Mother God Comforts Us With Justice
May 12, 2019
Today's message can be found below.
There will be a live audio Reflection & Prayer Service with community chatroom conversation in connection with this Multimedia Service this Sunday evening at 9 pm ET. Catch it towards the end of this Multimedia Service or on our Worship page. Video of the broadcast is posted there later.
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OPENING SONGS
Try to dance, move, sing, hum or play along with this music – or enjoy a meditative listen with deep, mindful breaths
A Song for Mama
Boyz 2 Men
Opening READINGS
From Biblical & Hebrew Scripture
Matthew 23:37-39
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
Hosea 11:1-4
“When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
But the more they were called,
the more they went away from me.
They sacrificed to the Baals
and they burned incense to images.
It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
taking them by the arms;
but they did not realize
it was I who healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with ties of love.
To them I was like one who lifts
a little child to the cheek,
and I bent down to feed them.
and out of Egypt I called my son.
But the more they were called,
the more they went away from me.
They sacrificed to the Baals
and they burned incense to images.
It was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
taking them by the arms;
but they did not realize
it was I who healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with ties of love.
To them I was like one who lifts
a little child to the cheek,
and I bent down to feed them.
From Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Click here for free ebooks of Emanuel Swedenborg's Theological Writings
Mother God Comforts Us with justice
By rev. Cory Bradford-Watts
Our reading from Hosea says, “I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek, and I bent down to feed them.” I don’t know about you, but this reminds me of my mom, Blythe. She’s an amazing mother: always there for me with kindness, support, and love. I was blessed with a mom that I can now say I see Divinity in, I hope you’re the same, but I also know I only acknowledge a small piece of the gift that she is to the world.
Truly, the image of a kind and caring mother is an image of God. Like God in this passage, most of our mothers fed us despite the trials of doing so. They carry us, support us, they inspire and teach us even as we go a wayward way. Like a good shepherd, they strive to pull us back. Even when we offer no thanks or compassion back for them. They are so much like God.
Like with God, it’s easy to dismiss the positive role our mothers play. When we’re being raised it’s hard to acknowledge the grand gifts bestowed by our mothers, bestowed also by those with a mother’s spirit, and by God. We take these monumental, all-enveloping gifts as given, as privilege. Instead, may we open ourselves to a greater appreciation of Motherliness.
I love the image of Divinity as a Mother that we see throughout scripture. Its one described clearly, repeatedly, and yet we often discount it as just allegory. But when scripture uses the word “Father” for God, we typically see this not as allegory, but as reality. One that dispels an open use of the phrase Divine Mother in our churches, in our homes, in our minds, as well as any other term seemingly at odds with this Fatherly reality. And it’s true, God is our father, and fatherhood is an image of Divinity, but so is motherhood.
Let’s not mince words. This legacy of Father as reality and Mother as dismissed allegory has sprouted from this world’s longstanding misogyny (men-centeredness and men-domination), and it’s been used as a tool to enforce that misogyny and its hierarchical desires.
Often, we point to Christ’s use of Father as the source of said enforcement. And in a way, it’s a good, easy excuse. Christ mainly uses the word “Father” for God. He too, stood amidst a misogynistic society, one seemingly ignoring the Hebrew scripture’s tradition of painting God as a Mother. Jesus and the writers of scripture knew full well that if he were to use the term “Mother” for God his audience may dwindle or react violently to the heresy. Even his Divine embodiment as the Son of God may have been sourced from a marketing and workability standpoint, as the Daughter of God would have been lost to the misogynistic history it hopes to transform. Not only that, but how do we reconcile “Father” and “Son” in an interfaith-Christian tradition that proposes that there is only one person of the Godhead: Father/Son? Well, by reading it all as a type of deep, informative allegory.
Christ himself does his best to inform and broaden these parental allegories, and couches his justice work in this area as parable, as we’re told he couched all of his teachings. He says in Matthew, “how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” Again, “how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing…”
The Lord has longed to gather us as a mother hen, and we have not been willing. We haven’t been willing to appreciate the Mother God in our midst. Like the fundamental gifts given by our mothers we prefer to take the Divine’s holy mothering for granted. But as Christ indicates, this lack of acknowledgement, this lack of embrace limits God’s fundamental ability to mother us, to gather and uplift us and our communities wholly, without the trappings of misogyny.
I often think back to my childhood and my mother’s resolute care. She’s never had a car, and so she’d take my brother and I around on the city bus, putting up with our roughhousing, our boyish antics. I can only imagine!
More often than I care to remember, she had to come to my elementary school, Robert E. Lee Elementary, and handle the issue of the day. This school, named after a southern general from the U.S. Civil War, often felt too aptly named to me. I often felt set upon by my teachers and saw even blacker boys set upon even more, blamed for things we didn’t commit and punished in an endless feedback loop for things we did. Although it depended on the teacher, if the class was talking, I’d be the one reprimanded and sent out of the room.
Not only that, I felt ostracized from my peers. Big, black, dangly, with a lisp as a child, wearing old sweat-outfits and sporting unpopular hair, I was the opposite of popular and often bullied despite my size. Called fat, ugly, dumb.
But, if ever my mother caught wind of injustice, from me or the school, there she came – a solid oak of righteousness, rebuking all that she found unfair. Now, I often felt she trusted the school’s narrative a little too much but this seemed of necessity. And it comforted me to know she had my back, always appearing despite the trial of travel, and would never put up with brash unfairness.
I was comforted by her insistence on justice and I think I take for granted her underlying force for it and what that engendered in me. What a powerful, inspiring, comforting woman in the image of the Just God. What powerful women we have raising us, supporting us, and motivating us. We’re told, and I believe, that their power, everything good about them, as well as us, is from Divinity. From the beauty of all of our forms, to the healthy orientations of our spirits, we are made in the image of Mother God, especially when we use our lives to raise up others. Hallelujah!
Now I know that for some people, gender-inclusiveness around God is a no-go, or at least unwarranted – “Why?” they ask. I could point to theology, Emanuel Swedenborg’s belief that God was gender-inclusive, all-encompassing. Swedenborg even used neutral and feminine terms to describe God in some of his books and his diaries. But instead, I’ll point to Christ, who I believe to be Divinity-Incarnate. Jesus Christ said he’s longed to gather us as a mother hen. She, God, has longed to be seen, to have her just-comfort appreciated, not for her sake, but for ours – for the health of the nations.
We need to see her. We need to acknowledge and celebrate Mother Goddess. For our healing, for our sanity, and to relinquish the tragic patterns of misogyny, hidden even to ourselves in our hearts and in our systems.
In a world like ours, the only comfort we should truly settle on is one centered on God’s justice. True comfort comes when no one is trampled upon, when no one is forgotten, when our mothers can look to God and see the Just-Truth, A Divine Version of Themselves.
CLOSING SONGS
Come Healing
Leonard Cohen
I Will Always Love You
Whitney Houston
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