Motherly God

​Mother’s Day and Father’s Day arrive every year with their own sets of joy and baggage. For us as Christians, it’s an opportunity to remember the motherly/fatherly nature of God while honoring the good qualities of our temporal parents. This Sunday we’ll be thanking God for our mothers. At their best, they represent to us the nurture and love of God. In scriptures, the metaphor of motherhood is used to articulate God's love for us. Like a mother, God is:

• Generative - able to give birth to a new creation
• Nurturing - providing food from her own body to feed her child
• Invested - instinct for the child will wake a parent up from deepest sleep
• Protective -Jesus himself compared himself to a mother hen, longing to keep all of her babies in the protective shelter of her wing. Matthew 23:37 "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. 

For some of us, it's hard to imagine God as a mother because the church as been so emphatic on identifying God as father and male. Even Jesus called God, Father. And in so doing, he emphasized the intimacy and care represented by that title. However, by definition, God is greater than gender categories but also inclusive of them. God is BOTH father and mother, and so much more!

​As the church, we acknowledge that everyone is in a different place around these “Hallmark Holidays”. We should honor each other in all the complexity these holidays hold.  Together, let’s celebrate the greatest truth: God our Mother/Father loves us deeply and truly.  For that, we are united in gratitude.  

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