Embraced By Our Mother God
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
May 12, 2024
Good morning Friends and Happy Mother’s Day to all our mothers! The scripture text I have chosen for this morning Proverbs 1:20-24 from The Message version.
Lady Wisdom goes out in the street and shouts.
At the town center she makes her speech.
In the middle of the traffic she takes her stand.
At the busiest corner she calls out:
“Simpletons! How long will you wallow in ignorance?
Cynics! How long will you feed your cynicism?
Idiots! How long will you refuse to learn?
About face! I can revise your life.
Look, I’m ready to pour out my spirit on you;
I’m ready to tell you all I know.
As it is, I’ve called, but you’ve turned a deaf ear;
I’ve reached out to you, but you’ve ignored me.
As Quakers, our understanding of God is mostly shaped by our individual experiences, and Friends use a variety of descriptors to help them find meaningful ways to connect to and describe the Divine. A while back I gave a message about God as Love and often, we, Quakers, talk about that of God in each of us or as our Inner Light. Yet, even when we talk of that Love or Inner-Light we do not ascribe it a gender.
Most of our gender descriptors actually come from the Bible. On Mother’s Day, I always like to take a moment to return and look at God from a feminine perspective.
The patriarchal world of the Bible has often limited us to using only male descriptors of God. But that may not be the way it was before the Bible was written. Doing a little exploratory history, one is quick to find a slightly different story arising outside the pages or Scripture.
In doing a little research, it’s worth noting that many anthropologists today believe the ancient Upper Paleolithic societies are likely to have followed a matrilineal structure, meaning women held supreme status at the center of the household. [Just the opposite of what most Christian churches teach today – when stating and defending the man as the head of the household. Something I gave up for Lent almost a couple decades ago, now.]
Merlin Stone explains that these communities revered ancestor worship, whereby “the concept of the creator of all human life may have been formulated by the clan’s image of the woman who had been their most ancient, primal ancestor.”
In other words, the Divine Ancestress – meaning early on God may have been characterized with feminine qualities rather than male.
I also learned in my research, anthropologists studying the rites and rituals of Paleolithic communities over the last two centuries have discovered countless stone figurines of pregnant women across Europe, the Middle East, and India. Some dating as far back as 25,000 BC point to the worship of the divine feminine.
It seems during this period in the ancient world, worship of female deities was widespread and immensely powerful. But it was with the advent of agriculture after the Paleolithic age that Goddess worship really started to take off.
Statuettes from that period representing the Mother Goddess have cropped up in Canaan (now Palestine/Israel) and Anatolia (now Turkey), and Goddess figurines have appeared all over the Neolithic communities of Egypt dating back to 4000 BC.
What I believe history is teaching us is that when women rise to prominence, misogyny often ensues, and by 1500 BC, Goddess-worshipping civilizations had mostly fallen from grace. Scholarship differs in its analysis of why, but many experts assert that the dominant masculine religions and patrilineal customs brought to Europe by invading Indo-Europeans seriously upset the state of play.
The suppression that followed makes for bleak reading. Activist and author Lynn Rogers says that “At the dawn of Western civilization 25,000 years of ‘her-story’ of the Goddess’ bountiful creativity were obliterated.”
Creation myths were rewritten (one of the reasons why we have so many creation stories, today), symbols of Goddess worship were denigrated, and “the ancient belief in the Goddess as the Ground of Being, The Universe from which The All emerged, was overturned.”
And THEN comes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which evolved in the Middle East and in Europe. These monotheistic religions began to cement the worship of a new, exclusively male order: God, King, Priest, and Father.
I found this research fascinating, because it changes the view of some things I have wondered about in the Old Testament. Actually, it is rather easy to find the remnants of this feminine understanding and view of God right in the pages of the Bible.
In several places in the Old Testament, we find the personification of God as Wisdom – and wisdom is almost always given a female gender.
Take for example our scripture for today from Proverbs 1 – I love Eugene Peterson’s translation of the personification of wisdom – which he actually labels “Lady Wisdom.”
Lady Wisdom goes out in the street and shouts.
At the town center she makes her speech.
In the middle of the traffic she takes her stand.
At the busiest corner she calls out:
More significantly the Apocrypha (the books of the Bible that were not considered cannon but were accepted as historical) often utilize the female descriptors for the wisdom of God.
Sadly, for most of our history (and still for many faith communities today), a female version of God seems threatening, demeaning or even heretical. But that might not have been the way it was in the beginning.
As I said earlier, I sense in most eras this was misogyny alive and well, as it sadly still is today in many (if not most) Christian churches. Some are now calling for the church to have its own Me Too moment.
A while back Christian Author, Scott McKnight wrote a book called The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible which had people debating and wrestling with how we see women in the Bible.
Then came The Junia Project – which advocates for women’s equality in the Church and uncovered several translations that had women’s names in scripture replaced with men’s to keep women in their place. The most notable was Junia, a female apostle of Jesus who for many generations was literally removed from scripture.
In some ways this was the beginning of the church’s “Me Too” moment. But more needs to be done. We need to continue to do the research and discover the impact of women and the importance of the female in understanding and relating to God.
Just listen to how one of the Apocryphal books - the Wisdom of Solomon personifies the Wisdom of God.
There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy…loving the good…humane…steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. …For she is a breath of the power of God…in every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets; for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with Wisdom. (7:22b-30)
As Quakers who call themselves, Friends, that one line should stand out and be quoted often – “She passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets…” That, to me, is absolutely beautiful.
Pastor Chris Glazer says the following about this passage from the Wisdom of Solomon,
“If you saw all these qualities in a personal ad or on a resume, you just might want to meet this person! I say “might” because this is a list so awesome many of us would feel intimidated. This is a description of Sophia, Greek for Wisdom, and in Jewish wisdom literature, you could say she was the feminine side of God…”
In another text it is said that Sophia was with God from the beginning—without Wisdom nothing was created that was created. If this sounds familiar, the mystical Gospel of John takes as its prologue a similar assertion, that the Word, or Jesus, was with God from the beginning, and without Jesus, nothing was made that was made.”
Maybe it would do us good in our overly male-dominated society to find comfort in scriptures that emphasize these aspects of God, such as:
Isaiah 66:13 – “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you,” God declares through the prophet Isaiah.
Or Jesus lamenting over Jerusalem in Matthew 23:37 – “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing”
Or as the Psalmist in that same Psalm 131 from last week’s message gives us that comforting goal of resting in God:
“I hold myself in quiet and silence,
like a little child in its mother’s arms,
like a little child, so I keep myself.”
Just maybe, in our current day, it would do us good to embrace a Mother-God-understanding. It might help us sense more accurately how God wants to interact in our life. Rather than the dominate, judging, power-hungry, controlling, manipulative aspects we often are wrestling with in the male dominated views, it would be refreshing to embrace a nurturing, caring, loving, and comforting understanding of God.
It reminds me of back in my doctoral work when I studied the people known as the Desert Mothers and Fathers. They chose to go into isolation by heading out into the wildernesses of the Middle East to pray.
An interesting part of their theology was that they did not believe Jesus came to save only Christians—rather, they believed that Jesus could save the whole world from its excesses, its materialism, prejudices, hatred, self-absorption, violence, and cruelty.
In many ways, I consider the Desert Mothers and Fathers the first real Quakers. Like us they believed that God speaks to everyone, but that in order to hear God’s voice, one must learn to be still and actively listen for it. Just what I have been talking about the last couple of Sundays.
Their focus was on the interior life that later, Quaker founder, George Fox would label and define as our Inner Light.
Along with their inward journey, just like us Quakers, there was also an outward expression as well. The Mothers and Fathers labored to create self-sustaining communities that could welcome and feed the stranger, the refugee, the pilgrim, and those escaping mistreatment and injustice, including women.
Mary C. Earl in her book specifically on the Desert Mothers, or “Ammas” as they were known, shared this about what they taught her, she said…
“…the ammas have taught me to set aside time for quiet. There are so many pressures that lead us to be fragmented. The tradition does not deny the pressures. The ammas tell us that God is present even in those daily struggles.”
I can remember that more readily if I have taken time for quiet, for rest, or holding myself in the Light.”
She also says,
“…the ammas take me back to basics. We live in a time in which so much polarization has happened in both the national political arena, and within the church. The ammas invite us to look beyond all the divisive fussing — not to deny it, but to see it as surface reality. They invite us to gaze more deeply, especially in the most tensive of circumstances.”
And lastly, she says,
“…the ammas tell me that from the beginnings of the life of the Church, women have been initiators of new patterns and teachings, opening the way for knowing the wholeness that God offers in Christ. When I am reading the stories and sayings of the desert ammas, I am struck by their utter confidence that no matter what, this world belongs to God, is loved by God, and that each person, each creature, each aspect of the created order, is an expression (some would say a theophany, a showing) of God’s love.
What if you and I took some time this Mother’s Day to embrace and gravitate to the qualities and attributes of our Mother God, to sense her nurturing love and seek her wisdom. Allowing ourselves to be wrapped in her safe embrace and comforted by her care?
As the Desert Mothers and Fathers, maybe we too should take time to slow ourselves down, to pause, to hold ourselves in the Light and seek our inner life?
To do that will mean we have to face some difficult things such as our excesses, our materialism, our prejudices, our hatred, our self-absorption, our violence, and our cruelty.
And once more, as the Ammas or Desert Mothers remind us, during our quiet and alone times this week, we should try and make time for acknowledging the pressures, polarizations, and tensions that we are experiencing – all while remembering no matter what this world throws at us - Mother God is always with us and ready to embrace us with her love!
Let me end this time this morning with an invocation by Chris Zydel that speaks to this process. Allow these words to enter you into our time of waiting worship this morning.
Oh Mother Of The Vast Sweetness Of Silence
I bring to you my worried mind
My spiraling out of control obsessions and anxieties
My endless stories of comparison and judgment
My multitudinous fears both real and imagined
My endless litany of self criticism and self recrimination
And lay them at your feet
Trusting that they will gently dissolve into the starry night of your blessed emptiness
Vanishing into the cosmic depths of your spacious expansiveness
Effortlessly transformed into the energy of soundless, wordless light and gently pulsing peace
Oh Mother Of Steadfast Love
I bring to you my deepest needs for connection
My yearning to be witnessed and valued
My burning thirst for acceptance and belonging
My desire to be seen as precious
My aching to be loved
Allowing them to be held in the boundless compassion of your mamas heart
Letting myself be a child again
Pulling greedily on the hem of your silken robes
Hungry for the sweet embracing smile that is always there
For me and me alone
Oh Mother Of Miraculous Healing
I bring to you my perfectly imperfect body
My lifelong chronicle of illnesses and injuries
Those multitudes of traumas and ailments
That have left me feeling
Damaged, wounded, limping, scarred
I ask for your powerful restorative touch
Your capacity to make whole again that which has been diminished by time and ordeal
Your ability to bring harmonizing grace to my body and my soul
To teach me to cherish myself in my all too human limitations
As I know you are able to cherish me
Oh Mother Of Expanded Mercy
I bring to you my broken heart
My seemingly bottomless well of grief
My shattered dreams
My darkest disappointments
My most shameful defeats
And nestle them in your ample arms
Where they can be bathed in the golden honey of your tender beneficence
Melting away like butter on warm toast
Soothed and comforted by the infinite store of blessed kindness that radiates from every pore of your celestial being
Like a dazzling, sparkling golden sun
Beckoning me to remember my most essential truth
That I am both human and divine
And to invite me to rise up out of the landscape of loss
To step into the world again
From the deepest luminous core of who I truly am
Who I always was
And who I was born to be.
Now, let us take some time and let those thoughts center us down into the arms of our Mother God. To help us do that here are some queries to ponder further.
1. Rather than the dominate, judging, power-hungry, controlling, manipulative perspectives of God, how might I embrace a more nurturing, caring, loving, and comforting understanding of God?
2. How am I being invited to look beyond all the divisive fussing in my world and see it as surface reality, and be invited to gaze more deeply, especially in the most tensive of circumstances for hope?
3. Where this week, will I take time, slow down, and allow my Mother God to embrace me in her loving arms?