Hilton Head Island, SC – October 18, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Exodus 3:1-6,10-15; Exodus 15:1-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Who is like thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like thee, majestic in holiness, terrible in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” – Exodus 15:11 (RSV)
This is the third or fourth time I have preached a sermon entitled Why “Thy?” None of them was a repeat of any other; each was written separately.
Having said that, I want to explain why I am a part of a very rapidly shrinking group of clergy of all branches of Christianity who still refer to God by the second-person personal pronoun “thou” rather than “you.” The clergy who still say “thee, thy, thou or thine” with respect to God are almost all old. When I was ordained over half a century ago, nearly every minister or priest of every age said “thee, thy, or thou” when speaking of God with a personal pronoun. Now almost all clergy, and especially laity, say “you” under those circumstances. There is a very good linguistic rationale for that new usage, as I shall now attempt to explain. Nevertheless, I am still a holdout for “Thou, Thee, Thine and Thy,” all of which I capitalize, and I later shall attempt to explain why I do that. Meanwhile, I hope you will indulge me while I go through this necessarily lengthy linguistic explanation.
In many languages, including German, French, Spanish, and Italian, there are two words for “you,” meaning anyone other than oneself. There is a “formal” you, and a “familiar” you. For example, in German the formal is Sie and the familiar is du, in Spanish it is Usted and tu. The formal you in those languages is the word you use when addressing people above your rank or class, or when talking to people you have never met or don’t know well. The familiar you (thou) is intentionally much more intimate. You use it for pets, children, for all family members, and for very close friends.
English evolved more recently as a language than German, French, Spanish, or Italian. In English, up until the time of Shakespeare in the late sixteenth century, there were also two words for what we now mean when we say “you.” The formal word was “you,” and the familiar word was “thou.” After Shakespeare, however, it was becoming evident that “thou” was on its way out. Even in Shakespeare, thou and you were sometimes used interchangeably. By 1700 or so, everyone in English became a “you” (singular), and all plural others were also “you.” Art thou following this? Is it clear to thee? Dost thy mind wrap itself around what I am saying, or am I trying to force too much into thine ears?
In religious language, however, especially in biblical language, “thou” continued to be used as the second-person singular personal pronoun for God. To my knowledge, all major biblical translations up through the Revised Standard Version, which was published in 1952, still used the word “thou” when referring to God. But from the mid-1950s on, more and more people in the English-speaking world began to speak of God as “you,” and most if not all new biblical translations or revisions since the 1950s use “you” when they refer to God.
From this we may deduce that in the major European languages, including English, God was traditionally perceived in the familiar, intimate term, such as “thou” in English, until the last seventy years or so. God was never thought of as a formal “you.” The irony of this is that in contemporary English, there is only one intimate “thou” left, and that is God, although that applies only to ancient clerical geezers such as I. Everyone else receives the more formal “you,” even though most people are unfamiliar to us, and therefore are in the “you” category.
What this amounts to is what we might call a “role reversal” in the common personal pronoun for God. Linguistically, He who is the unseen, unlimited, eternal Creator has become the sole surviving “thou” to a few of us, while all the rest of us, who are visible, limited, and temporal, fall into the singular or plural category of “you.”
Does that seem as odd to you as it does to me? Theologically I am greatly gratified that God is the only “thou” left linguistically in the English language, but linguistically I am also very surprised by what that now implies. It suggests that God is a divine being like any other human being. Most definitely that is not so, and that is why “thy” is one of the four personal pronouns for God I still use. I wish we had never adopted the pattern of calling God “you” when every other “you” is “you.” In His essence God is not like any of the rest of us. If our language can convey that, we should always do it, in my opinion. God is in a vastly different category as a being from human beings. He is in a singular category. “Thee, Thou, Thy, and Thine” are words which now automatically suggest God’s singularity, but very few people few people use them.
We are mortal; God is immortal. We are sinners; God is sinless. We are limited; God is unlimited. We are creatures; God is the Creator, the only Creator. We do not and cannot know everything; God is omniscient. We are temporal; God is eternal. We are imperfect; God is perfect. We were born, and shall die; God always existed, and shall never cease to exist. His being is infinitely elevated above our being, and calling Him “you” sounds far too familiar to me. But I hasten to add that I am speaking only for myself. And I am absolutely certain this sermon is not to reverse the linguistic process which has me in such a peevish pucker.
According to Old Testament scholars, Exodus 15 is the oldest written text in the entire Bible. If you wonder how they would know that, I can only give you an analogy. When you read Shakespeare, you are reading English literature that was written about 1600. You would know that by comparing it to other written works from the same period. If you read Chaucer, you’d know he lived at least two full centuries earlier. And if you read Beowulf, which you would be hard pressed to do, you’d know it was written around 650 or so. Language evolves, words change, and semanticists or linguists make it their business to know those things.
Exodus 15 says this of God: “Who is like Thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like thee, majestic in holiness, terrible in glorious deeds, doing wonders? Thou didst stretch out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them” (15:11-12). If you wonder what that last verse means, the translators had no idea, but they did the best they could on the basis of their necessarily limited knowledge of very ancient Hebrew, because Exodus 15 is about as ancient as Hebrew gets. But the first part of that verse proclaims that all the other gods of other peoples are non-existent, and furthermore that the God of Israel is elevated beyond anything we can fully grasp.
Because we are human, we think of God in human terms. We say, and the Bible says, that God has a heart, and eyes, arms. Exodus 15says that God also has a right hand. Most of us refer to God as “He,” as does the Bible as well, but God is not male. (I will address that subject next week.) In many respects, we cannot conceive of God without using such “anthropomorphisms,” such “human-form-isms.” Nonetheless, God is infinitely more unlike us than like us. That is why “Thy” is a far more preferable personal pronoun for God, in my opinion.
We have virtually no indisputable factual certainties about God, but we have numerous informative and comforting affirmations about God. We cannot know beyond doubt that God even exists, but we take the leap of faith that He does exist, we trust that He exists, we are in worship Sunday after Sunday because we are convinced that God exists, or otherwise most of us wouldn’t be here. We also trust that He created us, that He cares for us, and that He will lead us beyond death into an entirely different level of existence than we know now.
A German philosopher named Rudolf Otto described God as the “Wholly Other,” wholly being spelled w-h-o-l-l-y. God is the Totally Other from who we are, the Absolutely Other. Otto also called God, in a Latin phrase, the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, the Tremendous Mystery and Fascination.
No one will ever know when our species, Homo sapiens, became intrigued by the notion of divinity, but almost certainly it was tens of thousands of years ago. For a long, long time our ancient ancestors were polytheists; they believed in many gods. They believed there were gods who governed wind and weather, and who oversaw animals for hunting and plants for farming, as well as gods or goddesses of the sun, moon, sea, and mountains. Only within the past four thousand years, and probably closer to three thousand years ago, did any ethnic group come to believe there is just one God. They were the Hebrews, or Israelites, or Jews, and it is from their scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, that our expanded Christian Bible comes. But without question, the Jews were the first to espouse monotheism, the conviction that there is only one God.
The Hebrews had many titles for God. They called Him El, Elohim, El Shaddai, and Adonoy, among other titles. But God’s name was Yahweh. However, Yahweh was a word they thought was so sacred that they decreed it must never be pronounced out loud. When they came to God’s name as they were reading the Hebrew Bible, they always substituted the word Adonoy, the Lord.
The call of Moses to lead the Israelites out of their slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land of Canaan is described in the third chapter of Exodus. For forty years Moses had lived in Egypt as the adopted son of the Egyptian pharaoh, or king. Then he fled into the Sinai Desert, where he lived for the next forty years as an anonymous shepherd. (For some unexplained reason, the number “40” simply meant “a long time” to the biblical Hebrews; it didn’t literally mean “forty.) God didn’t forget who Moses was, though, and God had plans for him, big plans. So one day, when Moses was tending his sheep, he saw a bush burning out in the desert, and he went over to investigate it. Bushes don’t just spontaneously catch on fire in a desert, for heaven’s sake. But for heaven’s sake, this bush did catch fire, and God spoke to Moses from the midst of the burning bush. And, as the mottos of the Church of Scotland and the Presbyterian Church of Canada say: Nec Tamen Consumabatur --- It Was Not Consumed. That’s a great motto for a Church.
God told Moses he wanted him to go back to Egypt and lead the Israelites on an exodus to the land that God had promised Abraham’s descendants over five hundred years earlier. Moses gave God several objections as to why he was not the right man for the assignment. When God rejected every excuse, Moses finally said that if he were to do what God wanted, he needed to know God’s name. God told Moses that his name was Yahweh. That translates into English as “I Am” or “I Am Who I Am,” or possibly “I Will Be Who I Will Be.”
The 20th century German-American theologian Paul Tillich said that God is “The Ground of Being.” That memorable description has Exodus 3 written all over it. But what does it mean? It suggests that God is the Creator. It suggests that everything that is is because God is. It suggests that, as many students of the Book of Genesis claim, the opening verse of Genesis 1 should say, “In the beginning of his creating, God created the heavens and the earth.” God always was, but at some moment, presumably seventeen and a half billions years ago, He initiated creation with the Big Bang. (That is a conviction; it is not a certainty, either theologically or scientifically.) Apparently, in point of theological cosmological postulation, God first created what we call “the heavens”, i.e. “space.” There was no space until the Big Bang, there was nothing other than God until the Big Bang, and the astronomers and astrophysicists calculate that creation happened seventeen and a half billion years ago. Planet Earth coalesced in the midst of space as a planet only four a half billion years ago. Genesis therefore has it sort of correct, although its writers would not care at all about the cosmological dating of anything. Besides, who’s counting?
Astronomers and astrophysicists in particular tend either to be atheists (perhaps the majority, I would guess) or committed theists (a minority, but few of them as traditional Jews, Christians, or Muslims). In any event, a deity who is capable of creating an ever-expanding universe that is millions of light-years across (which is a number no one, even the most intellectually gifted of astrophysicists, can comprehend) is a being in an astonishingly unique category all by Him/Her-It-self. That’s why I like “Thy” when I try to conceptualize God. You and I are “who-s;” God is the only true Thee, Thy, Thou or Thine who ever existed.
I said earlier that I always capitalize “Thou, Thee, Thy, and Thine” when referring to God. I also capitalize “He, His, or Him.” I do that because way back when, which is farther and farther way back, nearly every writer or preacher I knew did that. The capitalization automatically referred only to God. I have never deviated from that perhaps quaint practice. To my way of thinking, it is a usage of the English language which deliberately elevates the divine nature of God by means of a particular English spelling. I believe that is a worthy goal of “wordsmithery.” This role reversal was never intended, but it occurred anyway as a fortuitous coincidence.
To summarize: Increasingly in English usage since four hundred years ago, the English words Thee, Thou, Thy, or Thine referred to no one except God. But for the past sixty or seventy years, increasing numbers of people, with the exception of crusty old clergy, called God “you” when addressing Him in prayer or otherwise. God was unintentionally and ironically elevated by being the only “Thou or Thy” whom people conceptualized, and everyone else became a “you” to one another. In time, though, even God became a “you” to most people.
God is far above and beyond us, but He also deigns to dwell among us. Christians believe that is especially evident in the person of a man called Jesus of Nazareth.
Why “Thy?” That’s why.