Sunday, September 7th, 2025: "The Image of God: Animals"
The First United Presbyterian Church
“The Image of God: Animals”
Rev. Amy Morgan
September 7, 2025
Hosea 11:10-11
They shall go after the Lord,
who roars like a lion;
when he roars,
his children shall come trembling from the west.
They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt
and like doves from the land of Assyria,
and I will return them to their homes, says the Lord.
Matthew 23:37-39
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you, desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ”
Images of God like the one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are likely pretty familiar to most of us. God as a (typically) white, male, father and/or king-like figure have been employed by the church liberally over the past two millennia, especially in the West. And there’s a reason for that. Actually, there are probably a host of reasons for that.
We’ll start with the fact that human brains have a preference for the familiar. And what was familiar to many of the folks recording the stories of our faith in scripture and interpreting those texts into theological positions and church doctrine over the centuries was a human like themselves.
Now, this didn’t start immediately after the ascension of Christ. As a matter of fact, the early church employed a diverse array of symbols and images for God and Christ, ranging from an anchor to a peacock. But especially once Constantine began the process of conflating Christianity with empire, the idea of a male, authoritarian lord God grew in popularity.
To be fair, this is not an entirely un-biblical image of God. The Hebrew scriptures frequently refer to God as “Adonai,” the Hebrew word for Lord. So much so, in fact, that Biblical scholars have identified different compilers of the Old Testament based on their preference for “Adonai” or YHWH.
But remember that the Hebrew narrative is one of escape from harsh, authoritarian rule in Egypt. They lived for many generations without a king or lord other than God. And the character of God as lord was distinct from rulers like Pharaoh.
Jesus also frequently referred to God as “abba,” the Greek word for father, in the gospels. But he also illustrated what he meant by that in the parable of the Prodigal Son. He was not making the point that God is male, but that God is unconditionally gracious and loving.
Our images of God don’t define God. But our images of God define and shape our relationship with God. The Biblical writers weren’t trying to narrowly prescribe how we are allowed to picture God’s form. They were trying to describe how their relationship with God felt. Like a liberating lord, like a loving father.
Sadly, at times throughout Christian history, these images have morphed into something else. An authoritarian lord. A judgmental and punitive father. A dominant male with the skin color of the ruling class. And the exclusive use of some Biblical images of God while denying others has been a deficit to our fuller understanding of and relationship with God.
There’s nothing wrong at all with referring to God as father and lord, connecting with those biblical images of God. But if those are the ONLY biblical images of God we embrace, to the exclusion of all others, we run the risk of falling into distorted impressions of what those images mean.
We need the full breadth and depth of biblical language for God to even begin to grasp the great mystery of the divine. We need paradoxical images and images that challenge and stretch us. We need images that invite us into a deeper, more authentic, more transformative relationship with God. We need all the images gifted to us by our ancestors in the faith instead of being satisfied with the few that have been codified into what makes up the majority of our doctrine and liturgy and hymns.
So for the next few weeks, that’s what we will be exploring. The great variety of Biblical images for God. And today we’re going to begin by stepping away from human images of God to explore how the Bible depicts God as animal.
In his book, When God Was a Bird , Mark Wallace argues for what he terms Christian animism, which he defines as “what happens when a committed Christian engages the world and each creature as alive, sentient, and related.” This begins, according to Wallace, with an embrace of the animal incarnation of God in the bird-form of the Holy Spirit as well as a recognition of the many animal expressions of God throughout scripture, ranging from lions to hens, as in the two texts we read this morning. Wallace argues that “The world is a continuous self-expression of divinity with no a priori restrictions attaching to this self-expression.” In other words, God can express the divine self in any way they choose.
In David Clough’s book On Animals, he understands the incarnation as God stepping “over the boundary between creator and creation and taking on creatureliness.” This creatureliness is not limited to humanity. The Bible depicts God in several animal forms – covered in scales, feathers, and fur.
And there are at least two reasons why it’s important for us to emphasize these animal images of God.
We’ll start with a little closer look at the two animal images in the scriptures we read today. In both of these texts, God is really upset with human behavior. The prophet Hosea spends 14 chapters basically reaming out God’s people for their unfaithfulness and detailing the horrible punishments God has planned for them. He uses this lion imagery for God elsewhere to describe how God is going to tear apart this wayward people. But here, in chapter 11, God as lion will use that ferocity and power to draw the people back home to safety and wholeness.
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has been ranting about the scribes and Pharisees, the religious leaders and their burdensome requirements and hypocrisy. He pronounces woe to them seven times. And then he turns to Jerusalem, and this mother hen instinct kicks in. He expresses his longing to gather the people together, to love and protect them and care for them.
These animal images of God allow us to be in relationship with a deity that is powerful, yes, but uses that power to connect, to gather, to defend, to nurture.
When C.S. Lewis employs a lion to serve as the Christ-figure in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he intentionally confounds our human-centered images of God to express this paradoxical power. When Susan learns that Aslan is not a man but is, in fact, a great lion, she asks, “Is he quite safe?” To which Mr. Beaver answers, “Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
We like our images of God to be safe, familiar. But sometimes that can lead to us creating images of God that aren’t good. The Bible instead offers us images of God that are anything but safe. But they are good. That’s the first gift of the Bible’s animal imagery for God. God is wild, unpredictable, powerful, instinctual even. And God is fiercely protective and illogically devoted. Exploring all the animal images of God can continue yielding such gifts to deepen our understanding and connection with God.
The second reason why we want to pay attention to these animal images for God in scripture is that it is a reminder that God is intimately connected to all of creation, not solely to humanity. If God roars like a lion and nurtures like a mother hen, then perhaps lions and hens are worthy of our care and respect as fellow creatures. Mark Wallace hopes that attentiveness to God’s animal incarnation will encourage humanity to steward the earth and its creatures as God charged us, to encounter earth as a “living being full of spiritual creatures…deserving of our reverence and worthy of our protection.”
Again, our images of God define and shape our relationship with God. But they also define and shape our relationship with everything else. If our image of God is confined to one species, one gender, one skin color, and especially if that happens to be our species, gender, and skin color, we have free license to regard everyone and everything else as less-than, as made in the image of something less-than God. But if we embrace the fullness of scripture’s imagery for the divine, we are challenged and privileged to place ourselves in equal and respectful relationship with all other people, creatures, and created things, all of them reflecting the divine glory in their particular way, all of them connecting us more authentically in relationship to God, humanity, and creation.
To God the lion, God the mother hen, God the dove be all the glory, now and forever. Amen.
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