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Dear Daughter
Scripture: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. — John 3:16
One sleepy Sunday afternoon, several years ago, I was sitting in the sanctuary after service with my daughter — six or seven years old at the time. We were looking through some pages of the Bible and talking about the message when she turned to me unexpectedly and asked, “Dad, why do they only talk about the guys in the Bible?”
Damn. I was impressed and embarrassed all at once.
It wasn’t a simple question. But my God, if it wasn’t the right one. In that quiet, matter-of-fact way children have, my daughter wasn’t just asking about the presence of people who looked like her in scripture. She was asking about the justice, the goodness, the fairness that has been denied to so many women across time — as their voices, and often their very presence, have been overlooked again and again.
How could a God who loves each of us so deeply and equally — a God who constantly speaks to all of us, if we listen — not speak to and through women? And further, how could that same loving God not want us to hear what has been spoken through them?
What messages of life, healing, hope, challenge, peace, and abundance have we missed because we have only paid attention to the voices of a handful of men?
My heart broke a little as I explained that the Bible was mostly written by men, preached and taught by men, and financially supported by men. There are truly remarkable women in its pages — but the story is largely told from the perspective of those who had the money, social power, and education to write it. And those people were men. Some of them were openly hostile to women.
It was a hard thing to say about a book we hold so dear — that it often only tells part of the story. But here’s what I’ve come to believe: it wasn’t only my daughter, or women throughout history, who have raised this question. I think God has the same question.
Our scripture today is not, at its heart, about sons. The writer’s choice to describe Jesus as God’s “only Son” was meant to emphasize the weight of God’s sacrifice. In the ancient world, only sons were the most prized — the most precious. And, if we’re honest, that bias hasn’t fully disappeared, even today, even here.
So we understand why the writer uses that language.
But that same language can be — and has been — used to prop up a harmful hierarchy, to suggest that men are worth more than women. And that is not what a loving, just, and good God says to God’s people.
Sons are important. Wonderful, even. I’m a son. But daughters are equally important, equally wonderful. Every child — whether you have one or many — is precious beyond words. And every child, every person, carries the capacity to create immense good and sow remarkable love.
So the point of this scripture is not simply that God loved the world and therefore sacrificed an only son. The point is this: God was willing to give the most precious thing imaginable to bring more light, more hope, more joy, more peace, and more life to a world whose reflex is fear, violence, and self-protection — a world that has long believed its sons are worth more than its daughters.
God did not sacrifice to preserve that broken logic.
God sacrificed to change it.
Amen.
