“God on the Other Side of the Door”

May 10, 2009

Isaiah 49:13-18

Matthew 23:37-39

The first semester of my freshman year in college I took a class called “Interpersonal Communication.” As the name suggests, it dealt with how we talk with one another.

The first day that the class met, the instructor had us circle our chairs. Then one by one we were to tell the rest of the class what we though about God and our mother.

As you can imagine, the responses varied greatly—from love to indifference to hatred.

I don’t remember what I said. I do remember feeling some anxiety about the whole exercise. This was, after all, a state university and God would be an unexpected presence in the classroom. And Mom was 250 miles away—out of sight and out of my 18-year-old mind. This was not going to be easy.

These were topics that called for responses from the heart and the soul.

Which, of course, was the point.

After the final student spoke, our instructor suggested to the class that, having spoken to each other about God and our mothers, we should now be able to talk with each other about any other topic.

On this Mother’s Day, I want to talk about God and mother.

When the second Sunday in May rolls around, I usually just say “Visit your mother—or call your mother. Or if those two actions are not possible, give thanks to God for your mother,” and leave it at that.

I usually try to find some topic other than “motherhood” to preach about on Mother’s Day for several reasons.

First because it is all too easy to slip into the sentimental (And you know the definition of sentimentality: loving something more than God loves it) or the corny—so that I get this vision of myself wrapped in an American flag and singing the praises of God, apple pie, and motherhood.

More significant, of course, is the obvious fact that, while I have a mother, I am not a mother. So much of what I would say is second-hand at best.

Even so, I decided that today I’d take the risk and talk about God and mother—not just my mother, however, because she would be appalled to know I was doing that—and that’s about all I’ll say of her—but to talk about mothers and to talk about God—and to save the apple pie until later in the day.

Marcia Hollis, a reporter in Montreal and mother of three, writes: “God feeds us, cleans up our messes, watches over our activities, and then gives us a good washing when we come to God all dirty from whatever we have been doing.” She adds, “That’s the kind of work mothers do.”

Certainly there is a danger in picturing God in all too human form. In the past hundred years or so Christians have pictured God as a “human” Father and Jesus as a man more than at any other time. And that image of God-as-male became oppressive to women and men alike.

So it is always refreshing for our spirits and our images of God to turn again to scripture.

Here and there in the Bible, we discover the God who is described as a mother. There aren’t many references, but they stir our imaginations and our hearts. They call us to new ways of experiencing God, new ways of thinking about mothers.

We hear Moses speaking to the Hebrew people of “the Rock that begot you . . . and the God who gave you birth.”

We encounter the vision of Isaiah who saw God as a woman in labor, telling the people: “Now I will cry out like a woman in travail, I will gasp and pant.”

And even Jesus gives us the image of himself as a mother hen.

Theologian Sallie McFague is concerned that using the image of God as Mother should be built not on the usual Mother’s Day stereotypes of softness, tenderness, and sentimentality, but on the female experiences of pregnancy and birth. God our Mother is no “soft touch.” The experience of gestation and birth engenders not passivity but active defense of the young.

Seen in this light, God’s anger is not provoked by affronts to her majesty or her creatures’ failure to meet a moral standard. God’s anger bursts forth when the offspring of her own being  are denied food, shelter, and fulfillment.

To meet such anger would be to meet a female strength both fierce and daunting, springing from impassioned, empathetic love. It gives a new dimension to the idea of God’s “wrath.”

The poet Maya Angelou said: “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.”

One way or another, most of us probably know what she’s talking about.

I once heard about a children’s book titled: The Boy Whose Mother Was a Pirate. This, of course, was before pirates started showing up on the nightly news. And I thought, Oh, to have a pirate for a mother! What that must be like! And what mother isn’t at least part pirate—adventurous, daring, sometimes a law unto themselves.

Of course, we try to domesticate our mothers but they will not be domesticated.

We remember that the first “Mother’s Day” was actually called the Mother’s March for Peace Day. It was a public occasion, it was a protest. It was mothers calling for a changed world. A hurricane of power.

Such examples of motherhood might indeed lead us to think and speak of God as a “strong mother God.” Such an understanding of God might help us to see the strength of our mothers.

Looking towards Mother’s Day and this sermon, I read again Anne Lamott’s small book from a few years ago, Operating Instructions. It is Lamott’s journal of her son’s first year. As the year progresses it also becomes a journal about her best friend’s discovery of and struggle with breast cancer.

Being a rather straightforward and energetic Christian, Lamott uses a lot of language that I probably couldn’t use in the pulpit.

She does tell one story, however, about a friend named Anne, who took her two-year-old up to Tahoe during the summer. They were staying in a rented condo by the lake. And of course, it’s such a hotbed of gambling that all the rooms are equipped with these curtains and shades that block out every speck of light so you can stay up all night in the casinos and then sleep all morning.

One afternoon Anne put the baby to bed in his playpen in one of these rooms, in the pitch-dark, and went to do some work. A few minutes later she heard the baby knocking on the door from inside the room, and she got up knowing he’d crawled out of his playpen.

She went to put him down again, but when she got to the door, she found he’d locked it. He had somehow managed to push in the little button on the doorknob. So he was calling to her, “Mommy, Mommy,” and she was saying to him, “Jiggle the doorknob, darling,” and of course he didn’t speak much English.

After a moment, it became clear to him that his mother couldn’t open the door, and the panic set in. He began sobbing. Anne ran around like crazy, trying everything possible . . . Finally she did the only thing she could, which was slide her fingers underneath the door, where there was a one-inch space. She kept telling him over and over to bend down and find her fingers. Finally somehow he did.

So they stayed like that for a really long time, on the floor, him holding onto her fingers in the dark. He stopped crying. She kept wanting to call the fire department or something, but she felt that contact was the most important thing.
She started saying, “Why don’t you lie down, darling, and take a little nap on the floor?” and he was obviously like, “Yeah, right, Mom, that’s a great idea, I’m feeling so nice and relaxed.” So she kept saying, “Open the door now,” and every so often he’d jiggle the knob, and eventually, after maybe a half and hour, it popped open.

Lamott concludes: “I keep thinking about that story, how much it feels like I’m the two-year-old in the dark and God is the mother and I don’t speak the language. She could break down the door if that struck her as being the best way, and ride off with me on her charger. But instead, via my friends and my church and my shabby faith, I can just hold onto her fingers underneath the door. It isn’t enough, and it is.[i]

“My soul is calm and quiet,” says the psalmist. “Like a child in its mother’s arms.”

The strong Mother God seeks to comfort and strengthen us, her children.

It is difficult to speak of God. It is difficult to speak of mothers.

In some way, however, it seems right to speak of them together.

My words have faltered—and maybe even gotten me into trouble.

So I need to hear from you. Tell me about God. Tell me about your mother. Tell one another.

Who knows? Perhaps having started by speaking of God and mothers, we can continue by speaking honestly and openly about everything else.