Jacqie Wallen
June 8, 2024
Pentecost
I love Pentecost! Which is why, I assume, Deborah asked me to preach today. The first thing I did after I said “yes” to Deborah was to go to Google and type in “Pentecost.” This is my usual way of starting a project, and especially necessary in this case because I have already preached on Pentecost several times and needed to be sure I had some new ideas.
I was surprised, when I googled Pentecost, to find that many of the paintings of Pentecost had no women at all in them, even though we know that Jesus’ mother, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ disciples Joanna and Susanna, and many other women were there in the upper room on that day. Mary was sometimes included in paintings and, less frequently, Mary Magdalene as well, but there were so many that show only males at that gathering. How did that happen? From the very beginning women were important members of the core Christian community. This was radical for the times (and even, in many churches, for our times): Both men and women were able preach and prophesy. But, too often, the role of women in the early Church has been forgotten or minimized.
The next thing I did was google “Holy Spirit.” This was another surprise. Almost everything that popped up referred to the Holy Spirit as “He.” Very rarely, the pronoun was “It.” But I knew that at the time of Jesus, the Holy Spirit was considered to be feminine. Part of this was grammatical. In English, nouns are not considered to have a gender, but in many other languages they do, and the articles and pronouns used with them reflect their gender. The gender can be masculine or feminine or, in some languages, neuter. In Aramaic, which Jesus spoke, and the Hebrew of that time the gender of the word for Holy Spirit was feminine. In the theology of the early Christian Church, the Holy Spirit was considered feminine and was spoken of as maternal. The words for the Holy Spirit became neuter or masculine later, when translated into Greek, depending on which name for the Holy Spirit was used. The Gnostics continued to think of the Holy Spirit as feminine. Messianic Judaism, Unity Church, and many Mormons still explicitly label the Holy Spirit as feminine. But in the patriarchal structure of almost all Christian churches, the feminine aspects of the divine received little or no attention.
The English language, like most others, is structured in a way that reinforces a binary understanding of gender, particularly through its use of pronouns. Traditional third-person singular pronouns—he, she, and it—offer only limited options for gender identification. “He” and “she” directly imply maleness or femaleness, while “it” is generally reserved for objects or non-human entities. This grammatical structure not only shapes how we refer to individuals but also subtly influences how we think about identity, roles, and even the Divine. Language doesn’t just express thought, it shapes it. When our only widely accepted personal pronouns require a male/female dichotomy, we begin to see that dichotomy as natural, universal, or even inevitable. This has profound implications for how society conceptualizes gender roles and identities. Those who identify outside of this binary—such as nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, or genderfluid individuals—often find themselves linguistically erased or misrepresented. Though the singular “they” has gained broader acceptance, many still resist it due to ingrained grammatical rules. Others accept it but often forget to use it because it doesn’t come naturally to mind. This can be very hurtful to people who do not think of themselves as described by either of the dichotomous gender categories. When people are consistently referred to in terms that do not reflect their identities, it can contribute to marginalization and invisibility. These linguistic constraints extend into our spiritual and theological frameworks. In English, God is almost universally referred to as “He,” a tradition inherited from patriarchal religious structures and reinforced through centuries of translation and doctrinal teaching. The Holy Spirit, too, is often assigned masculine pronouns, in spite of the fact that its attributes are more feminine and maternal. It is described as:
- Comforting
- Nurturing
- One who consoles, guides, and sustains, much as a mother cares for her children
- Wise (often represented by Sophia, or Wisdom, who, in Proverbs, is aptly depicted as crying out in the streets but no one will listen)
Mystics have described the Holy Spirit using maternal imagery. Julian of Norwich referred to Christ as “our Mother” and the Holy Spirit as one who nourishes and teaches like a mother. The Shekinah (the indwelling presence of God in Jewish mysticism), while not identical to the Holy Spirit, is often described in feminine terms and has influenced Christian mystical thought. But most of us grew up with an implicit understanding of God as male—an image that can marginalize women and nonbinary people, while limiting the perceived attributes of divinity to traditionally masculine traits like power, authority, and judgment. It can make it harder to envision a God who nurtures, weeps, creates, births, or comforts—attributes often culturally categorized as feminine.
In theological discourse, experimenting with pronouns for God can invite richer understandings of the divine. Referring to God as She, They, or alternating pronouns helps break the conceptual stranglehold of maleness. Many theologians and spiritual communities now embrace more inclusive language: speaking of the Holy Spirit as She, invoking Mother-Father God, or referring to God with non-gendered terms like Creator, Source, or simply Godself.
The concepts of yin and yang, rooted in ancient Chinese philosophy and cosmology, offer an alternative to the rigid gender binary reinforced by English pronouns. Yin and yang are often misunderstood in Western contexts as fixed opposites—yin being “female” and yang “male.” But in traditional Taoist philosophy, they are better understood as interdependent forces that continually transform into each other. Yin (feminine, associated with darkness, receptivity, softness, the moon) and yang (masculine, linked with light, activity, hardness, the sun) are not static identities but processes—dynamic energies in a state of constant interplay.
Everything contains both yin and yang. Nothing is purely one or the other. This fluid interplay differs from the Western binary of gender, which tends to categorize people as either male or female, with strict cultural roles attached to each. When we think of gender through the lens of yin and yang, we begin to transcend the fixed binary of “man/woman” or “he/she.” Instead, gender becomes more like energy—a spectrum of qualities that can exist in varying degrees within any person, at any time. A person might express more yin qualities one day and more yang the next. Or both simultaneously. This model aligns closely with how many nonbinary and genderfluid people describe their experience—not as a single, fixed gender, but as a dynamic expression of many gender elements. I found tables of pronouns designating various combinations of yin and yang. The simplest had five categories: All yin, more yin than yang, equal parts yin and yang, more yang than yin, all yang. Interesting and thought-provoking, but completely impractical. Imagine having to decide on the proportions of yin and yang every time you used a pronoun for someone. Also, it would be so much easier to insult someone by getting it wrong.
To go back to the feminine, or yin, nature of the Holy Spirit, I want to let you know that the hymn that John. Katie, and Marjory will sing for the offering, “She Comes Sailing on the Wind,” is the only hymn I could find that explicitly refers to the Holy Spirit as female. It was written by an Episcopalian Bishop named Gordon Light, who said:
“Lots of hymns don’t say what I believe. I love the music of the Church. But many of the hymns weren’t saying everything that I believed. And they weren’t saying things that were way down inside me. They were somebody else’s words and somebody else’s thoughts. In writing, things that were important for me came out.”
In closing, I want to read a prayer I found among my files while preparing this sermon. One of the assignments in a class that Marjory taught on Sophia, or Divine Wisdom, in 2022 was to write a prayer to Sophia. Here’s the prayer I wrote:
Oh, Great Mother, present even before time began, enfold
me and keep me safe. Comfort me in the dark times.
Let me lean on you and not fall.
Speak your wisdom to me and open my ears to hear.
Amen
[The music and lyrics for “She Comes Sailing in the Wind” are below.]