Mama Monday #101

 

What does it mean to say "God is love?" the feminine love of God Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail May 10   READ IN APP   Sermon first preached for Jubilee Episcopal Church on May 10, 2026. The texts for this week can be found here. What does it mean to say “God is love”? I say this a lot, and I know our former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was famed, rightly, for often saying: “if it’s not about love, then it’s not about God.” It is a simple thing to say, but not a simple thing to live. So what does it mean to say “God is love”? Jesus offers one insight today in the Gospel of John. He is speaking to his friends in the hours before he will be betrayed and crucified, but we hear it now, in the days of Easter, when Jesus is about to ascend to the Father and leave us transformed … in a world that feels very much like the same, violent, terrifying place that killed Jesus. So when Jesus promises, ”I will not leave you orphaned,” I hear something incredibly powerful: a promise that even in this violent, and frightening world, God is never going to leave us to face it alone. This is the first thing about God’s love: it is with us, always. In the most loveless of times, the most loveless of places. In fact, Jesus tells his friends to abide in my love. Another way to say this is: Jesus tells us to make a dwelling, to make a home, to get cozy in the love of God. And it might be tempting to see this as something soft and therefore, easily dominated by the hard facts of life in this violent and power-hungry and competitive and isolating world. But this is because we have been taught to see love as feminine, and femininity as soft and subservient. This is not how God’s love works. It is soft, and cozy, and gentle, yes — it is the love of a nurturer, who brushes fingers through our hair, counting the strands again and again. But it is also the love of a lion who will not leave a single cub orphaned. God’s love is never apart from God’s power. And as the late great prophet, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” And beloveds, we see so much power without any love in the world right now. We see so much of this loveless power we can be forgiven for thinking that love is the opposite of power. But it is not. Because it was not anger, or vengeance, or cruelty that compelled Jesus to walk out of the tomb that Easter morning, alive after death. It is not anger, or violence, or apathy, or coercion that transforms us from enemies into friends. It is love. It is love that is greater than the very power of death. This is why Jesus says we must abide in, dwell in, make a home in the love of God. Because there is a lot in this world that will make us afraid, that might even make us homeless. Maybe literally. Maybe spiritually, as I know so many of you have found you way here after leaving churches you thought were going to be your home forever. This is why Jesus invites us to “abide” to “dwell” in the love of God — make it your home. When your home is taken from you, when your sense of safety is taken from you, when you are missing the people who made your house a home … God is saying: I am still right here. Make a home with me. And God offers this home perhaps most especially when no one else in the world sees how much we need it. When no one else sees how deeply we are struggling. How desperate we are to be seen, to be loved, to be cared for. I am conscious, of course, that I am speaking of ignored anguish, of private pain, on Mother’s Day. A day when the labor so often ignored is meant to be honored. It was actually our lack of cultural acknowledgment of the ignored anguish and hidden labor of women in motherhood that led Anna Jarvis to craft the first Mother’s Day in 1908 in West Virginia. Anna Jarvis was not herself a mother, and never would be. But Anna Jarvis wanted to honor her mother, who had recently died. But more than that, she wanted to honor all mothers, and uplift this exact dimension of motherhood: that it is the essential labor of humanity, of child-rearing, and it is radically under-appreciated, under-valued, and unpaid. The first Mother’s Day was celebrated in a Methodist church and, through Anna Jarvis’ efforts, made a national civic and interfaith celebration — but by the end of Anna Jarvis’ life in 1948, she was disillusioned with how her radical holiday honoring the labor of women had been commercialized and sanitized of its more radical tone. Mother’s Day also claims Christian liturgical roots because in the Middle Ages, Christians celebrated a “Mothering Sunday” where the opening lines of the service were: “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and come together, all you that love her; rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow, that you may exult and be satisfied from the breasts of your consolation.”¹ This line, and many others like it in the Bible, uplift that all of us are spiritually nourished by the breastmilk of God (1 Peter 2:2), a God who labors to bring us to birth (Isaiah 66), and who loves us like a mother (Luke 13 and Matthew 23). But God knows, we don’t hear much about God’s maternal side in the greeting card aisles or on TV. It grieves me that when we demean the labor of women, we demean the fullness of God. When we do not see the humanity and sacred labor of mothers, we miss the way God loves us like a Mother. But though we may ignore, or be ignored, by mainstream metrics of value — God misses nothing. God’s attention is neither as short nor distractible as ours. Motherhood has had me clinging to this — how God sees everything, including the parts of life I sometimes feel like I have to obscure or apologize for or that are simply mine to hold. One of the verses I have held fast to in surviving and finding purpose in the overlooked parts of motherhood might surprise you. It is Matthew 6:4, “Give your gifts in secret, and your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you.” This verse comes from the story we usually read on Ash Wednesday, where Jesus admonishes his disciples to not pray super loudly or annoyingly or force their faith into other people’s faces, but instead, to pray and offer our money to God in secret, and the one whom we pray to — our Father — sees everything, and rewards us. So I will be honest, my clinging to this verse is a little out of context but nevertheless, it is one that has come to me, over and over and over. Because much of motherhood happens in secret — much of motherhood happens in the dark, tossing and turning of night; in the long hours of a lonely afternoon before bedtime; much of the labor of parenthood is in the not-public, unseen, exhausted moments and hours and years. “Give your gifts in secret, and your Father who sees in secret, will reward you.” For the six hundredth night in a row, when I woke up at 3am to feed my nearly-two-year-old daughter with my body, because the only thing that ever got her to fall asleep in those first two years of her life was nursing at my chest. I gave my gifts in secret, and my God, who saw in secret, did not leave me orphaned. For you, when you have had to weep in the barely-private solitude of a bathroom, trying to keep it together for the kids; for you, when you have held the hand of your infant through the plastic of a NICU cradle; for you, when you have wondered how you can possibly make ends meet or put one foot in front of the other — For you, who are grieving your mother; for you, grieving the relationship you wish you could have had or have with your mother; for you who grieve what your motherhood is or could be; for you who long to be mothers; for you when motherhood is hard … our God sees in secret, and our God does not leave you orphaned. Our God has seen what we have suffered in secret. What we have given in secret. What we have longed for in secret. What we have prayed for, in secret. This is what it means to me, that God is love. That everything we endure, and everything we long for, and everything that we rejoice in – God holds all of this so tenderly, and like the best kind of mother, hangs it on Her fridge and says, “look at how wonderful you are, my children.” This love cannot be broken by the things that try and break us. And there is nothing that is more powerful than a love that withstands. Because our God will never abandon us, even if everything and everyone else has. God cooed over our toes in the newborn years we cannot remember, and God will be there to beckon us home when our day comes that we cannot, and God is there in every day in between, God is inviting us to abide in Her love, to dwell forever in Her pastures, where She wants nothing more than to cradle us, care for us, and keep us. Forever. Alleluia.