Lucy replies, "No, she didn't, did she?"

Linus, who is listening intently to this exchange, drops his head into his hands in a gesture of exasperation, as Lucy says to the two men in her life, "Never even occurred to you, did it?"

Well, that was true for me, and perhaps for many of you. It never even occurred to me up until a few years ago to call God "Mother."

As a life-long Christian, I had always thought of God as my Father. And for very good reasons - Jesus had modeled for us calling God "Father" and had taught us to address God that very way.

My wrestling with gender language for God started seriously when we added the first woman to our pastoral team at our church. I had been used to our staff of seven pastors being an all-male club. However my theology changed as it became clear to me how differently Jesus treated women from the way other men of his day treated them. Although I now believed God had gifted women as pastors, my feelings had further to go. This was going to be terribly complicated. It was hard enough for men to get along, and now we were adding women to the mix! Little did I know it was the women who would help the men get along better!

I soon found myself stumbling over saying such things as "we pastors and our wives." Just a small thing, but reality meant it was "we pastors and our spouses" now.

Then I began to realize how masculine-oriented my language was most of the time. Whenever I talked about all the people of the world I used the word "man" as in "Man has to wrestle with the reality of a fallen world." Little did I realize that the reality of that fallen world also included fallen languages. The form of language itself reflects our sinfulness, prejudice, and exclusiveness.

Whenever I talked about an unidentified person I always used the supposedly generic word "he," naturally assuming "she" was included.

I cringed one day when someone gently pointed out to me that if I have two categories A and B, and I call both categories together A, then I have discounted the value of category B. Was that just more annoying political correctness, or were they right?

So I decided to change how I spoke about persons. What a terrible inconvenience, especially since I'm a professional "talker." However I also noticed it was a matter of kindness and consideration.

Even my favorite TV program, Star Trek, had changed its opening lines from "daring to go where no man has gone before" to "daring to go where no one has gone before," because women were going too!

One day I drove by a sign in front of a church which proclaimed, "He who is born of God will resemble his Father."

I appreciated the thought being presented. Those who are born again into God's reign will begin to look and act like God. But it became obvious to me that my wife, sitting next to me in the car, had been left out of that message.

Since the words "he" and "his" in our culture no longer include "she" and "her" in the way they used to, my wife had been linguistically excluded from the message on the sign. But worse yet was the phrase, "will resemble his Father." This gives the distinct impression that women who become Christians will start to look like fathers!

Then I attended a workshop given by one of the women in our church. She said as part of our consciousness raising she was only going to refer to people as womankind, use only feminine pronouns, and speak of God only as Mother and she and her. So for two hours I sat listening to this woman talk as if the male sex didn't exist. As if I didn't exist. I felt uncomfortable. I felt excluded. I felt angry. And when I sorted it all out later that day I realized I had experienced a tiny bit of what many women must feel when they listen to us religious teachers talk about spiritual matters in exclusively male language. I was aware for the first time how much emotional work women expended to hear what was being said.

So I began to explore my language about God to see if there was a more healing and inclusive way which the Scriptures pointed to in our speaking about God.

What a journey! I saw from the very beginning of the Bible God's image was not limited to the masculine. Genesis 1:27 said, "So God created humankind in God's image, in the image of God, God created them. Male and female God created them."

The first great surprise of the Bible is that God's image includes both male and female!

Then I discovered Isaiah saying in Chapter 66, "For thus says the Lord: As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you." That was another one of those Bible verses I had never memorized!

I remember the first time I offered a pastoral prayer in our worship service based on this passage. I prayed, "God you are like a mother who comforts her child." After the benediction someone rushed up to me and exclaimed, "Pastor, you should stick with talking the way the Bible talks about God -- none of this mother stuff." I pulled a Bible from the pew nearby and turned to this verse in Isaiah. My friend was amazed and dumbfounded.

I discovered hundreds of feminine images for God in the Bible. I also realized that although I believed what Jesus said in the Gospel of John was true, that "God is a Spirit," I had unconsciously made God into a male being.

Years ago, in a little book called Children's Letters To God, I came across this touching letter: "Dear God, are boys better than girls? I know you are one but try to be fair." It was signed, "Sylvia."

I had often used this little girl's letter to God as an amusing quote in my sermons. It evoked smiles and laughter. Now I think it is profoundly sad, for in these two sentences we are stunningly confronted with the heart of the God-language problem.

Why did Sylvia believe that God was a "boy" and therefore wondered if boys are better than girls? She did so because our religious language taught her this with single-minded clarity, unquestioned authority, and incredible repetition.

Our image of God is not formed by mental concepts as much as it is by images that produce a "feltness" about God. The factor that most determines our picture of God is a feeling or "feltness" of who God is. This "feltness" has been formed by all of our education, experiences, and memories, including those seemingly insignificant social signals such as only masculine language for God. Every time I hear, read, or use exclusively masculine language for God I receive another tiny imprint on my internal "felt" picture of God, that God is indeed only masculine.

In Brave New World, Huxley wrote, "Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth." Many more times in the lifetime of the average Christian, perhaps millions of times with those who read Christian books and listen to numerous sermons, God is referred to as Father, King, he, him, his, and himself. And each time, a deeply-imprinted "felt" masculine picture of God is subtly reinforced, and no amount of explanation or reassurance that we all know that God is not male can prevent this felt image from profoundly embedding itself in our psyche. The sheer magnitude of the repetition of masculine words for God prevents any other biblical image from getting a foothold.

Since I believe God is indeed a Spirit who includes and transcends masculine and feminine, I decided to honor that belief in my language.

As Pope John Paul has said, "God is a Father. More than that, God is a Mother." Neither male or female images of God are adequate in speaking of God, but both are necessary since God is person and not thing.

However, in my quest to be more faithful to the biblical picture of God, there were a few things I didn't want to do.

I didn't want to dismantle the Trinity, the core of historic Christian faith. I was not adding a fourth member called "Mother" to the Trinity. Rather, I wanted to expand my image of the First person of the Trinity beyond my limited male perspective.

Nor did I want to replace calling God "Father" with calling God "Mother," because a female goddess is just as exclusive as a male God. The Bible, church history, and theologians all affirm that God's image includes both male and female. I wanted to make that orthodox belief explicit, meaningful, and available for the average person by suggesting we call God both "Father" and "Mother."

Of course, Jesus called God "Father" and taught us to do so. It's interesting though that Jesus never said we were to only call God "Father." The early Christians clearly understood this and felt free to address God by names other than Father. I discovered an astounding fact as I went through the New Testament - that outside of the Gospels and the prayers of the New Testament, God is never once referred to as "Father." That is, there are no accounts in the New Testament of anyone but Jesus addressing God in prayer as "Father!" Amazing! These Christians who were closest to the Incarnation did not understand Jesus to say only call God "Father."

Nor does calling God "Father" mean we cannot also call God "Mother." We humans are limited to being fathers or mothers, but not God. God includes the best qualities of both fatherhood and motherhood.

So Jesus' startling use of the word "Abba" for God was an arrow pointing in that direction. "Abba" was the word used for father by the youngest child, a term of affection and intimacy. No one else in Jesus' day or in Jewish history had dared to call God "papa" or "daddy" before.

So Jesus called God "Abba" which said that God was like the best of fatherhood in his day. In that patriarchal society father was all powerful, free to act, the one his children were to obey, the transmitter of wisdom to his sons, personal, close, caring, comforting, protecting, and forgiving. In our day those words also describe the best of motherhood.

Of course Jesus would not have called God "Mother" directly, because in Jesus' day mothers had no rights, no freedoms. For instance, if your father died and your mother was still alive, in that day you were still considered an orphan. When so often the Apostle Paul spoke of us being adopted into God's family, he could only think of God as a father, since only fathers could adopt.

So, "Abba" was the most motherly word for Father Jesus could have used. Jesus could not use the word "mother" directly for God because of the meaning of the word in his culture. For Jesus to have directly called God "Mother" in his day would have been tantamount to calling God slave instead of master. But today that is not true. Mothers and fathers ideally have equal rights, both sharing in the freedoms of our land, and the parenting responsibilities of their children.

So my thesis is simple. Calling God "Father" and never "Mother" says something in our day that Jesus never intended, namely, that God is exclusively male or masculine. This in turn appears to make men more like God than women are. A simple and biblically-based solution to both problems today is to sometimes call God "Mother" while continuing to also call God "Father."

Calling God both "Father" and "Mother" reminds us that God can't be fully comprehended and that neither a male image or a female image is sufficient, but either is appropriate.

So, this means I feel free to pray the Lord's prayer as it is traditionally prayed, "Our Father who art in heaven." I also am free to pray this prayer which is my benediction to you.

"May the God, who mothers us all, lift us up on the breath of this new day, and make us shine like the eternal Son, and hold us forever in the palm of her hand. Amen."

Lydia Talbot: Paul, you have tackled one of the most explosive mine fields in all of Christendom, that of inclusive language, and yet you do it in a manner that does not alienate those who may oppose you. How do you manage that?

Paul Smith: Well, as pastor of the same church for thirty years, I have to live with what I teach, and so I've had to learn how to be aware of how fragile worship language and worship is in our services, and we have to bring along the people slowly and gently. Jesus said to the disciples, "I've got much more to teach you, but you can't bear it now." Those of us who like to be leaders need to bear that in mind, too.

Talbot:  Those who resist the feminine side of God many times are fearful that the basic tenets of their faith may be threatened, and yet you look at this in a way that eases that kind of fear, and you break down scriptural references that may have meant one thing two thousand years ago and something else today.

Smith:  Well, I hope so, because I'm not after changing Christianity; I'm after going after the real thing and historic Christian faith, and so I think we have to separate the message from the envelope it comes in. The envelope back in Jesus' day was a patriarchal cultural, but I don't believe Jesus intended to bless the patriarchy of his day. Jesus instead liberated us from that.

Talbot: You must comment on the Women's Missionary Union, wasn't it, the group of women on whom you first tested this issue of inclusive language?

Smith: Yes, it was our dear, sweet women of our Missionary Society, about twenty women whose average age was about seventy, and I always check out my radical ideas on them, and so they weren't sure about this, but the more we talked about it, the more they said, "Well, why not." And they were the first in our church to sing a hymn about Mother God. So, I'm so proud of them.

Talbot:  And yet it is often women who are most resistent to inclusive language.

Smith:  Yes. I think it could be very threatening. Sometimes the patriarchal system is very comfortable. It has defined roles and it says, "You act this way and men act that way." And, when that's upset, sometimes it's very upsetting to say, "Well, I don't know the other system."

Talbot:  Now you say in the book, Is It Okay to Call God Mother?, that to call the patriarchal system God's will is theological pornography. Can you explain that?

Smith:  Well, I think pornography is degrading to women. It is the misuse of God's creation. It's very harmful, and it's very damaging. And I think seeing God as only masculine and not feminine is also degrading to women. It's damaging to our inner-selves and it's the misuse of God's creation.

Talbot:  Now, although your book is banned in a number of bookstores around the countryside, what's been the response, not only by the women we've mentioned in your church, but by the larger community?

Smith:  Well, I get letters and calls, by far the great majority are people who said, "I cried all the way through it. Thank you. I've been a Southern Baptist all my life, and thought this must have been true. I believed in Jesus, but I didn't know I could also believe that men and women were together in God's image." Very, very grateful letters - it's been very, very gratifying.

Talbot:  Your wife is very much a part of this approach to the God that you worship, in her healing ministry.

Smith:  She sure is. She has had a very powerful ministry of healing prayer, and a part of that is introducing people to the feminine face of God, so their image of Mother gets healed, and it's been very powerful.

Talbot:  And the nurturing and gathering-in qualities are not exclusively female.

Smith:  Absolutely. Absolutely. When we divide qualities of humanity up into "these are feminine and these are masculine," then each of us has lost half of what it means to be human.

Talbot:  You say we become like the God we worship.

Smith: Yes, that's right, and if we have a masculine only God who in stereotypical terms is aggressive and assertive, then we're going to become like that.