The Motherhood of God

Sermon for May 11, 2025 (Mother's Day)
Psalm 23; Revelation 7:9-17

Happy Mother’s Day!  As I said in the article in the bulletin, Mother’s Day seems like a church-related celebration – if nothing else, it gets a few husbands to church who might not have come otherwise.  But the Book of Common Prayer doesn’t appoint special readings or prayers for Mother’s Day.  Instead, today we’re marking the fourth Sunday of Easter – what tradition calls “Good Shepherd Sunday” because the prayers and readings highlight Jesus as the one who guides us through the full-hearted life of resurrection.  But this year, Good Shepherd Sunday and Mother’s Day fall on the same date.

So, why does secular Mother’s Day feel like it should be a celebration on the Church calendar?  And does Mother’s Day have anything to do with seeing Jesus as our Good Shepherd?

Well, this might be heresy to some of my more liturgically proper colleagues, but I think the culture gets it right in seeing Mother’s Day as a churchy celebration.  Why?  Because it recognizes something we’ve had trouble admitting historically: that there’s a lot of the feminine in the way God tends and cares for us.  Over the centuries, that’s been a hard thing for the deeply patriarchal Church to wrap its mind and heart around.  And it’s still true today, too, especially in Christian traditions that give only men access to leadership.

But think about the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ ministry.  How does he spend his time; what do we find him doing?  Is he ruling over people – building alliances, planning strategy, punishing opponents, wielding authority?  Never.  In fact, explicitly, he calls his friends and followers to turn away from that model of power and, instead, follow his lead: engaging with those others reject, healing broken bodies and broken spirits, prioritizing the needs of the powerless, working for the well-being of others, washing dirty feet.  Jesus’ version of power turns the world’s expectation on its head.  And it sounds a lot like the way women have been exercising power through most of history – less through dominance and more through relationship.

So, when we think of Jesus as our Good Shepherd, it’s this loving approach to leadership we have in the back of our minds.  Now, I’ve never been a shepherd, so I have to be careful in what I claim here.  But I think it’s safe to say that shepherds don’t lead the sheep by dominating them at the sheep’s expense.  Shepherds don’t form alliances, other than with sheepdogs.  Instead, shepherds are invested fundamentally in the sheep’s well-being.  Now, do they exercise power?  Definitely.  That shepherd’s crook is both a weapon for fending off the wolves and a management tool for whacking the sheep into line, literally and figuratively.  But here’s the difference between that exercise of power and what’s often happened across our social history:  Good shepherds use power not to exalt themselves but to care for the needs of each sheep.

Even in a deeply patriarchal society like ancient Israel, God raised up this contrast version of power.  The mission for holy kingship in Israel was to prioritize the needs of the people – tending to them, not dominating them.  You can hear it in the prophets’ expectations of the Messiah, the king that God would send to save the people from their oppression by foreign masters.  As we remember each Palm Sunday, the king that God was sending would come humbly, not on a warhorse but on a donkey.  And that ruler wouldn’t be following his own agenda but advancing the purposes of the One who was really in charge.  And at the top of that agenda was the well-being of each beloved child made in God’s image and likeness.  That true power is what we still see in leaders who empty themselves, who pour themselves out, to model God’s truth that each sheep is worth caring for.

It kind of sounds like a good mom, doesn’t it?

Now, identifying these leadership traits as feminine is not some modern, politically correct innovation.  Six hundred years ago, God was revealing this truth to a young woman in an English village who’s become one of the most influential spiritual guides of our own age – Julian of Norwich.

After nearly dying from a devastating illness, Julian received a series of visions from God showing that the top-down model – power for the sake of order and control – isn’t God’s way at all.  God is not who the theologians of the day imagined, some feudal lord beset by unruly peasants who affront the lord’s honor through sin and need a champion to save them from God’s wrath.  Instead, Julian would have said, sin is just the cost of being human, life’s lessons that teach us to follow the faithful path of doing the next right thing.  For Julian, all things come from God’s Love, and all things exist to complete God’s Love.  God’s Love is all in all.

And here’s our part in that story:  Our salvation comes from Jesus, who gives himself up completely to show us how it’s done.  In the second reading today, in the vision of God redeeming all things at the end of the age, Jesus is the Lamb who has been slaughtered and yet who reigns, “the [sacrificial] Lamb at the center of the throne” who is also our shepherd, guiding us to springs of the water of life and wiping away every tear from our eyes” (Revelation 7:17). He’s not just the one who wields power; he’s the ultimate revelation of power from the God whose nature is motherly Love.

Well, all that’s not going to fit on a Mother’s Day card, and no one would buy it anyway.  But, at least for me, when I give thanks for my mother, I’m remembering her model of self-giving leadership.

At home, she was the one setting the boundaries, marking out how far we four sheep could stray before she turned us back around.  She was the one binding our wounds and tending our illnesses.  She was the one willing to have the uncomfortable conversations with maturing kids not just about sex but about what love’s intimacy means.  And, for me, when I was a teenager, she showed me what the shepherding work of ministry looked like, too, as she served as the Episcopal lay chaplain at what was then Southwest Missouri State University.  I watched her lead Evening Prayer and engage with the students.  I watched her interact with the guys in the other offices of the campus ministry center – the Catholic, Methodist, and Disciples of Christ pastors – and work with them as an equal partner in planning programs.  And I saw those pastors respect her for the passion, heart, and practicality she brought to their shared work.

So, this Mother’s Day, I invite you to think about where you’ve seen the Love of God roll up its sleeves and get to work in the world.  Who was doing it?  What did it look like?  Whose interests were being served?

And then, look at your own life of blessing.  Who has led you through the valley of the shadow of death?  Who has spread a table for you in the darkest times, and anointed you for healing, and made your cup run over with love?  Where have you found a foretaste of paradise, a glimpse of what it’s like to hunger and thirst no more, to find protection from the scorching heat, to drink from the water of life, and to know that your tears will be wiped away?  As you remember where and how you’ve seen divine power at work most directly, you’ll recognize its source:  Welcome to “the motherhood of God.”¹

1.      https://www.christiancentury.org/article/features/julian-theologian