When I was going through the discernment process, which is church speak for the communal way an individual determines if they are experiencing a call to ordained ministry, I spent a lot of my time talking about leadership. My style of leadership, how I have led in the past, my strengths and weakness as a leader.
Before this discernment process, I was a theatre teacher, particularly working with children, children with autism, and later with adults with developmental disabilities. So when I talked about leadership, I often talked about my tendency to lead from within or lead from behind. By this I meant that I often found myself not at the front of the room lecturing or teaching as if I was the one in the room with all the information that my students needed, but instead alongside my students, offering up curiosity of their experience as an equally important learning tool, allowing their creativity to take the lead (within some structure) and empowering them to engage in their own wondering about theatre or art or storytelling in a way that—I hoped— would start them on a path of loving storytelling and creation not simply getting the attention of a big part or getting their lines memorized correctly.
During my last meeting with this group who discerned this call with me, where I was given the thumbs up to continue moving towards priesthood, I got one ‘piece of advice’ from the head of the committee, a white, older Southern man, who felt he needed to tell me that the one caveat to their approval of my call was that I should probably get better at “leading from the front”.
Now, on the surface this doesn’t seem too harmful. I was being given feedback based on how this person experienced me, how they felt I might grow as a leader within the church. But over time I found myself wondering if these kind of responses of attempting to form how people, perhaps particularly women or gender minorities, could—or even should— approach their call to ministry, to serve God and god’s people, comes from the limited way we engage with the feminine representations of God that are available to us in scripture.
In your program today, I have placed one of my favorite icons, Jesus as a mother hen. In our scripture today, we hear…
“How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
This is one of the few times Jesus is described using feminine or mothering imagery in the Gospels. This imagery comes directly after a harsh takedown of the religious leaders of the time and is a lament for the state in which Jesus finds Jerusalem and its people. In the surrounding text, Jesus calls out the city of Jerusalem and its leaders as ones who have rejected God’s messengers, prophets, over and over. Jesus even calls out the leader Herod as a fox, this imagery painting a picture of the kind of creature that acts counter to the imagery that Jesus takes on. Jesus mourns that people continue to ignore the words of God and names the desire to gather up the children of Jerusalem under his wings as a mother hen does to her chicks. But the chicks Jesus the mother hen longs to gather don’t want it, reject it, won’t be comforted. The contrast between the harsh take down of the powerful and this gentle, mournful desire is startling, almost breath-taking. In using this imagery for the lament of God’s children, Jesus the mother hen joins a long line of women, who throughout scripture and in society at that time, take on the role of the mourner and the comforter—roles held most often by women.
What does it mean for us to see God as a mothering figure who mourns alongside us? What does it mean for Jesus to call out his followers, or those who would be his followers, as resistant to the comfort and nurturing that God offers? What might the picture of God as a mother hen allow us to feel about the joys and troubles our world? Are there things that we might allow ourselves to share more openly with this vision of God? A nurturing figure that desires to gather her children together is a contrast to the foxes; the religious, social and economic divisions faced at that time. It might even go against what we think we need today, in the midst of the divisions we experience in our own patriarchal systems, where strength, power and invulnerability rule. Just as Jesus can name prophets whose work, words, and bodies seem to be stomped on by the systems that would keep us apart, we have names of our prophets whose voices, bodies, and memories have also been crushed by the patriarchal work of separation, fear and division: MLK Jr, Marcia P. Johnson, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Pauli Murray, and many, many others.
I want to name that feminine qualities, as we might call them, are not limited solely to people who identify as women. When Jesus names his desire to behave in a nurturing manner, it allows our work of being like Jesus to extend to ways of being that go beyond the gender stereotypes that we are given. And if you’ve ever seen a chicken, you might find that nurturing and tender are not the first adjectives used to describe a hen. We see them also as fiercely loving, protective and maaaybe a little overbearing. In expanding our exposure to images where God is also reflected in this way— complex, layered, and diverse— we are allowed to see more and more of ourselves within God.
It seems to me that something we might be invited to, in exploring expanded imagery for God, in naming the problems and division caused by patriarchy, is a society that allows for each child of God to exist in creation as God made them to be, in God’s broad and diverse image. This may seem overly simple, and something we say often, but I wonder how seeing the feminine, masculine, gender-less and gender-full reflections of God’s diversity onto humanity might help those in positions of power and privilege, even each of us, to recognize that image of God in the people who are criminalized and dehumanized; consciously or unconsciously . I wonder if being exposed to a broad array of how we perceive of and speak to God might make it harder to treat groups of people as though they were less than.
As people of faith, part of our work of seeking justice, seeking transformation, might begin there: making sure that every person we come in contact with knows they are a reflection of God, exactly as they are. And because they are a reflection of God, they have the language and the tools to name something about God, because they can recognize it with themselves. And maybe, God-willing, from there, they can recognize it in their neighbor. To see and recognize and be called to better use this expansive understanding of God, beyond pronouns, beyond stereotypes, beyond a limited way of being, is to pay attention and actually notice God in humanity and creation, all around us.
The same week that I received the thumbs up from my discernment committee, I received an email from two of the women who were on this committee saying that they wanted to meet with me. We gathered for coffee and they each spoke to me about how they felt about my leadership style. They mentioned that they didn’t feel like I needed to change who I was or how I led in order to be called to this work. We shared stories of trying to conform to the expectations of others, to fit the ways we felt called to share God in packages that would be comfortable or palatable to others. We gathered, three women doing their best to follow God, to support each other following God, ready to call it out when the systems of the world try to block us from being who God has called us to be. We were in that moment gathered together under the wings of a God who was mourning and celebrating with us, nurturing and challenging us, calling us to live into who God had made each of us to be. I wonder if we all can find the moments of our lives where God is calling us to be gathered to her, to welcome her comfort, to see the counter cultural way she is calling us to respond to systems that work to divide us and put us into boxes, and to safely find our home, love and acceptance in her.