Our Father Loves Our Mother

Submitted by AnnMarieKneebone on December 10, 2007 - 5:17am.

Hi All,
This is a sermon that I wrote in response to last summers Be'ats trip to La and MS.

The text for this sermon is Leviticus 25:1 – 22

Our Father Loves Our Mother

This morning I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about gender metaphors and I want to talk about our responsibility to the rest of creation. These topics may not seem very related, but assigning a gender or using a gender metaphor for the Earth can directly impact our relationship with it.

The title of my reflection, Our Father Loves Our Mother, may seem a bit out of place for a liberal theologian. After all, I use inclusive language as often as possible. In the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples I am apt to say “our Creator” instead of “our Father”. I encourage churches to add an inclusive language statement in their bulletins. I also want to make clear that in this world not all of our fathers love our mothers. Many women are abused by their male partners. I think this happens in part because of the schism our culture has created between male and female, with the male being a dominating “god” figure and the female his subservient. Also, not all families have a father and a mother. Some families have only a father or a mother, some have two mothers and some have two fathers. I want to make it clear that I am not setting up the ideal family as having a mother and a father. What I am setting up is a thought experiment and an ideal that if a family has a mother and a father, that the father should love the mother.

I believe inclusive language is a very important way to reshape the Bible for our time, our culture, and our society. For a few years I eliminated from my writing and my speech all gender references to the Presence, or the Church, or Nature. I think I needed to do that in order to start with a clean slate … kind of reboot my brain. I knew I needed to think differently about everything. Now I’m dabbling with gender metaphors again, but this time quite intentionally. And I have been doing some reading to find out how the standard metaphors came to be. It’s interesting reading, and I am only just beginning really.

This planet which hosts our lives is often referred to as our Mother. She is understood to be the giver of life. At one time, and in some places still, she is revered as Goddess. One of my favorite books, When The Drummers Were Women by Layne Redmond says this, (quote) “The goddess and those who performed her sacred rituals were female. These oldest of rituals were earth-based. The earth itself was revered as the Great Mother of All That Is. Because new life came from women’s bodies as it did from the earth, women were celebrated as the embodiment of the divine. Human beings were not separate from their environment. They saw themselves as the earth in human form. In caring for the earth, people cared for themselves.” (end quote) Before Abraham served Yahweh, un-named priestesses worshipped The Great Mother. The Great Mother was later called The Queen of Heaven. She had several names including Inanna, Ishtar, and Ashtoreth. This Queen of Heaven can also be found in the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, as Asherah. In 2 Kings the prophet is very concerned because the people are worshipping Asherah. They considered her to be Yahweh’s wife. The people did not give up worshipping the Queen of Heaven easily, and we can still see vestiges of her worship such as in our understanding of Mother Nature.

When the Earth was considered Divine and the Queen of Heaven was worshipped, women were revered as the life-bringers. The power of a woman was respected. She was a leader. She created life, just like God. Today women are not understood the same way. Women are treated as possessions in many cultures around the world, and in many neighborhoods in our city. The undeniable power of a woman to create life instills a fear or intimidation of women in many men for whom obtaining power is the ultimate goal. A woman still does not command the same salary as a man for doing the same job. By our society’s standards, a mother who stays home to raise her children is not considered as having a job because she is not bringing in money from her work. Women, in general, are seen as having resources that are needed, and they are expected to supply the demand. The Earth, then, when seen as a Mother, is expected to fill the same shoes that we as a society expect of our biological mothers. When the Earth is personified as female in a society that uses degrading female imagery in advertising, it takes great intentionality to treat her with the respect she deserves.

This is where I think we find ourselves today when we think of Earth as Mother Nature. What about Earth as God’s creation? Our faith, which is framed by the religious history of Judeo-Christianity, usually includes Earth among God’s creation. Genesis tells, in both of its creation stories, that God created everything. The Genesis creation stories are also used to teach us our role here on this planet. For many, the stories are used to justify the human’s constant taking of the Earth’s resources – oil and commercialized farming are a couple of examples of that. These stories have also been used to defend the human’s right to other abuses of the planet such as the excessive garbage we store just under the Earth’s crust and the smoke and other pollutants with which we saturate her atmosphere. “We are in charge of the Earth and have a right to its resources. We are to take charge. We know best!” This is often how the Genesis stories get interpreted. Will you be at all surprised if I tell you that I disagree? Will you be upset with me if I ally myself with Earth and call her my Mother? I suspect that you will not.

If it is true that we humans are the ones given charge over the rest of creation, then I believe it is a charge of tending, not one of dominance. Just as Jesus lived his life as a servant and called his followers his friends I believe we are to live our lives as servants to this planet, seeking her best, replenishing her, and healing her. The Genesis stories should not be read apart from the rest of the sacred writings. Our reading today from Leviticus helps us put our creation story in a different context than maybe we are used to.

There are a lot of rules in Leviticus and it isn’t a book that gets preached from very often. In the middle of the tedium and pettiness of Leviticus, there are some surprising jewels of wisdom. Here is one: Every seventh year the planet gets a Sabbath, the planet gets to rest. No tilling for crops, no commercial harvesting, no drilling for oil … let the land rest. Every fiftieth year everyone gets to return to their family’s property while the land rests. It’s a time for celebration and rest. The law explains that you won’t have to worry about what you will eat because the land will provide for you in abundance in the sixth year. It is also explained that in the seventh year when the land is resting, while you may not commercially harvest the produce you are welcome to pick and eat as you are hungry.

What is the premise for this Sabbath for the land? It is that the land belongs to God, not to the humans. God didn’t give us this world; God made us managers of the world. We are to tend to the world like one tends a garden. This is one place where the metaphor of God as Divine Masculine and the Earth as Divine Feminine works for me. Mother Nature and Father God. This is where I get the idea that Our Father Loves Our Mother. It is true that no metaphor is perfect. If you take anything like this to its logical conclusion there will be problems, but if we look at the metaphor simply I think it can speak to us.

In Genesis God makes the planet. Then God takes a proverbial handful of the planet, let’s call it the dirt, and makes a sculpture. Then God breathes into the sculpture his own Fatherly breath … like CPR … and we become animated. According to this story, this legend, we are part Earth and part Divine, just like we are part of our fathers and part of our mothers. It’s beautiful to me. I can only honor who I truly am if I honor the Earth. When I honor the Earth I am honoring God. We are a family. God, Nature and us – we are all family. I’m not talking about the Christian family of believers … that’s different. I am talking about all people with each other, all that was made on this planet and even in the universe, and the Divine Source from which it was made. One might say, the Natural, Super-Natural, and the Inter-Natural. I made that up …. Inter-Natural. I don’t think it’s a real designation by scientists or theologians. I can tell you that my spell-check doesn’t like it very much.

I’m trying to get at how we are the children of God and Nature. I believe part of the reason that humans can abuse Nature is because we don’t identify with her anymore. There are times when humans don’t identify with each other anymore. When that happens we justify slavery, genocide, and torture. I know this is strong language, but I feel so strongly about this. When I identify with you as being a fellow human being made in the image of the Divine I have a much harder time hurting you or taking advantage of you. When I identify with the Earth as my Mother, I have a much harder time taking her resources without giving back. God’s law was to give the land a whole year’s rest every seven years. That’s a tall order! That’s much harder, I think, than just giving a tithe. Every seven years let the land just grow as it wants to. Don’t trim it, or fertilize it or dig holes in it … just let it be. Wow! That’s some kind of love!

Jesus’ movement changed a lot of things, including how we look at the laws. Circumcision is not required for us; the dietary laws are not something we follow; and we don’t have the same Sabbath rules. Does that mean that we disregard the First Testament? No, it means we read it alongside the Second Testament. Often it means that we look for the point of the law. What was God trying to get at? What were the people of faith who wrote the laws concerned about? Then we determine if those concerns are relevant today. I don’t think it takes a lot to see that the concern of abusing our natural resources is relevant today. I also don’t think that it’s difficult to see that our Mother is fighting back.

In June I spent a week in Louisiana and Mississippi listening to the stories of what happened – stories told by the people who live there, not by public leaders. I also spent the week helping to rebuild a house that was devastated by the storms, Katrina and Rita. I don’t know whether to interpret these storms – as well as global warming and other repercussions from our daily living – as the Earth fighting back or crying out, but I do believe that we need to pay attention and do things differently. While it is true that whatever efforts we make will help us and our future generations, it is even more true that our honoring of the Earth gives honor to our God. We assemble in our churches each week because we want to honor our God. We assemble because we want to participate in this life in its glorious entirety. We want to engage ourselves intentionally in the divinity that is offered to us by the Divine One. But being made of earth and spirit we worship God most beautifully when we worship God at the intersections of the natural and the super-natural. Our sacraments remind us of this – in baptism we use water, real water; in communion we use bread and wine. These natural elements help us be fully present to ourselves as being made of earth while we go about the rituals which are intended to remind us of our spiritual nature and help to connect us to God.

Today I encourage you to look around – take stock of your surroundings. How do you interact with the elements of nature, with our Mother? In what ways are you already connected spiritually to the elements of air, water, fire and earth? In what ways can you more intentionally realize your spiritual connection? Recycling, driving less and walking more, reusing paper, buying products that are earth-friendly – these are just a few ways that we can make a difference individually and as a community. Let’s follow our Father’s example and love our Mother.

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