God the Mother

Rev. JT Smiedendorf

May 11, 2025

Text: Deuteronomy 32:10-12a

God found Israel out in the wilderness,
in an empty, windswept wasteland.
The Holy one threw her arms around Israel,
lavished attention on Israel,
guarding Israel as the apple of the Divine eye.
God was like an eagle hovering over its nest,
overshadowing its young,
Then spreading the Divine wings, lifting them into the air,
teaching them to fly.
God alone led Israel;

May the Living Word of God in Scripture

Be alive within us,

be alive among us,

and be alive beyond us

How many of you see the elder woman on the cover of your bulletin? How many see the young woman?

This image holds two figures, but our filters of perception may not see both. Yet, if someone told you that you were about to see one image or the other, that’s what you would likely see.

What I have seen in my own faith journey and life around the church is something like this, a limiting expectation of what to expect, especially when it comes to our traditional interpretations of images of God and the Scriptures. That is to say, we have been told over the centuries that God is Father, God the Father, Heavenly Father. You could think of Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as a prime example of this kind of primacy of image, a male Zeus-like figure as God reaching out to the first human. Indeed, the Divine Presence can be like a life supporting father. Wonderful.

But how many of us were told about and shown and even expected to hear of God the Mother? What if Michelangelo had painted another image of God in the Scriptures on that ceiling. Today is Mother’s Day, not a Christian holiday, but a cultural one, and yet an opportune time to uplift a neglected and even repressed truth of our faith and a deep spiritual resource: an aspect of the feminine side of the Divine, God the Mother.

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott’s book The Divine Feminine is one of many books that document the many instances of Scripture, explicit and implicit, that speak of the Divine in feminine images. Almost too many to list. Here are a few that are mother images….

Isaiah 66:13

As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

Isaiah 42:14

“For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant.

Deuteronomy 32:18

You deserted the Rock, who fathered you; you forgot the God who gave you birth.

God is also depicted in Scripture as a nursing mother, a midwife, as mother bear, as a homemaker, a mother hen, as lady wisdom birthing Creation, and, as we heard today in Scripture, as a mother eagle.

In addition, there were numerous early church writers and medieval monks and nuns who frequently spoke of God and of Christ as mother.  German medieval mystic and saint Meister Eckhart said,

“What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.”

Some of this maternal emphasis in Scripture and tradition, especially Protestant, is lost in our historical habits of patriarchal interpretation. Some is repressed in the patriarchal history of the originating cultures. Some continues in our own current habitual readings and selections of Scripture.

Fortunately, the Biblical library which is sometimes limited and distorted in its presentation of the Divine due to its cultural blinders is liberated by the same Biblical library which always seems to have its own self-correcting, disrupting, evolutionary material from which to draw.  Images like that in the Deuteronomy passage that we heard moments ago can be remembered and uplifted.  In Scriptural writings attributed to the Apostle Paul, we hear that in Christ there is neither male or female, neither Jew nor Greek. In other words, in the parlance of the times, when we are in the Spirit of Christ, we will know that God is inclusive of and beyond these limiting distinctions, especially as a mark of status and rank. The Divine Circle is wide and wider still, big enough to know that God is like a father and that God is like a mother.

What I often see of God through the teaching and witness and actions of Jesus is God as compassion. Did you know that the Hebrew word for compassion is related to the Hebrew word for womb? That female organ is used in the ancient Scriptures to describe God’s compassion. Medieval English mystic Saint Julian of Norwich even talks of Jesus as Mother due to Jesus’ emphasis on compassion.

And one could say that the very origins of our modern Mother’s Day are in compassion. While there are different roots that can be traced even into antiquity, the first North American Mother’s Day was conceptualized with Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870. Despite having penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic 12 years earlier, Howe had become so distraught by the death and carnage of the Civil War that she called on mothers to come together and protest what she saw as the futility of their sons killing the sons of other mothers. With the following statement, she called for an international Mother’s Day celebrating peace and motherhood. Listen for the broken-hearted compassion in her call:

Arise, then, women of this day!  Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears, Say firmly:

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of
charity, mercy and patience.

“We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.

Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

Like Howe’s timely proposal, and like others, I have one. My friends, it is essential and not too late to reclaim this deep image and energy of our faith, God the Mother. Indeed, it is being done already. Nearly 30 years ago, spiritual teacher and author Andrew Harvey, wrote a major work titled The Return of the Mother. In it, Harvey tells us that Mother Mary is far less interested in adoration than imitation. The Divine Mother doesn’t just want to be loved; she wants that love to be made active in all things and in all moments so that the reign of her love can manifest on earth.

Harvey invokes the teaching of Brazilian liberation theologian Leonardo Boff about Mary as a “prophetic woman of liberation” in his book, The Maternal Face of God.  Boff says Mary brings both “denunciation and proclamation, prophecy and liberation.” He recognizes that under the influence of conquest and colonialism, Mother Mary has often been sentimentalized or forgotten. “As a result, for centuries Christianity has rendered the liberating” message of Mary’s Magnificat Song in Luke “impotent.”

Harvey applies Boff’s call for liberation to saving creation:

…and it is not only Christianity that has to make this effort to actualize justice, but every religion. We all have to hear the voice of the Mother in Mary’s pleas for transformation in this world.

Harvey believes that if Christianity were to receive the sacred call of the Divine Mother in Mary it could also at long last open itself to the living energy of Christ. Because they are the same energy, Mary’s and Christ’s.

Harvey suggests that the best way to serve Christ is to birth him as Mary did.  This insight parallels that of already mentioned medieval mystic Meister Eckhart who exclaimed: What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to Christ fourteen centuries ago and I don’t do the same in my time and place and culture?

And this call is timely, my friends.

The rise of fascism and Christo-fascism is very much related to the repression of the feminine and the exaltation of the ideology of power for power’s sake which is an expression of the toxic masculine. Yearning for a “strongman” is one sign of the patriarchal sickness called fascism.  We can instead be fueled by a yearning for and expression of God the Mother.

Modestly, some have begun. I am glad to celebrate that the denomination in which I was ordained and have served, the United Church of Christ, has a hymnal unique to historic protestant churches in that it attempts to balance the male and female images of God.

On this Mother’s Day, we can go further. We must go further to heal this consequential deficit of God the Mother. We continue to do so by remembering and uplifting the feminine images of God too long neglected in our prayer and preaching.  And not just on one Sunday. If we are to find peace and justice in this world, a limited ‘only masculine’ God will not get us there.

A friend and devotee of the Divine Feminine, Elizabeth Heubner, offered a poetic reflection for this Mother’s Day. She gave birth a few months ago, noticing that she could see more clearly now the mother love she felt that extended beyond her baby to all babies and how that is the love that Divine Mother has for us. Here is a portion of her reflection….

Every baby is my baby.
Love knows, there is a better way.
You, my baby, you know there is a better way.
Take my hand, and let us find it together.
 
All babies are my baby.
All babies are HER baby.
This is not weakness.
This is power—
The power to make the world whole.
 

And perhaps this is what we ought to reflect on this Mother’s Day:

To not only honor the Mother that bore you (and she does deserve deep honoring),

But to honor THE Mother, the Mother within us all.

To sit in Her seat and view the world and our challenges.

What would the Mother do?

As she sees and holds us all…

On this Mother’s Day, let us remember the strong women who cried out for peace and take up their mantle of peace and justice making. And let us remember and praise in word and song the strength and wisdom of God the Mother!