Joe's Journal
May 9, 2008

This coming Sunday our nation celebrates Mother’s Day. According to Wikipedia, Mother's Day was originally imported from Great Britain by Julia Ward Howe as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. (cont.) Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who worked to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors. When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day.

In the life of the church, we are celebrating the feast of Pentecost. At Pentecost, the church received the gift of the Holy Spirit, empowering the apostles to speak in every language of the known world.  The word for “spirit” in Greek is pneuma, a word that carries the feminine gender. A few years ago the Presbyterian church caught a lot of grief about a study paper on the Trinity because of feminine images suggested in the paper to describe the Trinity. Actually, the paper affirmed the traditional language of, “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” It went on to suggest other ways Scripture might illumine the Trinitarian God stating:

With the anchor of the language of Father, Son, and Spirit in place, we are liberated to amplify and expand upon the ways of naming the triune God.  We are free to speak of “God, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God,” of “God from whom, God through whom, and God in whom, are all things,” and of “God the compassionate mother, God the beloved child, and God the life-giving womb.” Such naming or ways of imaging and speaking of the triune reality and activity of God do not replace the traditional designations. Nor are they chosen arbitrarily. They are mined from Scripture … This set of references has support from some scriptural texts in which God is likened to a mother; from John Calvin who says that God has given himself to be known not only under the likeness of a father but also under the likeness of a mother; and from the Brief Statement of Faith of the PCUSA, that gives parallel descriptions of God as “like a mother who will not forsake her nursing child, like a father who runs to welcome the prodigal home.”

One sentence was lifted from a 34 page paper to create a media firestorm. While serving in Alpharetta, Georgia, I had people ready to leave the denomination over that feminine phrase being included in potential ways of speaking of the Trinity. To this day I wonder what got people so upset about that?

In two weeks, the lectionary offers two passages that contain beautiful feminine metaphors for God and God’s love. Isaiah 49:15-16 compares the love of God to a nursing mother: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you,” promises the Lord. The Psalm for that Sunday is Psalm 131:

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time on and forevermore.  

Ultimately the love of God is beyond comprehension, much less description with human metaphors, yet this Mother’s Day weekend, I am reminded that the Bible does not limit descriptions of God’s love to only father. As I spent the first part of the week at a Family Systems Workshop in Colorado, I was once again reminded of the blessings of motherly love I’ve known in my life: my mom’s love for me, my wife’s love for our children. It is not at all difficult for me to imagine God’s love is like a mother’s for her children. The Bible says God’s love even surpasses that of a mother. In my life experience, that’s hard to imagine.

Hope to see you Sunday!
Joe