Easter 4 - God-Mother-Tongue

Psalm 23; John 10:22-30

I read a study once that said that children who are exposed to a language while they’re in the womb will recognize that language for several years after they’re born, even if it’s never spoken to them after they’re born. So if a fetus hears its mother and those around it speaking in Cantonese, for example, even if they’re spoken to only in English from the moment of their birth, as toddlers they will still respond and turn their heads towards the speaker when they hear Cantonese. They’ll completely ignore Spanish or German or Norwegian, but they will show marked signs of attention when something is said in Cantonese. During their formation in the womb, their brain is shaped by the voices they hear, particularly the voice of their mother. It turns out that there really is such a thing as a mother tongue. Isn’t that neat?

I read another study once that said that families with small children should have smoke detectors in their house that can be programmed with voice recordings rather than with those annoyingly loud beeps. Those of you who have cared for small kids will know that once they’re asleep, they are completely out. You can pick them up, move them from one place to another, almost drop them when you’re moving them, and they. will. not. wake. up. Naturally, this is a concern if there’s ever a fire, because they’ll sleep right through the fire alarm. But what this study showed is that there is one thing that will wake a child up, and that’s the voice of their mother calling their name. In this study, these small children would wake up from the middle of a deep sleep if the smoke detector was programmed with their mother saying their name and they could then find their way to safety.

Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.” The voice of Jesus is God’s voice, come to us in human form, what we might rightly call our very first mother tongue. As Psalm 139 says, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them yet existed.”

When you were in your mother’s womb, amidst all of the voices and sounds you heard, there was also the voice of God, speaking to you words of life and love, calling you into being and welcoming you to join God’s community and Creation. With the voice of a mother who is preparing for the birth of a long-awaited and already beloved child, God spoke to you the words spoken at Creation, words that cause life to form out of darkness, words that bring order out of chaos. God said to you, even before you were born, “I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.” (Isaiah 43) God said, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 66) Some of the First Nations Peoples believe that God speaks to us in the womb and that the babbling of babies after they are born is divine language.

This is why Jesus says, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” Jesus himself knew the voice of God, more intimately than anyone else, and so he calls to us with the same voice we heard in the womb, and we turn towards it. Jesus speaks to us with the voice of care and love, with the voice of welcoming and belonging, and this is why we lift our heads and respond to this words. We follow him because he speaks the God-mother-tongue that we heard in the womb. We know that his words mean safety and well-being and welcome and love.

Interestingly, Jesus is not the only one to speak with this voice.  Anyone who speaks with the voice of care and love, who speaks words that welcome us, anyone who calls to us by name and tells us where we can find safety, any one of these people are speaking with the voice of God. We don’t usually describe it that way, but that’s what they’re doing. Each one of us knows the language spoken to us in the womb by God. It’s our mother tongue, even though we may know it in different dialects. You know when you’re hearing genuine words of love––we all do––because you’ve heard them spoken to you in the womb. 

And each one of us can speak those words, because each one of us was exposed to it in the womb. We might have forgotten the specific vocabulary, but the patterns of those words are hard-wired into us and they come out in subconscious ways. Whenever we speak words of welcome or compassion or forgiveness or love, we are speaking with the voice of God. It might sound like a bold claim, but the voice of love is the voice of God, and when we speak in love, people recognize and respond to it, because they, too, heard that voice in the womb. Individuals can speak with this voice, and so can communities. Churches, especially, are expected to speak with the voice of God, we are expected to speak words of welcome and compassion and forgiveness and love. When we do, people respond. When we don’t, they wander away.

When we hear the voice of Jesus––the voice of God––we follow, like sheep following the shepherd, like children following their mother’s voice. We follow because the voice of God leads us to places of safety and belonging. God brings us to green pastures - to places where we are fed and nurtured; to still waters - to places where we can rest and ease our thirstiness. God brings us to places where our souls are restored - to communities where people gather specifically to speak the words of God to one another, to speak words of love and life. God calls us, like a shepherd, like a mother, and we are so glad to follow. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Wednesday, May 9 - Service of Healing

Ezekiel 37:1-10; Psalm 27; Romans 8:18-39

We begin life connected. From the moment of conception, when the egg implants into the uterine lining, we are connected. Our bodies, our brains, our hearts form and develop entwined with the body of another. After we are born, after our physical connection with our mother is severed, we continue to live connected to one another through bonds of love. Without love, we cannot live. Perhaps you’ve heard of the terrible experiment conducted in the US in 1944, where twenty newborns were physically cared for but never cuddled, looked at, rocked, or hugged. After four months, more than ten of them had died, despite being physically healthy up to that point. They died because they were not loved, because they were disconnected.

We rely on this connectedness with others to affirm our own sense of worth. Babies whose parents smile at them a lot grow up with more self-confidence than babies whose parents don’t. Connectedness assures us that we have worth, that we are worthy to be in the company of others, that we are worthy of care. Our closest relationships are the ones in which we are seen and heard, where our very existence is a joy to the other, and theirs to us. 

Which explains why hurt and separation go hand in hand. When others reject any connection with us, when they treat us as unworthy of love or respect or kindness, we are hurt. God created us to be connected, and when those bonds are broken, we are deeply wounded. We might put on a brave front, we might shrug and say it’s no big deal, but inside, where no one can see but God, we question our worthiness to be loved and we begin to wither and die. 

Ironically, we respond to this hurt with, sadly, further separation. Too often, in order to protect ourselves from further rejection, we separate ourselves from others before they do the same to us, and when we do that, when we cut off ties of affection or vulnerability, then we hurt them. We may think it doesn’t matter to them, but it does. God created us to be in community, God created them to be in community, too. Separation hurts them the same way it hurts us. 

And so I’m guessing you can imagine how this can become a vicious cycle, if you haven’t experienced it personally already. When we are hurt, we separate ourselves from those around us, causing them to hurt, which causes them to continue the separation from us, which causes more hurt. The painful gap between us tears wider and wider, disrupting not only individual relationships but entire families, church communities, even countries.

We might call this cycle sin, and we talk about original sin as a way to begin to grasp how it might have all happened, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter. However it all started, we continue to do it. We are hurt, we hurt others, we separate from others, they separate from us. Friends become strangers, stranger become enemies, and at some point we look around and realize we are all a pile of dry bones in the valley, the victims and the perpetrators of physical and emotional wars, in the church and in the world. We yearn for life, and for some way to connect again, and we don’t know how to make that happen.

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“Thus says the Lord God … I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

In the valley of dry bones, where hurt has become deadly and our separation from one another is so complete that we are just a jumble of bones, the breath of God appears. The ruach in Hebrew, the pneuma in Greek, what in English we call the Spirit, intercedes in our cycle of hurt and separation and gives us new life. The same Spirit of God that moved over the waters at Creation and breathed life into the figures of clay so that they became human, this same spirit, this same breath moves into the valley of dry bones and gives life once again. God does not give life only once, but over and over again.

In our moments of deepest pain and alienation, when we feel most separated from those around us, even when we are the ones to have caused that separation, the Holy Spirit brings us into the house of the Lord, into his shelter, under the cover of his tent, into his own heart. And in God’s heart we find that we are not alone. In God’s heart, our connection is restored.

This is new life: reconnection. “Suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. … and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.” Through the power of our God-who-is-life, we are reconnected to God and, through God, to one another. We discover that we were not only created to be in community, we are worthy of being in community. We are worthy of connection because God’s breath is in us. Our hurts begin to heal, our inner selves become whole because we share the breath of God, because we are brought into connection with one another, because God puts us all back together. God restores not only each of us individually, but the multitude, so that each of us might be healed. 

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“I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” 

This is not a new life that comes only after our death. I have seen this healing take place in this place, in your midst. I have seen what were once dry bones receive new life. I have seen strangers become friends, and I have seen you turn towards one another when you are hurt, not away from each other. I have heard responsibility taken for hurts committed, I have heard desire for reconciliation. I have seen God piece together your broken edges and form a new community that is compassionate and forgiving. And I know that this has happened because in your pain, you have turned to God. God, present to you in Christ Jesus through the Holy Spirit, has been the source of your resilience and your healing. There are scars, to be sure, and some hurts have yet to be fully healed, but God has begun this work in you and God will complete it. This is the glory of the Easter season that we experience now, the goodness of the Lord in this land of the living.

Now we live still in this world. The cycle of sin, of hurt and separation and hurt, is not yet entirely disrupted. There will be times in the future when we will be hurt, when we will hurt others, there will be times when separation will be more prevalent than connectedness. There will again be “hardship or distress.” But there will again be healing, and connectedness, and new life. God will again draw you into God’s heart through the power of the Holy Spirit, and will again connect with you and connect you. God’s breath will come into you not just once but as many times as necessary, for as long as we live in the world, until all has been worked together for good. “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

God is here. God is with you, working amongst each of you and through all of you to bring healing and connection and new life––yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Thanks be to God, Amen.