Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Motherhood of God" (May 8, 1960)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Preacher | On this beach weekend, | 0:22 |
I would like to offer to those few brave souls | 0:26 | |
who stayed on campus, a sermon on the Motherhood of God. | 0:31 | |
A few years ago, a county school superintendent | 0:41 | |
related an incident to me that he said took place | 0:45 | |
in a small rural church in the Piedmont. | 0:50 | |
I found this a little bit difficult to believe | 0:56 | |
and went to considerable trouble to verify the incident. | 1:00 | |
I found that it actually happened just as he said, | 1:07 | |
and this is the way it went. | 1:12 | |
The men's Bible class in this small rural church | 1:16 | |
in Piedmont, North Carolina was assembled six years ago | 1:19 | |
on Mother's day. | 1:23 | |
The president of the class called on one of the members | 1:26 | |
of the class to lead the group in prayer. | 1:29 | |
And he began his prayer in this fashion. | 1:33 | |
"Oh Lord, we thank thee for our fine old Christian mothers. | 1:37 | |
If it had not been for them, very few of us would be here." | 1:45 | |
(congregation laughs) | 1:50 | |
The laughter which broke up the rest of the prayer | 1:54 | |
was a good deal more pious and reverent than the prayer | 1:58 | |
itself would have been had it continued. | 2:03 | |
For it bore testimony to the fact that he spoke more truth | 2:06 | |
than he intended when he said that, | 2:12 | |
"Had it not been for our mothers, | 2:14 | |
very few of us would be here." | 2:16 | |
So that whether we are good, bad, or indifferent, | 2:20 | |
whether we are gathered in chapel or not | 2:24 | |
on this Mother's day, we at least owe a debt of existence | 2:26 | |
to our mothers, good, bad, or indifferent. | 2:32 | |
And so it is fitting that we should set aside one day | 2:38 | |
of the year to consider the virtues of ideal motherhood | 2:41 | |
so that mothers will not be good, bad, or indifferent, | 2:47 | |
but will be good. | 2:50 | |
Now, if we follow the idea of Aristotle in thinking | 2:54 | |
that the true representation of anything is its highest form | 2:59 | |
or its perfect expression, | 3:03 | |
we would naturally turn our thoughts toward God, | 3:07 | |
wouldn't we? | 3:09 | |
Who alone is perfect. | 3:10 | |
But as I began to think about this sermon | 3:14 | |
on ideal motherhood, I was immediately confronted | 3:16 | |
with a terrific problem at this point, | 3:20 | |
because as we turn to God for the thought | 3:24 | |
of ideal motherhood, we are confronted immediately | 3:27 | |
by the fact that we have not verbalized our thoughts of God | 3:31 | |
in maternal words. | 3:35 | |
We just thought of God as father, not mother. | 3:38 | |
Indeed we have a great doctrine that we're very proud of | 3:43 | |
which we call the Fatherhood of God | 3:46 | |
and the Brotherhood of Man. | 3:49 | |
Our Lord, Jesus Christ himself, you remember | 3:52 | |
when his disciples asked him to teach them how to pray? | 3:55 | |
He said, "When you pray, say, 'Our Father'." | 3:58 | |
The Apostle Paul, who was the greatest exponent | 4:05 | |
and describer of the Christian faith in the era | 4:08 | |
as the church was beginning, | 4:12 | |
wrote in his letter to the Romans, | 4:16 | |
"We have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, | 4:17 | |
but we have received the spirit of adoption | 4:22 | |
whereby we cry, Abba, Father." | 4:24 | |
And so on it goes. | 4:30 | |
We have not found in our Christian theology | 4:32 | |
or in our Christian teachings and a doctrine | 4:35 | |
of ideal motherhood in God, have we? | 4:39 | |
And so I was about to turn away from the topic altogether | 4:43 | |
and not preach on ideal motherhood until I came across | 4:48 | |
some passages in the Bible, | 4:53 | |
which suggested to me that there is a latent | 4:58 | |
doctrine of the Motherhood of God in the scriptures. | 5:01 | |
And the further I examined these passages in the Bible, | 5:07 | |
the more convinced I became that this latent doctrine | 5:12 | |
needs to be lifted up and explored | 5:16 | |
and explained and glorified. | 5:20 | |
I believe in fact that if Jesus were walking | 5:25 | |
the earth today, instead of 2000 years ago, | 5:28 | |
he would say a great deal more about the Motherhood of God | 5:32 | |
than he did in the age in which he lived. | 5:36 | |
I believe that Jesus would teach us a great deal today | 5:40 | |
about God, in terms of what we know as motherhood. | 5:43 | |
Whereas he did very little of it in the day | 5:47 | |
in which he lived on this earth. | 5:50 | |
Now there are two things that will help us to see this. | 5:54 | |
The first is that it is very clear as we look | 5:57 | |
at the teachings of Jesus, that he had great difficulty | 5:59 | |
in finding words to use in describing what God | 6:02 | |
who is not fleshly or material or of this earth | 6:07 | |
should mean to those of us who are fleshly | 6:12 | |
and material and of this earth. | 6:14 | |
The only way by which he could do this | 6:18 | |
was to use language that we understand | 6:19 | |
since we are not disembodied spirits, not yet. | 6:21 | |
And so he used terms which would be meaningful | 6:25 | |
and yet realized in using these terms, | 6:29 | |
which he did that each one was inadequate. | 6:32 | |
We find this rather strange thing happening | 6:36 | |
in the teaching of Jesus, that he mixed his metaphors | 6:39 | |
in a sort of frantic effort to find language | 6:42 | |
that would be adequate to describe the greatness of God. | 6:47 | |
In one of the passages in Luke, | 6:51 | |
which give us the teaching of Jesus, | 6:53 | |
we find that he mixed his metaphor so much, | 6:55 | |
he got three of them in one sentence. | 6:58 | |
Now get the picture of this, | 7:01 | |
"Fear, not little flock," he began. | 7:04 | |
Now when he uses little flock, he's implying | 7:08 | |
that we are the sheep, that God is the shepherd. | 7:10 | |
He goes on, "Fear, not little flock, | 7:15 | |
it is your father's good pleasure." | 7:16 | |
Well, here we are immediately shifting from the scene | 7:20 | |
of the sheep and the shepherd to children and a father, | 7:23 | |
but he goes on to yet a third, | 7:28 | |
"It is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." | 7:30 | |
We are pictured here as subjects and God is a king | 7:35 | |
so that he had to use three different concepts | 7:40 | |
to get over one idea about the activity of God. | 7:43 | |
Everywhere in the teaching of Jesus, | 7:48 | |
we find that earthbound concepts were recognized | 7:50 | |
as being insufficient to get over the thought | 7:55 | |
of the greatness and the nature of God. | 7:58 | |
Now there is a second consideration which will help us | 8:03 | |
to see that Jesus probably would have moved far more | 8:06 | |
into the area of using maternal concepts, | 8:10 | |
had he been living and teaching on earth today. | 8:12 | |
And that is that the roles of men and women | 8:15 | |
relatively speaking, have changed a great deal | 8:18 | |
in the 2000 years since the earthly ministry | 8:21 | |
of Jesus Christ. | 8:25 | |
And we might add parenthetically as a direct result | 8:26 | |
of the spread of his gospel in his spirit, in the earth. | 8:30 | |
The roles of men and women of fathers and mothers | 8:34 | |
have greatly changed. | 8:37 | |
On the day that Jesus was giving his teaching, | 8:40 | |
if he had referred to God, his mother, | 8:43 | |
he would have been referring to a person | 8:47 | |
who in most instances where was forbidden | 8:49 | |
to speak in public, who was supposed to ask her husband | 8:52 | |
at home, if she had a question. | 8:56 | |
He would have been speaking of a person who was denied | 8:59 | |
most of the advantages of education that were made possible | 9:02 | |
for the men. | 9:06 | |
He would've been speaking of a person | 9:08 | |
who had no real authority in the home | 9:09 | |
who accepted the authority of the father. | 9:12 | |
These conditions of course have changed greatly | 9:16 | |
in the years since the earthly ministry of Jesus. | 9:19 | |
So that we think of mother and father | 9:23 | |
as being equals in the home. | 9:24 | |
The mother very often is better educated than the father. | 9:27 | |
The mother very often goes into professions | 9:30 | |
and takes her place in society | 9:33 | |
and becomes a real contributor to public life | 9:36 | |
as well as to the private life of the family. | 9:38 | |
And now for us to continue to ignore | 9:42 | |
the virtues of motherhood, as we think about God | 9:46 | |
in a situation that has changed as radically as this | 9:49 | |
is for us to ignore the necessity of rethinking | 9:53 | |
our terminology about God. | 9:57 | |
Now, this does not mean, | 10:03 | |
and I certainly wouldn't want anybody to get this idea | 10:05 | |
that we should cease talking about the Fatherhood of God. | 10:09 | |
There's nothing wrong with our thinking | 10:15 | |
about the Fatherhood of God. | 10:17 | |
We should continue to do this. | 10:18 | |
It is not necessary for us to deny the Fatherhood of God | 10:21 | |
in order to assert the companion doctrine | 10:25 | |
of the Motherhood of God. | 10:28 | |
Any more than it is necessary for you | 10:30 | |
to hate your earthly father in order to | 10:33 | |
love your earthly mother. | 10:35 | |
It is not necessary for us to be against Monday, | 10:38 | |
to be in favor of Tuesday when Tuesday comes. | 10:41 | |
And so what we are saying is that we should have | 10:45 | |
a doctrine of the Fatherhood of God | 10:47 | |
and a doctrine of the Motherhood of God. | 10:49 | |
Now, there is a very important reason why this is necessary | 10:53 | |
and that is that we will purify and correct | 10:56 | |
the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, | 11:01 | |
which very much needs purifying and correcting. | 11:04 | |
If we have a companion doctrine of the Motherhood of God, | 11:07 | |
I think it will not be hard for you to believe that | 11:12 | |
if you will consider something. | 11:16 | |
Think now for a moment, what comes into your mind | 11:20 | |
when you hear the word father? | 11:25 | |
What visual image? | 11:29 | |
Well, as I look at some fathers here in the pews, | 11:32 | |
I see that you are warm-blooded creatures | 11:37 | |
who are bipeds capable of standing erect | 11:41 | |
or of reclining in an easy chair with your feet popped up, | 11:45 | |
you have hair on your heads more or less. | 11:50 | |
(congregation laughs) | 11:54 | |
You have a circulatory system, | 11:55 | |
your voice is a little huskier than your female counterpart. | 12:00 | |
The chemical components of your bodies | 12:06 | |
are worth about a dollar. | 12:08 | |
Now it is interesting to note | 12:12 | |
that these qualities do not refer to | 12:18 | |
or describe God in the slightest degree. | 12:22 | |
When you have said all this and much more, | 12:27 | |
that could be said, you have said nothing about God, | 12:29 | |
God partakes up none of these qualities. | 12:34 | |
And unless we have a doctrine of the Motherhood of God, | 12:40 | |
which stands over against and balances and corrects | 12:46 | |
the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, | 12:49 | |
we are very likely in our egocentric condition | 12:52 | |
to identify these earthbound, | 12:57 | |
male-centered qualities of imperfect fatherhood with God. | 13:01 | |
And this would be an awful mistake. | 13:08 | |
And so we need a concept of the Motherhood of God | 13:13 | |
to correct the fallacies that will creep in inevitably | 13:16 | |
to the doctrine of the Fatherhood of God, | 13:20 | |
if we leave it simply like this. | 13:23 | |
Our university's symposium committee has chosen a topic | 13:27 | |
for next year and announced it. | 13:31 | |
And the topic is post-Christian man. | 13:32 | |
Now I feel sure that they are going to go on and elaborate | 13:37 | |
what they mean by this topic. | 13:40 | |
While they are doing this, I suggested you and I address | 13:44 | |
our minds to a far more important topic | 13:47 | |
while they are elaborating what they mean by this one. | 13:51 | |
That topic would be a transposition of two words | 13:56 | |
in this one, instead of our thinking about | 13:58 | |
the post-Christian man, let us think about | 14:00 | |
the post man Christian, or in other words, | 14:02 | |
the Christian who has emancipated himself | 14:06 | |
from the archaic anthropomorphism of thinking of God | 14:09 | |
in purely masculine terms. | 14:12 | |
We ought to be done with this, | 14:15 | |
not because fathers on earth need to be downgraded, | 14:18 | |
but because God deserves to be thought of as he really is. | 14:22 | |
And we do not think of God as he really is, | 14:29 | |
when we think of him in strictly masculine terms. | 14:31 | |
Well, this would be a reason enough for us to explore | 14:36 | |
a doctrine of the Motherhood of God, | 14:39 | |
but there is yet a far more important reason for it, | 14:41 | |
which has to do with the fact that all of our talk | 14:45 | |
about the Fatherhood of God and no talk | 14:48 | |
about the Motherhood of God ignores the tragic fact | 14:52 | |
that the term father is too many sons and daughters, | 14:59 | |
a dirty word. | 15:04 | |
The only way that they have ever known decency and integrity | 15:08 | |
and love is in terms of mother. | 15:12 | |
Because for them, father has been a callous, crude, | 15:17 | |
faithless, self-centered, slobbering sot. | 15:23 | |
Mother in many instances has been decent | 15:29 | |
and to take God to such sons and daughters | 15:34 | |
in any terms that remind them of their father | 15:38 | |
is to commit the worst blasphemy imaginable | 15:41 | |
against the nature of God, | 15:43 | |
Martin Luther rebelled against the thought | 15:48 | |
of presenting God, as father, because his own father | 15:51 | |
was a very harsh and vindictive man. | 15:55 | |
And when Luther wrote that hymn, | 15:59 | |
"A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," | 16:01 | |
which is certainly the most masculine hymn | 16:03 | |
in our hymn books. | 16:07 | |
He studiously refrained from identifying God as father. | 16:10 | |
As a mighty fortress, a bulwark, | 16:15 | |
but he did not identify him as father | 16:19 | |
because he had a personal reason not to do it. | 16:22 | |
There was a reason why Abraham Lincoln said | 16:27 | |
that all he ever was and would be he owed to his mother. | 16:29 | |
Toyohiko Kagawa, the great Japanese Christian | 16:36 | |
who died just a few weeks ago, amazed a lot of people | 16:40 | |
by the fact that he always seemed to speak | 16:45 | |
of his relationship to God as though | 16:47 | |
he were related to a mother, not a father. | 16:50 | |
The thing that amazed people about that was | 16:54 | |
that we knew that his mother was a prostitute, | 16:57 | |
but although his mother was a woman of ill fame, | 17:00 | |
his father was so much worse that he preferred | 17:04 | |
to think of God in terms of his mother, | 17:07 | |
rather than his father. | 17:11 | |
Sir James Berry, the great British writer | 17:14 | |
said that he had the opinion that most young children | 17:18 | |
who folded their hands and closed their eyes | 17:24 | |
and lifted their thoughts towards God and said, | 17:29 | |
"Our father" with their lips, | 17:31 | |
had a vision of their mother's face in their minds. | 17:35 | |
And so it is that he Stanley Jones used to tell us | 17:41 | |
during the great famines in India, | 17:45 | |
that God did not to appear to the starving millions of India | 17:47 | |
in any other form except that of food. | 17:52 | |
So God does not dare appear to many sons and daughters today | 17:55 | |
in any other form, except that of mother, | 18:00 | |
because for them, the image of father has been ruined | 18:03 | |
by a father who was ruined. | 18:07 | |
We have a very practical reason, therefore to explore | 18:12 | |
the companion doctrine of the Motherhood of God, | 18:15 | |
for those who are repelled by the thought | 18:19 | |
of God as father. | 18:22 | |
Now, I think in all of this, we must not make the mistake. | 18:25 | |
I'll be erecting, a false division between the concept | 18:31 | |
of father and the concept of mother. | 18:35 | |
Actually, many of the responsibilities and duties, | 18:38 | |
and functions of father and mother are identical. | 18:43 | |
They are co-creators in bringing children into the world. | 18:46 | |
One is indispensable as the other. | 18:49 | |
Many of the things, indeed most of the things | 18:52 | |
that parents do are done equally as well, | 18:55 | |
and with equal importance by both father and mother. | 18:58 | |
So we do not wish to make this false division. | 19:02 | |
There's another thing in this connection | 19:06 | |
that ought to be remembered. | 19:08 | |
And that is that the term father very often means | 19:09 | |
mother as well as father, just as we use the word, | 19:13 | |
he impersonally to mean an individual who may be a man | 19:17 | |
or who may be a woman. | 19:23 | |
So the term father very often is used. | 19:24 | |
And this is true in the scriptures to represent parenthood, | 19:26 | |
whether male or female. | 19:31 | |
And so in some of the passages in the Bible | 19:35 | |
where father is used, it means simply parent, | 19:37 | |
not a masculine parent, | 19:42 | |
but there yet remains for us to say what the things are | 19:47 | |
about ideal motherhood, which represent the nature | 19:52 | |
of God to us better than ideal fatherhood. | 19:56 | |
We might say also that these are the ideals, | 20:02 | |
which we see in God up to which mothers should live today. | 20:05 | |
Well in the first place, an ideal mother is one who cares | 20:11 | |
for a child during the very immature months and years | 20:17 | |
when the child is not able to stand or to walk | 20:21 | |
or to take care of itself. | 20:24 | |
Now, fathers do a few things for children at this age, | 20:27 | |
but by and large, this is the task of the mother | 20:30 | |
to care for the immature and the young | 20:33 | |
while the father is out earning the salary | 20:35 | |
and making the living. | 20:38 | |
The mother stays at home looks after the infant, feeds it, | 20:40 | |
changes its clothes, sees that it gets it nap | 20:44 | |
and it's medicine, teaches it, its first words. | 20:47 | |
The care of the very immature. | 20:52 | |
Do we need this kind of care from God in our spiritual life? | 20:58 | |
I should say we do. | 21:03 | |
And no matter how long we may be in this world | 21:06 | |
as Christians, it is extremely doubtful | 21:09 | |
that we shall ever outgrow the need | 21:13 | |
of the Motherhood of God, because we seem to be so unable | 21:15 | |
spiritually to stand alone. | 21:20 | |
We need the mothering activity of God to care for us | 21:22 | |
in our spiritual infancy. | 21:27 | |
When we're not able to know what is right | 21:30 | |
from what is wrong when we're not able to eat the meat. | 21:33 | |
As Paul said of mature Christianity, | 21:37 | |
we need the Motherhood of God. | 21:40 | |
And then there is a second activity of God, | 21:44 | |
which reminds us very much of ideal motherhood, | 21:46 | |
fathers to a certain extent do this, | 21:52 | |
but mothers are traditionally known for being sympathetic | 21:54 | |
and comforting and understanding of us | 21:59 | |
when we've had a hard time when we've been defeated, | 22:03 | |
when we've made a horrible mistake. | 22:06 | |
The father is thought of as the stern, | 22:10 | |
unyielding, uncomprehending parent. | 22:13 | |
Whereas the mother is thought of as the one | 22:17 | |
who sympathizes and understands and comforts. | 22:20 | |
And indeed in the 66 chapter of Isaiah, | 22:25 | |
which was read a little while ago. | 22:28 | |
We find these words, | 22:31 | |
Thus sayeth the Lord, "As a mother comforts her children, | 22:33 | |
so I will comfort you." | 22:38 | |
He did not say as a father here, | 22:41 | |
he said, as a mother and God is like that. | 22:44 | |
In the 40th chapter of Isaiah, we find God saying, | 22:49 | |
"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, sayeth your Lord. | 22:52 | |
Speak ye comfortably unto Jerusalem and cry unto her, | 22:57 | |
that her warfare is accomplished, | 23:00 | |
that her iniquity is pardoned. | 23:02 | |
For she hath received of the Lord double for all her sins." | 23:05 | |
There is the righteous vindictive activity of God. | 23:09 | |
But on the other side, there is the comforting, | 23:12 | |
the understanding the sympathetic side of God, | 23:15 | |
which is best represented by motherhood | 23:18 | |
and not by fatherhood, who was it that inspired any vote? | 23:20 | |
The greatest statement of love and devotion | 23:26 | |
that literature records. | 23:29 | |
It was not a lover, It was not a father. | 23:31 | |
It was a mother, a mother who sympathetically understood | 23:35 | |
and comforted. | 23:40 | |
She not only was a mother to her son | 23:43 | |
but a mother to her son's wife. | 23:45 | |
So that when she was in a strange land to her, | 23:48 | |
the land of her daughter-in-law and had had great tragedy | 23:51 | |
in her own life by losing her husband. | 23:56 | |
When her son's wife lost her husband, the son of the mother, | 24:00 | |
Naomi took such care of that daughter-in-law | 24:08 | |
that she evoked from a foreigner from a daughter-in-law | 24:12 | |
if you please, the greatest testimony of love and devotion, | 24:16 | |
that literature records. | 24:20 | |
So that when Naiomi was preparing | 24:22 | |
to leave the land of Moab and return to her own land | 24:24 | |
and leave her daughters-in-law who were widowed | 24:28 | |
along with her in the land, which was their own, | 24:31 | |
Ruth took hold of her and said, | 24:35 | |
"Entreat me not to leave thee, | 24:37 | |
or return from following after thee: | 24:41 | |
for whither thou goest, I will go, | 24:43 | |
and whither thou dwellest, I will dwell; | 24:47 | |
thy people shall be my people and thy God, my God. | 24:51 | |
And where thou diest, will I die, | 24:56 | |
and there will I be buried: | 24:59 | |
and may the Lord do up and more to me, | 25:00 | |
if ought but death part thee and me." | 25:05 | |
This great statement of devotion was inspired | 25:10 | |
by a mother who was sympathetic, | 25:14 | |
who was helpful and comforting. | 25:17 | |
But there is a third activity that characterizes motherhood, | 25:20 | |
which we learned from God. | 25:24 | |
And that is the activity of holding the family together. | 25:27 | |
It is the mother who traditionally holds the father | 25:32 | |
to the children and the children to the father | 25:36 | |
and both father and children to the home. | 25:38 | |
This is a very necessary glue in human society. | 25:42 | |
The holding of the family together. | 25:47 | |
And God looks down upon his human family | 25:50 | |
and would hold it together. | 25:54 | |
We stray from each other and we stray | 25:56 | |
from our heavenly parent and he would hold us together. | 25:58 | |
Like a mother holds her family together. | 26:03 | |
You remember that Jesus had this in mind and identified | 26:06 | |
himself with this maternal concept, | 26:09 | |
when as he was entering Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday. | 26:13 | |
With the brow of the hill, he stood there and looked down | 26:17 | |
upon the city and said, "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, | 26:19 | |
thou that kill us, the prophets and stone us. | 26:23 | |
Those that are sent unto thee. | 26:25 | |
How often would I have gathered thy children | 26:27 | |
as a hen and gathereth her chickens | 26:29 | |
under its wing, but you would not." | 26:31 | |
Jesus did not identify himself with the role of the rooster, | 26:37 | |
but with the role of the hen, who is a mother | 26:41 | |
to her chickens. | 26:44 | |
The activity of God, like a mother, | 26:47 | |
holding the family together should be in our doctrine of God | 26:49 | |
and might very well be in the doctrine of motherhood. | 26:57 | |
And then in the last place, we think of the mother | 27:02 | |
as being the parent who never gives up on the child, | 27:06 | |
however far he may stray, however, lost he may become. | 27:11 | |
Very often the father will run out of patience | 27:18 | |
and will cut off the child and disinherit him and say, | 27:21 | |
"He's not my child," but the mother never does. | 27:25 | |
Traditionally it is the mother who stays after the child | 27:28 | |
who keeps on loving the child and keeps trying | 27:33 | |
to bring him back to right. | 27:37 | |
This is the activity of God. | 27:39 | |
He is like a mother here. | 27:42 | |
There are so many illustrations of this from the Bible | 27:47 | |
and from Christian history that we could not enumerate them. | 27:50 | |
But you remember our Lord himself gave the parable | 27:54 | |
of the woman who had lost a coin. | 27:57 | |
It was only worth 16 cents. | 28:01 | |
The drachma was a very small coin. | 28:02 | |
And yet he said that this woman who had lost that coin | 28:06 | |
would get the broom and would sweep the house | 28:09 | |
and continue to search quote until she finds it. | 28:12 | |
Now, the father being more practical would have said, | 28:19 | |
"Mother, why are you spending so much time | 28:23 | |
looking for a 16 cent piece? | 28:25 | |
While I can go out here tomorrow and earn you | 28:28 | |
another one in just a short length of time. | 28:30 | |
Don't waste all this time looking for this coin." | 28:33 | |
But it doesn't seem to appeal to the mother. | 28:38 | |
This argument, | 28:40 | |
if there is a mother who has a wayward son, | 28:44 | |
you could say to her, | 28:49 | |
"Why do you knock yourself out about this boy? | 28:50 | |
While over here, we have an IBM machine that computes | 28:53 | |
the population of the earth and gets the percentages | 28:56 | |
of people who are on the plus side of life | 29:00 | |
and the percentages of people who are on the | 29:03 | |
minus side of life. | 29:05 | |
And if your son is going astray, don't worry about it. | 29:07 | |
There'll be a great many others who will hold up that, | 29:10 | |
which he has let down, don't be concerned | 29:13 | |
about this particular one, just look at the percentages | 29:16 | |
that come out of the IBM machine." | 29:21 | |
But you know, there's an existential quality | 29:24 | |
about motherhood that is totally unimpressed | 29:26 | |
by the IBM machine and all its works. | 29:30 | |
Just as that woman who had lost that coin | 29:34 | |
wanted to find that coin, not another one like it, that one. | 29:37 | |
So the mother wants to reclaim that child | 29:44 | |
and she is very unimpressed with the thought | 29:50 | |
that there may be many others who, all right, | 29:53 | |
if there is one hers that is not right, | 29:57 | |
she keeps on loving that one until she restores | 30:01 | |
it to righteousness. | 30:06 | |
Over and over again Jesus taught us that God was like that. | 30:09 | |
He is interested in this one and he keeps on loving this one | 30:14 | |
until he or she is restored. | 30:22 | |
I believe we need to explore the Motherhood of God, | 30:27 | |
along with the Fatherhood of God. | 30:32 | |
Will you stand? | 30:36 | |
Oh, thou whose nature so far surpasses our human language, | 30:43 | |
that we cannot describe thee adequately. | 30:50 | |
We thank thee that by one means or another, | 30:54 | |
thou does find us search us out. | 30:57 | |
We thank thee for that in our fathers, | 31:01 | |
which is like thee and that in our mothers, | 31:04 | |
which is like thee. | 31:07 | |
And grant that each one of us may this day | 31:09 | |
learn perfection from thee, and be like thee. | 31:11 | |
Now may the grace of the Lord, Jesus Christ, | 31:17 | |
the love of God, the Father, and the communion | 31:21 | |
and fellowship of the Holy Spirit, | 31:24 | |
rest upon you and abide with evermore. | 31:26 |
Item Info
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