I will assume that we all accept the idea that God is neither male nor female. Can I also assume we all accept that God is BOTH male and female? That any time we use a name, an image, or a pronoun – he or she – to refer to God, we’re using a symbol that is exceedingly limited in approaching the reality of what the source of all life really is. GOOD. That way I need not convince you that God has feminine characteristics, I only need convince you that when we neglect the feminine face of God, we are all the poorer for it. And the Christian tradition has indeed restricted its reference to God to mostly masculine images – King, Lord, Father God, and has robbed us of God’s softer but equally strong feminine face.

But that aside, do you know there is actually much objection to calling God “Mother”. Many, particularly the “Bible says what it says”- sort, believe that it denies the special revelation of God – through His word the Bible and His fullest revelation in the person of Jesus Christ, a male. They argue that nowhere in Scripture has God revealed Himself or called Himself “Mother.” They say that it is largely feminist theologians that fight for the right to call God “Mother”. But indeed there are many references to God as a mother hen, God who births, who cries out like a woman in labor. Not only that, I believe the Bible is simply biased, in that it was written by males, and copied by male scribes, who were living in a patriarchal society and that coloured everything they said and most surely it coloured their addressing God as Father.

On a personal level, our image of ourselves has everything to do with our image of God, and our image of God has everything to do with our image of ourselves. If our image of God is too limited, or skewed towards the masculine, then women will never have a sense of ourselves as fully bearing the divine image. And men will always carry power by the mere fact of being more like God than women are.

There are many experiences and traits once thought exclusively feminine that women and men actually share. And gay men especially, are said to have brains that very closely resemble that of straight women, so an article in the June issue of TIME magazine reports, entitled “What A Male Gay Brain Looks Like”. And after all if women and men are equals, lovingly created in the image of God, then God must be imaged in feminine as well as masculine terms.

I believe we have to relate to God BOTH as male and female, and not as neither – otherwise God just vanishes, we neuter God, so to speak. And to balance out years of relating to God as male, we might need to spend some time focusing on the female side of that equation. Otherwise we will continue to have a lopsided, narrow and limited image of the nature of God.
So this morning I intend to present to you Mother God from my perspective as both a woman and a mother. I’m going to take us through what it is like to be pregnant, to birth and to mother, and hope that these experiences can help us understand and appreciate the feminine face of God.

On Dec 9, 1985 at 6.12pm, I gave birth to my first child, a son, Jinwei. My pregnancy had been a reasonably healthy and happy one. The labor and delivery were nothing out of the ordinary. Everything went smoothly as my doctor and the books had said it would. I had done nothing that millions of other women throughout thousands of years had not done. But something happened that evening that neither my husband nor I will ever forget.

In the hospital lights of that delivery room and in the months following, something happened that profoundly affected our lives. And we were never, never, the same again.
Just as Mark introduced us to paradox prayer at the retreat, becoming a mother is an experience full of paradox. Labor and delivery were at the same time the most wonderful thing and the most terrible thing I had ever been through. It was both tiring and exhilarating. And being a new mother was the most lonely thing and the most communal thing I had ever done. At the same time that I felt my life had been hindered, I sensed also that it was fuller than ever before. I have mentioned this in a previous sermon about losing life to find it. Parents do lose their lives when they have kids, but in a curious way, also find it.
Upon thinking about God as mother, I realize that women experience God in a special way during pregnancy and childbirth. I do not say this in order to exclude men, but rather to include women. And to show that we see God in the day-to-day living out of our lives.
In pregnancy a woman’s body takes over. As I watched my belly balloon outward, I felt as though I had lost control of my body. It went ahead on its own and left my mind in shock somewhere behind. But my body was doing exactly what it was equipped to do: growing that baby. And my body was doing it without any help from me, quite apart from my will or my mind. For nine months I had to surrender to the growth and movement and miracle of body. It was as if my body was not my own. It was as if God and Her creative juices took over.
I do remember however, being filled with a sense of my unborn baby’s presence and value, He was very real as I felt his every kick, punch, nudge and movement of life. An evidence of things unseen. Here was my body somehow bound up with this other being, distinct from it, but yet we were still one. The two are one. I was both myself and this other being. Another paradox.
This too is the paradox of the incarnation. God and Christ are the two in one. Though not separate from Christ, God is distinct from Christ. Christ is not all of God, as the newborn baby is not all of the mother. But in Christ, God as it were, gives birth to God.
Another thought is that Christ was in a real sense pregnant with God, heavy with God. His body was not his own; it was given over for another purpose. Both pregnancy and incarnation involve the feeding of one life on another. The one lives in and through the other.
We tend to overuse the imagery of Christ as Son of God and perhaps do not see that it was not the maleness of Christ that made him human. He was human because he possessed a body, and through his body he was made to suffer. As a woman suffers in childbirth, so Christ suffered in the birthing of God on earth. Christ as human was the child of God, as all of us are children of God.
As a new mother, I immediately felt an intense love and overwhelming protectiveness for my newborn baby. It is love that comes unasked for. It is love for a being who hasn’t earned it but who commands my love merely by being. At the moment of birth, we love our child merely for the sake of loving it, not for what it gives in return, not for what it does for us, not even for the hope that someday it will love us, back. We love that baby simply because it is. We love him just as he is, from the moment we see her, red and bloody, squinting and wrinkled. Unlovely, yet loved. This is the kind of love God has for Her children. Agape love, we call it. It is sacrificial love, selfless, unbounded, unconditional love.
This instinctive love and closeness binds parent and child. It is as though the two are one. I remember being able to hear almost every movement my baby made in the night. No matter how soundly I slept. And as a nursing mother I felt this oneness even more intensely. In nursing, breasts which were once considered very private and sensual, now become public and functional. Their function was to sustain life.
For mothers and fathers alike, the demands of having a child are far greater than can ever be anticipated. No matter how well we prepare ourselves for the coming of this new person into our lives, we are still unprepared for the reality of it.
The crisis of having a child is likened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; it brings with it knowledge of a different sort, it is the end of innocence for the marriage relationship. One feels cast out into a world where there is unending work to be done and pain to be endured. New questions must be asked, and most times there are no perfect answers. Parents often just learn on the job. Exhaustion and tension set in. Things like sex, going to the movies and long baths take a back seat. I always tell people, you really don’t fully know the meaning of “a quick shower” till you have a baby in the house!
These new tensions and new demands make new parents feel inept. They are tired. They argue. They don’t apologize. Even as they wonder if they will ever be the same again, they realize: No, they will not. They come face to face with their own limits and those of their spouse. They admit that there are things about their spouse they don’t like. In the midst of the miracle of birth they confront the darker side of life. They experience the Fall.
But sometimes there are advantages to falling. Grace, wonderful gift that it is, comes when we least expect it. It flows from where we are least likely to look. Grace is found within ourselves. In the God within us. New parents eventually find that confidence, that balance, that ‘learning by doing’ and that’s why the second, third and subsequent children get easier and easier to mother.
So we begin to see how pregnancy, childbirth, nursing and mothering is a giving of one’s body so that another might have life. It is a sweet sensual communion. Likewise God’s love for us, so that we might have life, is sensual too; it is a love we can feel. A love that comes unasked for, undeserved, from the moment of our birth.
And mothers desire, just as God does, to give Her child a sense of identity, to instill in him what is best about ourselves, to give her the highest of our values, the finest of our beliefs, the depth of our wisdom. We want our child to be as we are, but better, more assured, suffering none of what we suffered, wanting not for what we wanted.
All this while knowing that my child needs to find his own identity. I know that in order to mature at all, my child must have space to grow, room to experiment, freedom to accept or reject all that I have carefully taught. I know that even as I gave birth to, nursed and raised my child, I must someday let her go. I realize, as did God, that my child must have his own free will.
Mature human relationships are not like relationships with a newborn child. Even when they were say 2 years old, I was already negotiating, compromising and rationalising with my children. A mature relationship with God must surely include this same interdependence and back-and-forth responding. As long as my children and I live, I will feel for them absolute and unconditional love. But that love will exist within my mature relationships with them, in which we will be responding to one another in our freedom and also in our responsibility. What I am really trying to say is that as adults we cannot keep running to God like helpless babes; we need to exercise our responsibility to help ourselves too. As a mother I expect that of my grown-up kids, and so does God.

Today, as I look at my children, I can hardly believe that they are mine. So much grown from that newborn laid on my breast, whom I inspected from head to toe, feeling the shape of his head, the smoothness of his skin, the smell of baby. It is beyond our comprehension that a baby human being, only minutes prior was unseen, a mystery. Now that my kids are here, all grown up, I still cannot fully grasp the reality of it all. The miracle of life. I still wonder at it. I am awed by it. And I am thankful for it.
“That’s fine for you to say”, some of you are thinking, “but I am not pregnant, nor ever going to give birth, maybe even not be a parent”. I say to you, although this is my own experience, the nature of my experience is shared by all who love and nurture -- whether, for example, you are a single social worker, a doctor or nurse, adoptive parents, doting uncles and aunts, pet lovers, teachers who care about their students or, even artists and poets give birth to wonderful creations and works of art. We can all empathise with this experience.

Created in God’s Image
Let us together continue in this series to explore the many faces and facets of God, and become more aware of the godlike qualities residing in us all. Each of us, by virtue of the very fact of being human, male and female, is like God. And that in order to be truly whole, whether we are women or men, we must embrace both the male and female aspects of the divine -- and we must embrace those aspects of ourselves and of one another.
Men, especially those of the straight kind, are often shut off from their feminine energy and their soft side, and there is so little in our culture that nurtures that side of males. Because of this, men are suffering, and our world is suffering, because we still do not completely support the idea of men being sensitive, loving, gentle, forgiving, healing, even mushy. But my goodness, this was exactly what Jesus was. Of Mary Magdalene, it has been said, "he could not see her in tears without himself weeping." He spent every waking moment of his ministry embracing people in his love and continues to do so.
And women, long denied their worth, for too long considered inferior to men -- women were unclean, to be submissive wives, to be quiet in church, women denied ordination, public leadership. If women begin to see the image of God in themselves, they will begin to trust in their own power and strength.

And personally I want my kids to know that all of their God-given traits, all of who they are, is okay; that their sex doesn’t have to assign them to specific gender roles; that we are all made up of the male and female. Without both the masculine and feminine, we are not whole.

So let’s not be afraid to approach God as mother more often. A mother that accepts us more than we imagine a stern patriarchal male God would, a vulnerable mother willing to interact with us at our level of everyday life experiences, a loving mother who talks to us, listens to us, struggles with us and weeps with us. A Mother God.

Prayer
Prayer is often said to be a monologue, only our voice is heard.
Today, we will not speak to God.
Today, we will listen.
God will speak to us.
Close your eyes.
Calm yourself.
Be still.
Listen.

Do not picture God before you, God is not an image you can see. Do not picture God sitting beside you or behind you, Do not picture God above you or before you, for this would make God an object limited by time and space.
Think of God as Presence – present with you, in you, around you, here, there, everywhere. Pervasive, fluid, unbounded, and intimate. Beyond your reach, yet it reaches you!
Be still. Listen attentively with your hearts.
Tony, Julia, Nick, Joshua, Stephen, Jason, Chin Fong, Emmelyn, Lawrence, Andrew, Chris, Ben, Gordon, Daniel, Debbie, ….
You are my beloved.
I have known you and loved you from all eternity, from the beginning of time, before you were born, before your mother was born. I knew you. From the foundation of the world you were in my mind.
I knew you by name when you were yet unnamed. Your heritage is deeper than you know. It resides in me, your maker and lover.
Like a mother, I carried you in my womb, I nurtured you and gave you shape and form. When you were born, I held you in my arms and laid you naked on my breast. I fed you with food the angels eat.
You ate. You smiled. You felt the warmth of my embrace. As the years went by, I unfolded my plan for you, a plan written in your being.
I made you free. You had none of the compulsions that control you now. You had no demands upon you. You could become yourself, your very own version of humanity. I was there, cheering you on to discover your destiny. In your pursuits, I knew that you would encounter me. I. your true lover, am at the core of your being. Surely you could not miss my presence?
But you did.
How did you become so distracted from reality? Why did you deny the deepest impulses within your soul? You denied that which I placed there to guide you and make you whole. You attached yourself instead to false loves and succumbed to society’s expectations. Your dreams and high ambitions were frustrated by false loves – love of position, of power, love of praise, of acceptance, love of wealth, of riches. How did you fail to see that I had given you all these things before you went in pursuit of them?
I am a frustrated lover. I am in the yearning of your heart, yet you do not find me. You embrace substitutes. I offer you the food of angels, but you settle for fast-food snacks. You have turned away from the eternal spring to drink from polluted water. Remember my child, that there is a fountain of living waters, life-giving waters, fresh and clear, waiting for you!
Even though you have frustrated me, I will never stop loving you. You do not experience my love because you do not recognize it. I come to you in your emptiness when your false loves fail you. True lovers do not abandon their beloved. How often must you break my heart? How many tears must I shed? How long must I wait for you to return to me, and in returning, find yourself?
The shy lover cannot say it. The timid lover turns away. But I say it to your face. I shout it out loud: “I love you”. Nothing can stem the tide of my love for you. No faithfulness on your part, no lusting after other loves, no devotion to idols of fame, success, material gain – nothing can block my love for you. No matter how tightly you are held in the embrace of these false lovers, I am nearer to you than they.
I love you no matter that you resist my advances, that you ignore my pleas, that you are drawn away by the flattering words of seducers. I am shameless in my love and unembarrassed by my lack of restraint.
You are my beloved, and I am here for you.
You are my child, and I will not cease loving you.
You are my image, and because I AM, you are.
You are mine; and I am yours.