A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — May 9, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Isaiah 49:13-15; 66:12-13;  Hosea 11:1-4, 8-11 —  Mother’s Day

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show
no compassion for the child of her womb?—Isaiah 49:15

As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you. — Isaiah 66:13

I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks…
My compassion grows warm and tender… — Hosea 11:4, 8

One of my “pet peeves” involves how often people seem to take acts of caring or concern for those less fortunate to be signs of weakness.  So I understand very well the angry response that then-Senator Hubert Humphrey gave many years ago to a reporter who was questioning him about his efforts on behalf of a number of social programs.  “Compassion is not weakness,” he declared, “and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.”  We could use his voice today to counter the many politicians and commentators who insist on viewing compassion as a wishy-washy kind of failing, mocking those who show compassion as “bleeding hearts.”  For them, it seems, personal responsibility is paramount, and compassion, when put into action, merely fosters weakness and has no place in our stand-on-your-own-two-feet, dog-eat-dog, watch-out-for-number-one, free-market world.

How strange this is!  Because the Hebrew prophets and Jesus make it clear that compassion is one of the primary attributes of God.  At the end of the “Sermon on the Plain” in Luke 6:36, Jesus declares, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.”  The Greek word here is oiktirmon, which literally means “compassionate.”  “Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.”

 

For the prophets, God’s compassion is a mark of God’s power and goes hand-in-hand with comforting the people.  “Sing for joy,” says Isaiah.  And then in the characteristic, parallel structure of Hebrew verse, where the same thing is said in two different words, he says—“For the Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones.”  Comfort is rooted in strength.  Comfort literally means “to share or give strength.”  God is the one with power and shares that power in comforting the people.  Too often we Christians miss this aspect of God in the Old Testament, for we tend to equate God’s power with judgment and punishment!  But power as comfort and compassion, as love and grace, are themes the New Testament picks up and amplifies in the stories of Jesus and his followers.

Maybe some of our ambivalence about compassion is rooted in the deep-seated sexism of our world.  It is no accident that I chose the three particular passages from Isaiah and Hosea today for Mother’s Day.  For in each of them the dominant image is God as Mother.  But most of us have grown up calling God Father—“Our Father, who art in heaven…”—so it can be hard to view God as mother.  Many church people actively reject such an image.  But it’s there in scripture.  A mothering God is suggested in Isaiah 49:15— “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?  Even these may forget, yet I will never forget you.”  The mothering image  is more direct in Isaiah 66:13, where after the people are likened to nursing infants the Lord promises, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.”  And in Hosea 11 we are offered the clear image of God as a nursing mother—“I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks.  I bent down to them and fed them.”  I will never forget the real tenderness with which Kathy took each of our children up in her arms and then sort of bent over them as she nursed them.  This image of God as a nursing mother sets the stage for God to say to her children in Hosea 11:8-9, “How can I give you up?  How can I destroy you?  My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.  I will not again destroy.”

It’s almost inevitable that the prophets would see God as a Mother when they speak of God’s compassion.  For the Hebrew word for compassion is rooted in a profound metaphor for both birthing and motherly love.  “Rahamim” is that Hebrew word.  We translate it as “compassion,” or sometimes as “mercy” or “pity.”  And this word, “rahamim,” is itself the plural form of the Hebrew word for womb, “rehem.”  God’s compassion is like the love a mother has for a child of her womb.  Such love does not result in the kind of legalistic judgment and condemnation we commonly associate with God as King, Judge, or Father.  Rather the “wombish” love of God reveals itself in care, in mercy, in a motherly yearning for shalom—that is, in a mother-to-be’s care and concern for the wholeness and wellness of the children to be born from her womb.

We are always encompassed and enfolded by God’s compassion—God’s rahamim.  It is this Hebrew plural for “womb” that gives rise to my sermon title, “Living in the Womb of God.”  This image for our relationship to God has both a remarkable universality and a startling mystery.  Every single one of us—indeed, every single person who has ever existed—has lived for the better part of nine months inside a womb.  Yet no one that I have ever known or heard of consciously remembers that universal human experience.

 

Now it’s always risky to push any metaphor too far.  But I think there are some implications we can draw from the idea of “living in the womb of God” even beyond the already stated promise of God’s ever-present care.  First, there’s the sense that all of our existence is “pregnant” (so to speak) with possibilities.  There is a new world awaiting us, and our birthing stands always ahead of us.  Being “born again” is not some kind of once-and-for-all thing that’s the end of one’s spiritual journey.  We always need to be “delivered.”  As powerful a symbol as “the Kingdom of God” is in scripture, few people have any real sense of what it is like to live under a king or to await the promise of a new kingdom and whatever that might bring.  “Living in the womb of God” conveys something of the experiential reality of already being there—for what parent to be has not spoken to the new life in mommy’s tummy?—but not yet delivered into a bright, new world.

A second thing the metaphor of “living in the womb of God” suggests is that everything that goes on in the world all around us is vitally important.  Scientists continue to learn more and more about how environmental factors affect development in the womb.  Any number of seemingly trivial factors can increase the risk of birth defects.  All too often the church has minimized the importance of the “things of this world” relative to some “higher” spiritual realm—ignoring, tolerating, or even excusing systems of injustice, exploitation, and oppression.  Why concern yourself with this world when “going to heaven” is what really matters.  But the compassion of God—the rahamim, the womb of God—has no place for any threats to the wellness of God’s children.  The prophets continually called to loose the bonds of injustice, to set all captives free, and to meet the needs of the poor and unfortunate.  And according to Luke, Jesus began his ministry in Nazareth with just such a call to action.  The things of this world do indeed matter in shaping and preparing us to be born into a new world to come.

Finally the call of the prophets and of Jesus implies that our response as people “living in the womb of God,” enfolded by God’s compassion, is to deal with each other and with all people with a sense of this same compassion.  The Gospel of Matthew tells us we will be held accountable for the simple, unremembered acts of kindness we do or fail to do for the least of our brothers and sisters.  This is where it gets hard for us.  In a world that views compassion as a sign of weakness, we sometimes end up trying to rationalize our compassion by limiting it to those we judge to be deserving—the working poor, yes, but not welfare mothers who keep having children, homeless families (maybe) but not homeless derelicts, refugees seeking political asylum (again maybe—provided they're fleeing one or our enemies) but not illegal immigrants fleeing poverty.  Yet as the prophets remind us, we ourselves are never “deserving” of God’s compassion.  Compassion has everything to do with who God is.  We are living in the womb of God—whether we know it or not… and whether we appreciate it or not.

Some years ago when the Rev. Dr. James Forbes, Jr., was senior pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, he responded from the pulpit after Mayor Rudy Giuliani issued a statement that if the poor didn’t like his hard-nosed policies they could just as well go someplace else, leaving the city to all the contributing members of society who deserved to live there.  Forbes’ sermon included a poem he called “A Parable of Utter Impoverishment.”
And I saw a great exodus from New York City.

All the bridges, tunnels, and piers were jammed with
the departing poor.  As they walked or limped along
they pushed their carts of precious little things.

And when the poor had all departed, God looked
around and saw that they who remained in the city now
breathed a sigh of relief.  They could enjoy their
precious little things in peace, without the
burden of care for the destitute and the poor.

Then God in deep sorrow and tender compassion
began to gather God’s precious little things so God could
journey with those who had been cast from the city.

And it came to pass that when God had gathered up
the sunlight and rain, the seed-bearing earth,
and the life-giving air, God wept over the city and departed
pushing God’s own cart of precious little things.

And New York City was no more. ¹

“Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.”  We are all of us—rich and poor, oppressor and victim, captor and captive alike—living in the womb of God, nurtured by the compassion of God, and waiting to be delivered, waiting to be born anew.  There is a new world yet to be, a world in which we will truly know God as Mother and Father.  Let us celebrate and share in the strong compassion of God for all peoples everywhere.  Amen.

 

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¹ Rev. Dr. James Forbes, Jr., from “God’s Little Things,” Seminary Consortium on Urban Pastoral Education, Congress on Urban Ministry, April, 1996.