The Divine Feminine

July 2025 - Isaiah 66:10-14 - Matthew 9:18-26...

"From Eve and Asherah to the mother of our Lord and Mary Magdalene and all the effeminate who’ve endured the sting of feeling less worthy than their masculine counterparts, if God’s Church was only meant to be male-controlled—than we are not only severely limiting ourselves but limiting God. I believe it is time for a resurrection of faith in the Divine Feminine."

Special thanks for the scholarship of Julie Faith Parker’s book “Eve Isn’t Evil” and Merlin Stone’s book “When God Was a Woman.” 

Thanks for listening! May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15:13) For more information about Keith visit www.authorkeithlong.com or St. Luke Lutheran Church visit www.stlukecg.org

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SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Pocket Pastor Podcast, Sermons on Demand, a show for those on the go, instant inspiration, questions for the quest, strength for the soul. I'm Keith Long, and this Pulpit to Your Pocket preaching comes to you from St. Luke Lutheran Church, a congregation of the ELCA in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. For more information about me, check out authorkeithlong.com. To see what we've got going on at St. Luke, visit us in person at the corner of 70th and Hinton in Cottage Grove Sundays at 9 a.m. Or check out Saint LukeCG.org for more information. Thanks for listening. I'm honored to be part of your spiritual journey. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. A shout out for the feminist scholarship of Julie Faith Parker's book, Eve is an Evil, and Merlin Stone's book, When God Was a Woman, and for my partner preacher in the summer of 2025, the Reverend Alison Bondi. Full disclosure, this is a sermon, it's a synthesis of a month's worth of sermons on the topic of the divine feminine. Me and the Reverend Alison Bondi, who was on our seminary internship at the time, we each took two sermons apiece, and because I'm a big nerd who occasionally works harder, not smarter, instead of only doing my own for this podcast, I pulled out all the historical context from Allison's sermon on Mary and plugged it into this one and basically rewrote a bunch of it to give you one complete sermon. So here it is. The Declaration of Independence's second sentence reads, We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This sentence is considered one of the most significant in American and world history. Some have argued that in the seventeen hundreds the word men was sometimes used to denote both genders. According to the Library of Congress, most people in those days could have interpreted all men to mean humanity. If they wanted to be crystal clear, they could have used the word humanity instead of men. But they didn't. Why is this? Well, speaking purely from a biblical standpoint here, I place a lot of the blame on the writers of the scriptures in which God is almost primarily identified with he, him, his pronouns, and as the Father. Taken with the fact that there are only a handful of positive stories about women and the entire Bible, it doesn't take a seminary degree to ascertain that the flat feeling about women was easy to spot. Or take that whole business with sixth century Pope Gregory's sermon number thirty three, when he inexplicably merged the persons of Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany. In that same sermon not only did two different Marys become one Mary, but then Gregory said that that one Mary was a prostitute. Sadly, his idea was not rejected for lack of biblical evidence, but instead caught on like wildfire. If you've ever wondered if one sermon or speech or comment can make a lasting impact, look no further than Sermon number thirty three from roughly fifteen hundred years ago. As a result of this one man's interpretation just like that, Mary Magdalene became a lady of the evening, and any trace of her spiritual authority was effectively erased. The Catholic Church finally clarified in nineteen sixty-nine that there was no biblical basis for Gregory's label, which today I'd call slander, but the damage had been done and then some. I don't know what Gregory's deal with women was or why his sermon became so popular and believable, but a person really does have to do some sleuthing to find evidence of the divine feminine outside of a few important feminine figures in the Bible. Isaiah gave a solid effort, though, in his description of the eventual return of the Israelites from Babylonian exile, the prophet speaks for God and urged the people to rejoice for Jerusalem, instructing them to quote, be glad for her, love her, mourn for her, nurse and be consoled at her breast, and drink deeply from her bosom. The her is God Jerusalem? It's not super clear. Isaiah living in an ancient world cleverly uses this metaphoric mothering god language, however, because well, I don't know why. But according to Merlin Stone, this reference to a mothering god would not have fallen on deaf ears, and maybe that's why. Stone knows this because the archaeological evidence abounds in the ancient world with stories of the great goddess, that is, the female gendered god, who flourished in the near and middle east for thousands of years before the arrival of the patriarchal Abraham. That's right, for far longer than we can imagine, our ancestors thought about God as a wise goddess, a comforting mother, the birther of the universe. Goddess figurines had been found all over the world, and get this, were often depicted as serpents and doves. Yes, the same serpents and doves that appear in Genesis in the Garden of Eden and hovering over the waters at creation and in the gospels as the spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism. Goddess mythology reigns supreme for a really, really long time. From the mighty Minoans of ancient Crete to Babylon, Sumaria, and Egypt, all women were considered godly. Across societies spanning thousands of years women were remarkably free and in many places powerfully so. The ancient Greek Heraclitus Ponticus summed it up best. From of old they have been ruled by the women. While they are certainly downplayed, thankfully women were not completely scrubbed out of the Bible, even after the arrival of the patriarchal age. Hardly, I mean, how boring would the Bible be if Abraham didn't have Sarah, if Isaac was without Rebecca, or one that didn't feature Miriam, Esther, Rahab, Ruth, or Deborah, plus many more, all respectively deserving their due for their mighty acts of courage, compassion, and faith. And then there are those handful of references to the previous age of goddess mythology and the matriarchy rule in these obscure forty or so cameos of the famous goddess Asherah, who is the mother of the Canaanite pantheon. No one has probably heard of Asherah because of those forty of those forty references, there's almost no consistency in translation. In other words, Asherah is never given the kind of platform in the Bible that she earned for every other ancient Near Eastern culture. For those societies, though, goddesses held a range of responsibilities, including protecting cities, inventing writing and agriculture, fighting wars, ruling the underworld and heaven, and inciting love, and oh birthing humanity. Unfortunately for the patriarchs and lucky for us, deleting Asherah proved impossible. She was, after all, royalty, and people of the Bible took notice, even naming their daughters and sons after her with names like Asher, which in the Hebrew language meant happiness, but everywhere else that sort of name meant something far, far more divinely awesome. From Eve and Asherah to the mother of our Lord and Mary Magdalene, and all the effeminate who've endured the sting of feeling less worthy than their masculine counterparts. If God's church was only meant to be male controlled, then we are not only severely limiting ourselves, but limiting God. I believe it is time for a resurrection of faith in the divine feminine. I want to see more of the feminine faith from Matthew nine when the woman suffering from constant hemorrhaging seeks to merely touch the hem of Jesus' cloak, fully believing that's all it would take to be healed. Just a touch of that fabric. And not only did her amazing plan work, but she became one of the only people in the Bible whose faith thoroughly astounded Jesus. Imagine then how astounding our impact would be if we not only embraced every gender, but embraced every gender as divine. As more and more people accuse the church of being astoundingly small minded, fear mongering, and judgmental, what if instead of dis defensively clinging to power or trying to change the laws? What if the answer was as simple as the church doubling down on our depictions of God? I mean, all it took to undermine Mary Magdalene was one guy's slanderous sermon. I wonder, what if we got out of the way of who God chooses to love? What is that infinite love of God actually capable of? He, him, his, she, her, hers, they, there, them. God is not made in our image. As Julie Faith Parker writes, God is constrained by nothing, including our constructs that label people as male, female, non-binary, transgender, or another sexual identity. To confine God to male pronouns limits God. It is beyond due that we make a similar declaration of independence that perhaps God isn't bound or limited to our depictions as our father or our mother, but is in fact so much bigger than the gender assignments we give. Isn't it time we let the spirit of creation loose? Isn't it time we get out of the way to let the Spirit of God rely on whoever the Spirit of God wants to rely on? Isn't it time to set free God's healing love into the world, one opening mind and compassionate heart at a time? I don't know about you, but it's a yes for me. In Jesus' name. Amen.