Mother's Day Reflection
Like Jesus, we can be thoughtful about what images we let (and don't let) form our personal images of God. In our current moment of global war crimes, mass economic exploitation, and collective deconstruction of versions of faith that no longer work for people, we need mothering images of God more than ever before. (Mosaic: Jesus as Mother Hen -- Dominus Flevit Church in Jerusalem)
SPEAKER NOTES
Mother’s Day Reflection
Grandma Ginni Questions
Happy Mother’s Day!
Mother’s Day for my family is one of the days of the year we do what we call “Grandma Ginni questions”
You may know my story: That my mom died of cancer young, when I was only 15.
So my kids and even my wife never got to meet my mom.
And there’s grief in that for me because she shaped so much of who I am.
But, somewhere along the line I learned that important life lesson that the stories of the people we’ve lost keep their legacies alive.
And maybe, from a spiritual perspective, that keeps alive more than just their legacy.
- Maybe, if, as we often say here, God is our great fellow experiencer, not a removed deity sitting in some timeless throne room but a companion spirit to every living thing,
- maybe all who have died truly live on in the memory of God, which we enhance every time we tell a story
- Perhaps this is why so many people, including me, report beautiful stories of seeing their lost loved ones in dreams or prayers, consoling them, guiding them, encouraging them.
So, yeah, at some point, that became real to me, and so my wife and I started “Grandma Ginni Questions” with our kids.
Each of the kids and my wife ask a question about Grandma Ginni and then I try my best to answer with a memory or story. Often I text my sisters and dad to help and it’s a great chance to share memories with them too. The questions from the kids are always like “what was her favorite superhero?” “Did she love cookies or cake?” But even those lead to memories or things I didn’t even realize I remembered about her.
And so those stories and little picture of who she was form an image of my mom for my wife and kids, even though they didn’t get to meet her.
If your family has lost someone you might try a practice like this on days you remeber them. We do this on her birthday and the anniversary of her death. And we also do this for my brother, who we lost.
Context
Those who study the intersection of faith and sciences like psychology (seeing those as allies not enemies) teach that this same image formation through repeated story telling and practice is true with spirituality.
Just like Grandma Ginni questions on Mother’s Day forms my kids and wife to have their own personal images of my mom, the prayers and songs and experiences and stories and memories and metaphors we share and repeat about God together at church or in our families or in our culture form each of our personal images of God —
- For better or for worse!
- Hopefully for better here at BLC!
This is why Jesus is such a helpful northstar for our church — his life and ministry and death and resurrection and teachings are a starting point for forming images of God that are healthy rather than toxic.
“Jesus is the image of the invisible God” is the phrase from the Bible’s Book of Hebrews.
And Jesus himself is building off of so many images that formed him from what he had in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.
- Some of them are more healthy and beautiful and pro-social than others.
- So we see in the Gospel in the Bible Jesus makes choices about the Biblical imagery he inherited,
- to form the personal images of God of those he was teaching too.
He deliberately points away from images that the Hebrew Bible certainly entertains, but ultimately prove lacking
- All-controlling, impersonal deity.
- Warring, conquering king.
He prefers
- Parental love (“abba”), coaching us into maturity and transformation.
- An upside down king or emperor — focused on provision and self-giving service, not dominance or being served.
- The image of an empathetic and wise friend.
- The image of a fellow sufferer in solidarity with those hurting.
- Significant to today, the protective image of a mother hen gathering her chicks.
- Talk about an image of God needed for so many children in Gaza right now,
- For whom there is no protective shield from the horrors of war…
- Are they doomed to be without comfort?
- Or is God with them like a mother hen?
El Shaddai
There are actually many mothering images of God in the Bible; they have just been muted by centuries of male-centric Biblical interpretation.
One of my favorite mother images of God from the Bible that can form our own personal images of God is an image that most people don’t realize is there.
It’s one I like to bring up often here, because I want it to form all of us.
- It’s one of the choices I make as a theologian for this community, as I try to stay true to Jesus making choices for his community.
- So returning to it again and again is important.
The image is Mother Nourisher God or Mother Refuge God.
This image shows up 48 times in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament.
- The Hebrew phrase is “El Shaddai”.
- El is a common Hebrew word for god or deity
- Shaddai is a more particular Hebrew word that linguists identify with two root words in Ancient Near East languages:
- one is a word for “mountain” — giving us “God of the Mountain” — like the God who is a protective refuge from danger.
- and the other is a word for “mother’s breast” — “God of the Breast” — like the God who nourishes you.
- BUT, unfortunately, I’ll bet you’ve never read “God of the Breast” in an English translation of the Bible or Instagram post quoting a Bible verse.
- The reason is “El Shaddai” has been historically translated to English as “Almighty God”,
- Which is not a terrible translation of the concepts of protection and nourishing.
- But you can see how patriarchal and dominance-focused early translators of the Bible to English are in that choice, right?
- “We can’t evoke protection and nourishment with motherly images; we have to evoke them with dominant images.”
- Even more influential than those 48 instances in the Hebrew Bible, “Almighty God” became the most used addressing of God in the Protestant “Book of Common Prayer”
- Which, even if you’ve never used it or you didn’t grow up in a church tradition where it was referred to, it has formed the way we all pray and think about God just because it formed generations upon generations of Western Christian thought before us.
And so, like Grandma Ginni Questions with my kids, but with an adverse effect, the image of an “Almighty God” has formed our personal images of God over the years
- to the point that is just a knee-jerk idea about God now
- God is obviously “almighty”, all-controlling,
But with such an image of God,
- when someone faces the tragedy of a loss or a failure,
- or when someone is abused,
- or when (as we’ve been talking about this spring here at BLC) our economy only works for a few at the top and exploits the poor and exhausts the middle class,
- or when ethnocentric and egotistical thirsts for power lead to war and war crimes that kill thousands of innocent people in a place like Gaza…
With an “almighty” image of God,
- then our response to things like these is:
- The almighty God must be allowing them for some mysterious reason.
- Must be choosing not to intervene with almighty-ness.
As someone who prayed for a mom with cancer who was never healed, for a brother in a coma who never woke up, I feel uncomfortable with that response.
- The character of such a God who could intervene but chooses not to feels suspect to me.
On the other hand, what if we recover the root images behind “El Shaddai”?
- Not almighty God, but
- Nourishing God of the Breast.
- Protecting God of the Mountain.
What if those are the images that year after year, ritual after ritual, prayer after prayer, form our personal images of God? (Like Grandma Ginni questions with my kids.)
How, then, are we formed to respond to loss? To abuse? To economic exploitation? To war and atrocities?
- It’s entirely different, right?
- The God of the Breast isn’t a puppet master tyrant, threatened by people asking about the suffering of the world, defending their mysterious will.
- The God of the Breast scoops us up in our despair and anger and hurt, and holds us.
- The God of the Mountain gets down to the business of healing wounds, righting wrongs, teaching us the hard-won lessons of life to grow and mature and be transformed for the better by even the setbacks God never wanted for us in the first place.
It’s interesting: this Mother-like view of God, which in the world of theology is sometimes called an open and relational vision of God, often brings up a philosophical discussion about God’s power…
- And the pushback is sometimes: if God is not all-controlling like a dominating King whose will is perfect, doesn’t that make God powerless or impotent? We can’t worship a powerless God!
- But to not have all-controlling power doesn’t at all have to mean God is therefore powerless!
- That’s an either or argument. And it doesn’t have to be.
- This Mother-like God is the most powerful force in all of life.
- It’s the power of God’s love and forgiveness and healing and justice and creativity that can guide and inspire us all if we slow down enough to listen to it.
- It’s just that we’ve worshipped all-controlling domination as “true power” for so long.
- But if worshipping all-controlling domination gives us a fragile God always defending God’s perfect will, is that really true power?
- Isn’t a truer picture of power the resilient Mother-like God who gets down to the actual business of a life well lived?
Here are some examples of “El Shaddai” in the Bible.
- Note how differently you feel reading El Shaddai as “Almighty God” vs El Shaddai as “God of the Breast” or “God of the Mountain”
In Genesis 28:3, the sending of Jacob, one of the forefathers of the Hebrew people…
May [El Shaddai] bless you and make you fruitful and increase your numbers until you become a community of peoples.
- Almighty God makes this feel like humans are just pawns on God’s chess board
- But the God of the Breast makes this feel like a beautiful story of co-creativity unfolding.
In Psalm 91:1-2
1 Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of [El Shaddai].
2 I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.”
- If you’re someone who has lost someone to sickness who you prayed to be well, or if you’re someone who has been oppressed all your life (for the color of your skin perhaps), praying this to “Almighty God” can feel like you’re being gas lit —
- if you’re so all-controlling and almighty, snap your finger and change my situation!
- It makes so much more sense and feels so much more comforting praying this to the Nourishing Mother God — that God is faithful to shelter us and fight for us, but isn’t gas lighting us with empty promises.
- That God is so powerful; it’s just not a pretend power that confuses prayer for magical thinking.
In the Prophet Joel 1:15, calling for repentance and humility because of the injustice of humanity.
Alas for that day!
For the day of the Lord is near;
it will come like destruction from [El Shaddai].
- This one is huge
- A call for repentance and a promise of destruction from “Almighty God” is terrifying —
- like all the worst versions of high control religion and “hell, fire, and brimstone” messages out there.
- But a call for repentance and a promise of destruction from a Protector Mother God —
- the proverbial momma bear concerned about her cubs —
- that hits totally different!
- You don’t cross a momma bear because of the bear’s love for her cubs!
Closing
Here’s how this touches ground for me.
- The images we give oxygen to, week in week out, year by year, in repeated phrases, in the church services we attend, in the songs that get stuck in our head —
- those are the ones that live on and form our personal images of God, and the next generations’ personal images of God,
- Life is so busy and demanding, we don’t often have the time or space to trace the way this is happening;
- It just happens in the background.
- So Jesus’ intentionality about what images to feed and what images to starve, what is best suited to lead us to life, is so helpful.
I’ve now logged over two decades with a steady diet of healthy images of God forming my personal image of God
- Some unhealthy images too, that have required some filtering
- But mostly healthy ones.
- So in the moments I come to the end of myself…
- As we all inevitably do,
- Regularly.
- In the constant demands of modern life,
- In parenting,
- In regret over a bad choice,
- In the overwhelm of a 24 hr news cycle,
- Meeting God in prayer has become
- a return to security after feeling insecure,
- forgiveness in my regrets,
- protection from cruel words,
- a nourishing calm before venturing into the chaos of a day,
- a sharing of my joys,
- a hope when I witness things that seem hopeless,
- guidance for what’s next,
- teaching and conviction about what love requires of me today…
Sometimes my prayer life is conversational, like a phone call with an amazing mom, that I wish I could have…
- Like God, this is how I’m feeling today.
- Or God, what do you think?
Often it’s being quiet,
- Like God, just settle my racing mind.
Sometimes it’s an intuition,
- Like God, I feel your guidance, your direction, an alignment within me.
This is what I want for all of us, which is why we choose the images of God we choose to give oxygen here at BLC.
- If you long for the kind of experiences I’m describing, but you’re not having them right now,
- I believe that the way we pray and teach people to look to God here at BLC — week-in, week-out, month by month — can gradually form you in a way that can make that more of a reality.
In particular we need mothering images of God more than ever before.
In our current moment, with
- global war crimes,
- mass economic exploitation,
- collective deconstruction of versions of faith that no longer work for people,
Mothering images of God can offer us much needed nourishment and refuge.
Let me pray for us…