Our Mothering God
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One of the ways that I’ve grown the most as a person, seminarian, and pastor is recognizing and cherishing others. I cherish the ways that each of you has been vulnerable with me, sharing the things that are bothering you, sharing the things that you are nervous about, and sometimes even the things that made you mad or disappointed you. Those genuine and open interactions are my favorite part of being not only your pastor here in Pleasanton/Prescott but also in my school, to my classmates, and in public space. The ways that you all and others come to me, looking for honesty and love, and being able to give that to you, is one of the best Spiritual fruits that nourish my soul.
So today, on Mother’s Day, I would like to share the ways that I have found God to be a mothering God.
Our Mothering God.
I don’t want to confuse anyone, I’m not changing any language for God or re-writing our liturgies or changing scripture. Just as a way of celebrating Mother's Day, I want to offer you some of my discoveries about God that I have found through my experiences as a mother. I invite you who have experienced being a mother or auntie or adoptive parent or single father or single mother, to hear what I’ve seen about God and imagine your experiences into these scriptures. I also invite you to see the ways that your grandmothers, Mothers, Aunties, Fathers, and friends are like Our Mothering God.
The more we see God in one another,
the closer we grow to one another and the closer we grow to God.
Content warning – I will mention and discuss the loss of a child and pregnancy loss in today’s sermon. I encourage you to be kind to yourself and honor your own heart in discerning if you would like to step away during the message. If at any point, anyone would prefer to step away, please feel blessed by myself and all of our worshiping community in doing so. We recognize that not all parents have children.
In the Gospel of Luke chapter 13, verse 34, the Gospel writer recalls Jesus speaking to the father leaders of his people, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those who were sent to you! How often I have wanted to gather your people just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you didn’t want that.”
As a parent of strong-willed children, I often think of this sort of scathing scripture spoken by Jesus: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”[1]
I’m envisioning chasing my toddlers with a washcloth to clean the dirt off their faces.
My teenage sisters who were way too cool to listen when I encouraged them to not make that poor choice. I imagine that feeling is what Jesus is feeling here. Jesus longs to parent and care for the Israelites.
I grew up on a farm and in middle school and high school, my mom let me keep chickens. The best mama hens were these tiny hens called bantam or banny hens. They would gladly adopt any stray chick, duckling, quail or turkey that needed them. The turkey chicks were about the same size as these little hens, but the hens didn’t care.
They were glad to brood and hatch any egg and tend to any young bird that needed them.
The Gospel writer Matthew shares this same quote from Jesus, who longs to be a mother hen, but Matthew calls those looking to persecute Jesus a den of vipers.
If you’ve never kept chickens, one thing about keeping chickens is that when you go to gather eggs, there are a couple of rules:
Wear gloves because the hens, especially the broody ones, will peck you for stealing their eggs. And these hens, they leave a mark. They don’t just peck you; they sort of nip at you, and they’ll break skin. They mean business.
You don’t just shove your hand under a hen because you might grab what you think is an egg and pull out a black snake.
The black snakes loved the hen house, but if that snake got caught by these hens, they would attack.
They grab the snake and sound the alarm.
There is a big commotion of squawking and feathers and wings flapping.
Then all the other hens rush in and they’ll all attack the snake. Pecking it. I’ve seen a flock of hens make short work of a snake in the hen house.
When Jesus expresses this longing to be like a mother hen, to protect the children of Israel under his wing- to protect them from the brood of vipers – I only see those banny hens.
Jesus understands this longing to care for and nurture the children of Israel because of his own mother.
Mary, the Mother of God, who was his first and one of the most faithful disciples. Mary, the Mother of God, faithfully said “Yes” when God called her. She cared for and encouraged Jesus to live into his identity as a son of God. She was there for the beginning of his ministry in the Gospel of John when Jesus turned water into wine. It was Mary who encouraged him to work this miracle.
Mary, the Mother of God, was there when Jesus was crucified, and she was ordained to continue in his work as a mother to the disciples by Jesus himself when he was on the cross.
In my studies of learning biblical Greek, I learned that in John 3:16, “God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son…” in this verse, in the Greek, begotten or born could be used. “God so loved the world that God gave their only born son…”
As someone who has given birth, the birthed vs begetting language really felt different to my soul because of my experiences.
I see the works of God and the miracle of Jesus embodied as a human man here very differently.
The complete humility, pain, physical work, spiritual division, exhaustion, and sheer joy that God must have felt when God begot Jesus. When God birthed Jesus.[2]
When I heard that God birthed Jesus. My body reacted to it.
I reached down and touched my own stomach. I remembered how heavy my stomach was and how my back ached. I remembered the pains of childbirth that left me on my hands and knees, only able to breathe and wait for the next contraction.
When God birthed Jesus, there must have been so much surrender, a setting aside of God’s self to bring Jesus, who was eternally born, always part of God but now separate, into the Trinity.
My experiences as a mother holding my own children reflect on a God who is willing to come to be with us as a human. Christ embodied in the same infant experience on Mary’s chest as my tiny, vulnerable, completely reliant, slick, and slimy, beautiful, perfect children on my chest.
I imagine the way that the savior of the world’s tiny infant’s head must have smelled when Mary brushed her lips across those tiny baby hairs on his head.
Oh, how God must love us!
My experience tells me that love that is birthed, is the same love that makes one willing to break their body.
Break their body either on their hands and knees, breathing between contractions, or as a crucified savior on the cross.
Our mothering God broke their bodies for their children
in birth and for our re-birth.
Broke their bodies so that we may live.
Flourish.
Eternally.
Jesus invites us outside the need to literally give birth in order to see what holy mothering looks like. In Luke 11:27-28, the Gospel writer tells us that “a certain woman in the crowd spoke up: “Happy is the mother who gave birth to you and who nursed you. “But he said, “Happy rather are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.” Jesus is essentially saying, “My mother is holy not because of the production of her womb or breasts, but because she said yes to God and then embodied her yes in bearing me, your Messiah.”[4]
Mary is a mother, in the image of God because she said yes to God,
not because she had a child.
John Calvin brings the metaphor full circle in his systematic theology, Institutes, a giant writing that covers everything about Christianity in his perspective: the nature of Christ, the nature of God, what it means to be saved, the mission of the church, and more. Calvin likens the church to the mother for Christianity.[5] The Church is on earth to be the hands and feet of Christ.
Calvin proposes that we, as Christ’s church are not just the hands and feet of Christ, but like Mary, when we say yes to God, we also become the womb and breasts for Christ.
Calvin says, “There is no other way to enter into life unless this mother (the church) conceives us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast and lastly, unless she keeps us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like angels…” He goes on to say, “Furthermore, away from her bosom, one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sin or any salvation.”[6] To John Calvin, all of Christ’s followers are called to mother new disciples and one another.
I have traveled the more typical road to being a mother. But I’ve had friends who are wonderful aunties, who are the cool friend for their friend’s children. I also have friends who have struggled with infertility, who have lost babies they very much longed for and wanted, and friends whose children have died far too young. In them,
I’ve learned that mothers do not always have children.
Serene Jones, a theologian and exquisite writer, shares a story about her experience with her friend Wendy.[7] Wendy is a massage therapist, who specializes in companioning and comforting women who are experiencing the loss of a pregnancy. Serene Jones tells us of how Wendy had knowing hands to help, massaging her legs and feet, bringing comfort to her body, which she felt had betrayed her during the loss of her pregnancy. Serene longed for a ritual in that time. She wanted some liturgical recognition, she wanted her pastor to visit, even though she didn’t ask him to or tell him, as her miscarriage also seemed too private or personal to share. Sharing “this type of thing” wasn’t the norm in her faith community.
When Wendy called Serene to come to be with her when she was experiencing her own miscarriage, of course, Serene rushed over. Wendy hoped that Serene could bring a sense of the sacred to her grief.[8] Serene sat with Wendy, making tea and sharing soup, and as the hours crept on and as she tucked Wendy into bed, Wendy reached out and said, “Serene, I’m afraid to sleep. It’s like I’m falling into death.”
Serene walks to her car searching for something more that she could have done to help Wendy, some ceremony from Christian history or ritual, as a theologian and ordained minister, Serene grasped for a connection to her faith to ground her. A question pops into her head,
What happened to God in heaven
and to the Spirit’s presence when Christ died?
This question descended on her, pulling her with it to the earth, grounding her.[9]
“Jesus doesn’t die outside of God, but in God, deep in the viscera of that holy tripart union… no part of God remains untouched by this death… It seeps into every corner of the whole body of persons.”[10] She sees that
God bore Jesus’ death inside.
Just like she and Wendy, anointing what felt like inescapable death, but God did not die, instead, living to grieve another day.
Serene hears God whisper to her, “I know.”
A whispered echo, “I know.”
God reached down and instinctively touched the places from where Jesus was born.
“I know.”
God did know how Serene and Wendy felt.
God knew that not all mothers have children.
We worship a mothering God.
A God whose only-born son is our savior.
A God who has lost a child, who has lost a piece of their living selves, a God who has been fully human just to be with us and teach us to be with them.
We worship a God who wishes to gather us under their wings like a hen, to keep us warm and protect us.
We worship a mothering God.
But just like any good Mother, God expects us to grow into the people we were created to be.
We are called to be a mothering church.
A mothering church hears God’s call to discipleship.
But a mothering church has nothing to do with bearing children.
A mothering church is simply in the image of God.
A church where it is not too personal to talk about “this kind of thing”
A church that fathers nations of believers, that adopts all those into the family of God
We worship a mothering and fathering and adopting God.
We are called to be a mothering and fathering and adopting Church.
A witness to our God.
[1] Mary J. Streufert, Language for God: A Lutheran Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), 50.
[2] Rachel Fetters, “Trinitarian Language” (Women in Ministry Forum, Saint Paul School of Theology, Spring 2023).
[3] Fetters.
[4] Louise Kumandjek Tappa, “God in Man’s Image,” in New Eyes for Reading: Biblical and Theological Reflections by Women from the Third World, ed. John S. Pobee (Bloomington: Meyer Stone Books, 1987), 105.
[5] Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace, Guides to Theological Inquiry (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 167.
[6] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), bk. 4.1.1.
[7] Serene Jones, “Rupture,” in Hope Deferred: Heart-Healing Reflections on Reproductive Loss, ed. Nadine Pence Frantz and Mary T. Stimming (Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2010).
[8] Jones, 50.
[9] Jones, 61.
[10] Jones, 62.
