c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ God, said Simone de Beauvoir, tends to look a lot like whoever is in power.

But Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig, a professor at Hebrew Union College in New York City, has a different visual. She preached: “God is a woman and she is growing older.

“She moves more slowly now. She cannot stand erect. Her hair is thinning. Her face is lined. Her smile no longer innocent. Her voice is scratchy. Her eyes tire. Sometimes she has to strain to hear. God is a woman and she is growing older, yet she remembers everything.”

Preaching on Yom Kippur to a congregation in Washington Heights, N.Y., Wenig suggested God is an elderly woman, sitting at her kitchen table, waiting for her children to come home.

This striking way of visualizing God is contained in a new collection, “The Book of Women’s Sermons” (Riverhead).

In it, 35 women expound on sacred texts and sacred moments. Their approaches are often fresh and unconventional _ and controversial.

“There is always a lot of fear around change and giving up control,” said the Rev. E. Lee Hancock, editor of “The Book of Women’s Sermons” and a Presbyterian minister for 20 years. “But the divine is finally beyond any image of human construction. The images are not ultimate, but a way of accessing the divine. It is only natural that the images of God reflect the social arrangement. And historically, there is always a fight about what is considered sacred and what is considered profane.”

The fight in recent years for many Christians has focused on the 1993 Re-Imaging Conference and its 1998 revival, both centered on widening perceptions of God. Both provoked an anti-feminist backlash.

But the suspicion that women themselves are sullied, unworthy of reading Scripture or representing God, is ancient.

St. Augustine, for example, wrote, “Women are not made in the image of God.” Thomas Aquinas spoke of women as “misbegotten males,” and Martin Luther taught, “God created Adam lord over all living creatures but Eve spoiled it all.”

Nevertheless, Hancock and an increasing number of women have climbed into Jewish and Christian pulpits. “From the sidelines and basements, out of religious education rooms and kitchens, women began to move from invisible positions of service to command the authority of the word,” she notes in the book.

Their sermons can be a revelation. Sarah Manges, an associate editor at Riverhead, said: “This book made me friends with Christianity again. I left the (Roman) Catholic Church while I was still in high school, and I hadn’t realized how much theological work has been done over the last 30 years. I can’t tell you how many women have told me, `If I knew I could go to church and hear this, I would be back in church every Sunday.”’

In these pages, poet Maxine Silverman preaches on the importance of “Leaving the Bed Unmade” every Sabbath as a righteous and holy act. The Rev. Dr. Dorothy Austin, an Episcopal priest and professor, asks her listeners to see God as a small boy did, as the Maker of Chocolate Cakes.

Alice Walker, in a speech to the Auburn Theological Seminary on her heritage of Christianity, challenges her listeners to consider the members of her little Methodist church in rural Georgia, “who were raised never to look a white person directly in the face.

“I think now, and it hurts me to think it, of how tormented the true believers in our church must have been, wondering if, in heaven, Jesus Christ, a white man, the only good one besides Santa Claus and Abraham Lincoln they’d ever heard of, would deign to sit near them.”

Walker poses hard questions about African-Americans being “beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction.” But she titled her speech “Anything We Love Can Be Saved.”

Hancock described the book project with deep affection. “Knowing so many of these women, enjoying what wonderful people they are, it has been an honor to be midwife to their voices,” she said. “Many are appreciated in their local communities, but very few are known to a larger audience.”

For instance, Hancock heard about the preaching of Rev. Dr. Rebecca Edminston-Lange because members of her sister’s book group in Washington, D.C., were abuzz about the Unitarian minister’s gifts. Edminston-Lange’s sermon on abiding with her mother and her beloved daylilies as the older woman slowly died struck many of the other contributors as a breath-taking entry.

“The mind does hunger for eternity,” Edminston-Lange preached. “But perhaps the mistake we make is thinking that eternity means time going on forever. Perhaps eternity is more like apprehending the eternal _ the timeless in the now. Something like the beauty of the daylily or the constancy of love.”

DEA END LONG