Born Again: God as Mother and the Spirit Midwife

May only God's words be spoken and only God's words heard. Amen. Amen.

I don't know what motivations led Nicodemus to come by night to visit Jesus.

We see other Pharisees in John's gospel coming to Jesus in an adversarial way.

They're threatened by his popularity, or they're concerned, rightly,

about protecting the faith from a potential false teacher.

They come to him and they try to trip him up.

But here Nicodemus, for whatever reason,

whether he's sincerely curious or there's something more self-interested going

on, for whatever reason, he comes to Jesus by night and he wants to tell Jesus

that they're on the same side.

Him and Jesus and all the Pharisees as well.

We know, he says, we know you've come from God because that's the only way you

could do these things you've been doing.

Yes, Jesus says, in answer to Nicodemus' non-question, I did come from God.

And the only way for you to see the kingdom of God is to be born from above.

Nicodemus maybe wanted some new theological tidbits or to enter into a philosophical

debate about the nature of being and becoming or to refine his personal practice

of righteousness or maybe to figure out just who this new teacher was without

getting himself in too much trouble,

maybe nicodemus wanted all of these things but what jesus tells him that he needs is a mother.

I confess that over the years when people have asked me if I'm born again,

if I'm a born-again Christian, I've never heard that as a question about whether

I found God to be my mother.

And yet, it is what Jesus is suggesting here. To enter the kingdom of God, we need a second birth.

We need another mother.

And I find it a relief to hear it that way.

This being born again doesn't require me to pray a specific prayer or run up

in response to an altar call or vote a certain way or give up the things I care

most about in order to please some distant deity.

This being born again invites me to rest.

Invites me to rest nourished in the darkness of God's womb.

It invites me to be moved by muscles stronger than my own through narrow places

to let my mother do the work for me to be caught with warm steady midwife hands

and placed on my mother's chest,

this being born again is nothing more than being held in the darkness and carried

into the light being fed and learning to eat being loved and learning to love.

How can these things be? Nicodemus says. Are you a teacher of Israel and you

do not understand these things? Jesus replies.

Maybe he's asking, haven't you read the prophet Isaiah?

When God announced to Isaiah that the old things were passing away and something

new was coming, this is how God said it.

For a long time I have held my peace. I have kept still and restrained myself.

Now, I will cry out like a woman in labor. I will gasp and pant.

God is a mother in labor giving birth to a new kingdom.

God is a mother in labor delivering us, born again, safely into it.

And we need to be born again, because our first birth delivered us blinking

into a world full of beautiful and terrible things.

God made this world and called it good, but our own human selfishness has marred it.

This world has been damaged by sin, and we cannot escape being damaged too and

then participating in the damage.

As we grow up and we grow into our awareness of how badly broken things are here,

from our deeply lamentable proclivity to war, to the minor daily selfishnesses

we indulge in, we might see these things and then, like Nicodemus,

seek Jesus, thinking the solution lies in some minor self-improvement strategies

or some clearer theological understanding.

But to that, Jesus says, this isn't a matter of minor alterations.

This is about a whole new life given to you by your mother God.

Your life must be so altered, it's as if you were gestating in the darkness

of God's womb and remade from God's body.

Nurtured by God, you're invited into this new birth in a whole new set of restored

relationships into a new mode of inhabiting the world.

The whole cosmos needs this kind of transforming love.

And maybe God the Spirit is the midwife accompanying the birth.

I remember my midwife, Cindy, drawing in black magic marker on my 38-week pregnant

belly an outline of the exact position that the baby was in,

head down, elbows tucked in,

those heels that I kept feeling right there in my side.

That was the moment I understood that midwives can see what others can't see.

They can make the invisible visible.

The spirit midwife sees what's on the inside.

Or 18th century American midwife Martha Ballard.

Along with delivering babies, she was a moral force in her community in the

first years of our nation, guiding its conscience, shaping its newly forming laws.

Like her, the spirit midwife guides us into all truth.

Or Mary Frances Hill Coley, an African-American midwife in Georgia who delivered

thousands of babies in the early 20th century.

And she didn't just aid in childbirth. She kept visiting her babies for years,

making sure they had what they needed to grow up healthy.

It wasn't just a one-day gig for her. It was a relationship of continuing care, of comfort and help.

The spirit midwife is our comforter and our helper, is with us always.

We're the midwives in Minneapolis right now who go by night to deliver extra

breast milk to babies whose mothers have been taken by ice.

The spirit midwife cares for those who are unseen and persecuted.

In the 1960s, a priest in Iceland collected accounts by and about midwives who

traveled across rural Iceland delivering babies in the earliest part of the 20th century.

A contemporary poet has used those words from those memoirs to create found

poems, and when I read them,

I can't help but think of us and our mother God and our spirit midwife. Listen.

Hands endowed with a strange power to ease suffering, draw out pain,

relieve aches, soft and mild, mother and child, whom she lifted to the light of this world.

Or, it was as if death fell back out the door wherever she went.

And then this bit, which seems especially a warning for our night owl Nicodemus

to take with him As he goes out into the dark,

pondering the words of Jesus Perhaps wondering when and how he might be born again,

The homestead certainly beautiful in sunshine and summer glory Beautiful the

bay as the sun glitters on streams and islands And majestic,

solid mountains Stand firm-footed as storms rage,

But everyone knows Women like to go into labor During the deadliest blizzards.

And usually at night.

The homily was offered by the Rev. Amy Peterson. Musical contributions were

performed by Dr. Kevin Seale.

Introduction and closing reflections were shared by the Rev. Amy Peterson.

Sermon audio was prepared by Nanette Popa. Production was guided by Karen Marie Frederiksen.