Today is the sixth Sunday of Easter, that season of the church's life when we celebrate the presence of the risen Christ.  It is also Mother's Day, a day of the secular year in which we are all encouraged to spend some money on mum.  Now, I'll be honest with you.  Being my sceptical self, I am not usually inclined to be bothered too much with Mother's Day.  To me, it seems less a celebration of motherhood than yet another opportunity for the commercial world to make a killing.  For that reason, amongst others, I have never been particularly keen to acknowledge Mother's Day in the church's calendar.  But today I am making a rather major exception.  Today, you see, the lectionary readings provide an opportunity to reflect on motherhood in a big way.  Indeed, the Scriptures today invite us to reflect on the motherhood . . .  of God.

People have been calling God their mother for a very long time - and I'm not just talking about the pagans.  Jews have prayed to God as Mother for at least four thousand years, and perhaps more.  So, too, many of the earliest Christian communities, and many thousands of the faithful ever since.  But these facts are not particularly obvious to the modern Christian.  Indeed, most of us seem quite sure that God is not a Mother!  When the National Christian Youth Convention was on in Tassie a few years ago, a friend of mine was invited to preach in a church not far from here.  As part of the service, she chose a popular song from the previous convention, which referred to God as both mother and sister.  The congregation's singing was interrupted at that verse by the resident youth pastor, who stood up to denounce my friend as a neo-pagan who had no business introducing such ideas in a Christian church!

Well . . .  today I'd like to show you, from the Scriptures, how the image of God as mother is absolutely foundational to the Christian experience of salvation.  And I begin with Paul's words to the Athenians in Acts:  'In God we live and move and have our being'.  In God we live and move and have our being.  Have you ever considered what that means?  It is a womb-image.  It pictures ourselves and the whole universe as creatures within the womb of God.  Creatures who derive our life and vitality and meaningfulness from the one who nurtures us inside her very self.  John's gospel makes a more explicit reference to the birthing metaphor in chapter three, verses five to seven.  There Jesus tells Nicodemus that salvation is wrought by our being born from water and the Spirit.  God as mother once again.  And it is this same mother-Spirit whom Jesus promises to send to his disciples when he is physically removed from the earth.  These are his words:  'I will not leave you orphaned.  I will come to you . . .  On that day you will realise that I am in my Father and you are in me, and I am in you'.  Again, this strikingly intimate language of the womb.  We are told that Jesus lives within God, and we live within Jesus.  Here the ongoing presence of Jesus for the church is presented as the motherly presence of the Spirit, who, having given us new birth, now sticks around to nurture us.  So, even the masculine language of Father and Son is de-stabilised by the powerful image of the mothering God.

This New Testament language reaches back into the old Testament for its inspiration.  There we read of the God who is like a mother-bird:  brooding over the waters of creation (Gen 1.2), and giving refuge to her young beneath the shelter of her wings (Ps 36.7).  We read of the God who gave birth to Israel (Deut 32.18; Num 11.12-13; Isaiah 42.14).  We read of the motherly comfort of God (Is 63.13), the motherly compassion of God (Jer 31.20), and the motherly fury of God at those who would steal her offspring (Hos 13.8).  But more deeply, of course, the Old Testament often speaks of God as Hagia Sophia - Mother Wisdom (Job; Proverbs; Baruch; Wisdom).  I have spoken of her before.  You will remember that she is the one on whom both Matthew and John base their pictures of Jesus.  She, like Jesus, is a divine figure who shares in the deity of the one God, Yahweh, but who comes to earth to represent God's justice and compassion in real and concrete ways.  This close relationship between the Jewish Sophia and the Christian Jesus has led many devout Christians to pray to Jesus as their Mother.  Anselm of Canterbury and Julian of Norwich are two of many.

'Well O.K.', I hear you say, 'God can be called our Mother.  So what?  What difference does it make?'.  Well, I think it makes a lot of difference, in at least three ways.  First, it gives all of us, men and women, a wonderful new insight into the compassion and grace of God.  Lil and I have a friend in Melbourne whose daughter is addicted to heroin.  The daughter has absolutely ruined her mother's happiness.  She has stolen thousands of dollars worth of books and money and furniture and kitchenware from her mother's house.  She has dumped her children with her mother and gone off to look for a hit.  She has borrowed and crashed her mother's car on more than one occasion.  But despite all the abuse and suffering, her mother keeps welcoming her back.  For a long while (I'll be honest with you), I just couldn't understand it.  I'd say to Judith, 'why don't you draw a line in the sand?  Why don't you say 'this far, but no more'?  Why don't you attend to what you need to stay sane?  Why won't you let your daughter face the full consequences of what she is and what she has done?  This continual rescuing isn't helping one bit, you know!'.  Judith could never answer my questions.  All she could ever say, with tears in her eyes, was 'she's my daughter, Garry.  She's my daughter'.  Eventually I learned something about the incredibly strong bond between mothers and their children.  I learned about the way in which mothers keep hoping for their children, against all hope.  I learned about the way in which Mothers identify with their children, and feel their pain most cogently.  And . . . I learned something about the motherly love of God, expressed so beautifully in Hosea:  'How can I give you up, Ephraim?  How can I hand you over, Israel?  My heart is changed within me, all my compassion is aroused.'  From this love of mothers, I have learned something of how it could be that God would choose to die with us rather than destroy us.

A second way in which the Motherhood of God makes a difference is this:  if God is our mother, then the life experience of women is valid as authentic religious experience.  It may surprise you that anyone would feel differently!  But consider the following.  The Roman Catholic church won't ordain women.  Why?  Because it doesn't consider a woman's sense of call to the priesthood to be an authentic religious experience.  The Uniting Church has difficulty recruiting women for leadership roles in worship.  Why?  Because the dominant ways of doing worship have been formed by men, out of the raw material of male experience.  The formal, cerebral, rather distant mode of worship is very male in structure and bias.  No wonder that most women believe they could never lead a congregation in worship. It has not occurred to most of our potential female worship leaders that other ways of doing things might be acceptable. Their own ways of doing and knowing are so seldom demonstrated or acknowledged!  If God is a mother, then even the most uniquely female of experiences can be modes of revelation.  Consider, for example, the spiritual meanings of menstruation, or menopause, or miscarriage, or the female experience of sex.   And what of the specifically female ways of knowing?  All of these experiences tell us something important about ourselves, and our relationship with God.  Not only for women, but for men also.

A third implication of God being a mother is that it is most important that we stop pretending that God is always and only a father.  If we keep praying to a God who is a father only, then we miss out on some really very important aspects of who God is.  The trouble with most of the prayers in both the English translations of the bible and in books like Uniting in Worship, is that pretty well all the prayers are addressed to a male God.  This betrays the dominance of the masculine perspective.  And we've all been inducted into that perspective.  Men and women.  But how tragic!  We've been seeing God in black and white.  We've been hearing God in mono!  We've been touching God with gloves on, and smelling God with pegs on our noses!  Unless we open ourselves to the possibilities of God's many other names, then we continue to constrain and hamstring our capacities for encounter with God.  Not the God of our making, but the real God.

Perhaps today's reflections have been a revelation to you.  Perhaps a window has been opened in you soul, and the new vistas seem full of promise.  If that's the case, I'd encourage you to explore those vistas with all your heart.  Perhaps, on the other hand, you've found what I've said to be quite wrong or even heretical.  That may be so.  I guess I'd simply beg that you give prayerful consideration to what I've said before you dismiss it. I'd love to hear from anyone who can correct these meditations for the sake of God's work in this place.

In the name of God - Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Lifegiver - as in the beginning, so now, and forever.  Amen.