NRSLuke 13: 31-35
31At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." 32 He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.33Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' 34Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 35See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"
The Word of the Lord… Thanks be to God.
Sisters and Brothers in Christ, may the Lord keep all your days and deeds in the amazing grace and surpassing peace of Jesus the Messiah. Amen.
Is Christ our Brother or our Mother?
A couple of weeks ago I met that question head on as I was preparing our worship for the Sundays of Lent. I use a web-based resource for worship planning called “Sundays and Seasons,” offered by Augsburg-Fortress, the publishing branch of our own ELCA. A subscription service that St. Paul’s pays for me and our whole worship team to use, “Sundays and Seasons” makes available all the materials included in all our various hymnals and further provides a host of worship ideas, including music suggestions, preaching tips, and liturgical resources for each of the times of the church year. This allows the worship planner to introduce variety into our Sunday gatherings, while at the same time retaining the continuity of our liturgy. Of course, it’s up to the worship planner’s own choosing, but “Sunday and Seasons” also includes a set of seasonally appropriate texts for each of the spoken parts of our liturgy, such as the order for confession and forgiveness, the offering prayer, and the benediction. It was the “Sundays and Seasons” suggestion for our Lenten benediction that caught my eye this past month, for it read, and I quote:
God our Father bless you and shield you.
Christ our Mother shelter you and carry you.
God the Holy Spirit guide your journey
+ both now and forever.
Amen.
At first, I thought that this must be a typo. Somebody surely had to have typed “mother” instead of “brother,” since after all Jesus was clearly a male. In the great hymn “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee,” we sing to “God our Father, Christ our brother, all who live in love are thine.”
Likewise, in many of our prayers we have traditionally addressed Christ as our Savior and Brother. This had to be a mistake, and then it hit me.
Some smart-aleck, probably a woman, up there in the editorial offices of Augsburg-Fortress is just trying to mess with my head. Here we are, us poor, persecuted male pastors working our tails off to keep the church in the good old 20th century, and along comes this radical, liberal, femi-nazi who just wants to stir the pot and see us persecuted even more. Christ our Mother! Really! I thought, “I’m not falling for that trap,” and I immediately changed the text to read, “Christ our Brother.”
And then I got hit again, this time knocking me off my high horse and straight on to my knees. It’s right here in today’s Gospel, where Jesus, speaking for God and as God, says to Jerusalem, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” That’s a feminine image of God. In Jesus God is like a mother hen trying to gather her chicks under the protection of her wings. So maybe Christ is both our mother and our brother? Most of the Bible’s images of God are masculine – Father, Son, King, among many others – but the Bible also contains feminine images of God, and not just this one here in Luke. One of the most striking comes from the Book of Deuteronomy when Moses chides the people of Israel for having forgotten the God who “gave you birth” (32: 18). God is also frequently invoked as Israel’s “Rock,” so you can say that the Bible uses masculine, feminine, and neuter images for God, but the thing to remember, and what I so often forget, is that all these are images, word pictures, if you will, for the God who is ultimately beyond all human understanding. So when we encounter gendered words describing God, he or she or it, the question is not whether God is male or female or neuter, for God is clearly none of these, but rather, the question is: what dimension or aspect of God are these words trying to communicate?
I have to admit, I was pretty much oblivious to the various nuances of gender until, from 1994-98, I was president of the board of the Hospice of Galveston County, a not-for-profit, community-based hospice that served not only Galveston County, but also parts of Brazoria, Matagorda, Wharton, Fort Bend, Chambers, and even Harris County. At the time we had a budget between $3-4M and annually served about 400 patients and their families, with a staff of, I think, at that time, 28 full-time employees. Of those employees, 26 of the 28 were female, but the board was comprised mostly of males, many of whom were major donors and executives from local business and industry. In our board meetings we often made decisions from what I would later recognize as a typically male point of view. We’d ask, “How much does it cost?”, “Can we afford it?”, “Is this the right thing at the right time?”, and if so, “Where are we going to get the money?” Right or wrong, affordable or unaffordable, these were the questions that drove most of our discussions, and once we’d answered those questions to our satisfaction, we’d adjourn to drinks and refreshments, patting ourselves on the backs all the while for what fine work we had done.
But then later when, as president, I would meet with our majority female Hospice staff to share our board decisions, I would be hit with all sorts of questions that had never occurred to me, like, “How’s that going to affect the arrangements Mary has made for child care?”, or “How’s June going to feel about sharing that part of her work with another staffer?”, or “But with Barbara taking off to care for her new baby, how are we going to get this done while having to fill in for her?” Very suddenly everything got very personal, intimate even, and I was like the proverbial deer in the headlights. What’s all this stuff about feelings? How should I know what child care arrangements Mary has made, or when Barbara is taking her pregnancy leave. I didn’t even know that Barbara was pregnant. Honestly, I was like the Tom Hanks character in the movie “A League of Their Own.” “ARE YOU CRYING? There’s no crying. THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL?” It’s the right thing to do and the numbers work, so let’s everybody get on board, right? No, wrong. As my mother, sister, and wife had been trying to teach me for many years, even if something works on paper, if it doesn’t work for people, it doesn’t work. And that’s when a little bitty, teeny-weeny light went on in my head.
As I was beginning to understand the limitations of typically male decision-making, it also began to occur to me that there might be similar limitations to our typically male images of God. After all, there’s more to God that just cold calculation. God is not all power and might. We believe in a God who does more than just run numbers and figure cost/benefit ratios. I’m not saying that men are incapable of weighing the importance of emotions in decision-making, far from it, but I am saying that the skew of our language is such that words like control, command, and muscle usually end up being identified as male and masculine, while words like gentleness, mercy, and compassion usually get labeled female and feminine. This gender slanting leads to a diminishment of our understandings of what it means to be male and what it means female, and it definitely messes with our appreciation for who God is and what God does.
Yes, God rules the universe in kingly authority and majesty, but God also has a female touch, nurturing, feeding, and caring for the creatures God has birthed into existence. On the banks of the Red Sea, as Pharaoh’s chariots drowned beneath the mighty waves that God rained down upon them, Israel sang to their Lord is masculine terms, “Yahweh is a warrior, Yahweh is his name,” but Israel could also sing to God in motherly terms as one who heals, tends, and binds up the broken-hearted. Likewise, as we heard in last Sunday’s gospel, three times Jesus faces down the devil in what some would call a masculine display of power, resisting temptation after temptation. But this Sunday Jesus, so anxious is he to spare Jerusalem her looming destruction, identifies himself as a mother hen, longing to protect her brood from danger.
The God revealed in Holy Scripture and whom we name as Holy Trinity is beyond being identified with any gender. But because the only language we know, with the exception of mathematics, is gender bound, then the only way we can keep from making God into an idol after our own likeness, is to use inclusive rather than exclusive language. God is both our Father and our Mother, accompanying us through life as both our Brother and our Sister, holding sun, moon, and stars in their courses while numbering the hairs of each our heads, loving us with a depth and intimacy that exceeds even father or mother.
This brings me back to that Benediction I first encountered in “Sundays and Seasons.” If you look to the back of the bulletin, you’ll see that I used “Christ our Brother” instead of “Christ our Mother.” So next week, after what I’ve preached this morning, what do you think I should put in the service? Hands up for “Christ our Brother.” Now, hands up for “Christ our Mother.” Guess what, you’re both right.
In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
