Many of you met my sister Kathleen and her son Brian when they came down for my installation. Brian is the only child in our generation, my mother’s only grandchild. And that’s surprising because, of the two of us, Kathleen didn’t want children and I did. I was the one who played with dolls. I was the one who earned money baby-sitting. I had names for four children, two boys and two girls, picked out by the time I was six. My undergraduate degree was in elementary education. I wanted children.
By the time I was forty I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Not only had I never found anyone I wanted to marry, I had just been diagnosed with fibroid tumors and adenomyosis and was facing a hysterectomy. For several months before and after the surgery I looked seriously into adopting an infant girl, even as a single parent. I had missionary friends in Peru, which has a large number of abandoned infants and children, and they would have been happy to take care of all the paperwork on that end. I would have named her Susannah Kathleen. But in the end I decided not to go ahead with it.
There were a number of practical reasons why not; but in the end what it came down to was that I didn’t believe that was what God wanted me to do. I didn’t feel led.
Part of what made the decision process so difficult was that, fifteen years before, when I was twenty-five, I had had an abortion. And for most of those 15 years I had believed that the reason I wasn’t finding anyone to marry and have children by was that God - whom I wasn’t sure I believed in anyway - was punishing me for what I had done. And after I became a Christian, which happened when I was thirty-six, even as the Holy Spirit was slowly and laboriously changing me from an abortion rights activist into a pro-life advocate, I continued to believe that I deserved to be childless. That I couldn’t expect anything else. That it was only just.
So Mother’s Days were painful for me - but not as painful as they were for other women. There weren’t any Mother’s Day cards for Chris, whose year-old daughter Elizabeth died the year before I joined the church. There wasn’t one for Nancy, either, who had her third miscarriage when we were in Bible study together. And then there was Penny, whose son Scott was killed by a hit-and-run driver when he was eight. I remember Diane, too, whose son Terry was in prison in Texas for dealing cocaine. And I remember Lucy, who hadn’t heard from her daughter Kim since the day she ran away from home, the year before her high school graduation. I remember these women now. But I only half-noticed at the time. Or - I noticed, but I didn’t let it really sink in.
But then something happened.
My sort-of-sister Caryl, who once was married to my brother Nate, and who wanted children as badly as ever I had, if not more so, married again and got pregnant. And as a good, life-long Episcopalian, she looked around to find a suitable godmother. And although Caryl’s brother and sister-in-law were designated as guardians of whatever children she and Chad would have, they are Jewish, and she wanted someone whom she could count on to raise them as Christians. So she asked me if I would accept the responsibility.
And that is how I became a mother. I became a mother after I had had a hysterectomy, through no action or initiative of my own, as a free gift of God, as a direct result of my commitment to Him. And what I learned about God, about mothering, and about love over the next few years cannot be forgotten, or repaid, or duplicated. And I believe that there is no love on earth more complete, more transforming, more self-sacrificing than the love a mother has for her child. Mother-love’s reputation for primal power and single-mindedness is deserved. But you don’t have to be female, or present at the birth, to feel it. Fathers and aunts and cousins can also know mother-love.
But that love pales before the love of God. Because mother-love can fail. And much as we hype motherhood on this day, we can pluck hundreds of examples of inadequate or deficient or destructive mother-love from our newspapers. Our abortion culture makes mother-love an option subject to our convenience. Child abuse and neglect are rampant. And at the other extreme, some mothers smother their children with over-protection or emotional demands. And even good mothers - the best mothers - mothers who love their children with patience and wisdom and kindness - have been known to get tired or lose their tempers or just plain make a mistake. And even good mothers - the best mothers - can raise children who turn their backs on them, who reject all their good upbringing and choose a path of self-destruction. And those mothers - and fathers - may eventually come to the point of saying, “No more. I have wept enough, I have no child.”
But God through Isaiah says, “Can a mother forget her nursing child or show no compassion on the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you!” [v. 15]
Isaiah is talking here about God’s chosen people, the line and city of David, Zion, Jerusalem. They have turned their backs on God, rejected his gifts and his grace, and chosen a path of self-destruction that would lead to exile and death. Isaiah preaches for forty years to both the northern kingdom, with its capital in Samaria, and the southern, with its capital in Jerusalem. He holds up a mirror to the people of Israel in which they can see clearly their idolatry, their violence, their immorality, their corruption, but they do not repent. He reminds them of the loving care God has lavished upon them, but they do not respond. He warms them of the terrible consequences which will come if they do not change, but they do not listen. Early in Isaiah’s lifetime the northern kingdom falls to Assyria, and the people who are not killed are taken away into exile. Assyria is particularly ruthless; the exiles are either sold or scattered, and people of other nations are brought in to settle the conquered lands. The southern kingdom remains nominally independent for another hundred years, though, and for a while they cherish the illusion that they will survive. But Isaiah knows better; their doom is sealed. They, too, are destined to go away into captivity, because their leaders have chosen to ignore the words of God.
But throughout all of this God continues to hold out a promise of rescue. The people who listen to Isaiah know that even when things look totally hopeless, even when the land is overrun and desolate, even when the people are suffering, in poverty and in danger, that God is still in control and that he is already planning for their redemption.
It’s hard to see beyond our circumstances. It’s easy to tell someone who has suffered a loss - of a child, of a spouse, of a hope - to rise above it, but it’s a whole lot harder to do. And it’s even harder to do while you’re right in the middle of it.
A man named Brent Bozell recently remembered his father at his funeral, speaking of the struggles he endured. Manic depression was untreatable in those days, and on top of episodes which often left him hospitalized, cost him his career and his home and his reputation, he also suffered from “peripheral neuropathy (whatever that is), sleep apnea, osteoporosis, degenerative disk disease, asthma, and Alzheimer’s. One by one they came, and when it seemed that no part of his body had been left untouched yet a new illness was diagnosed. We wondered how he could endure so much, accept this torture with such nobility, with never one word of complaint.” Brent found the answer he was looking for in his father’s own writings: “God is all-powerful, but he cannot undo what he has done, and what he once did was to make men free. This means that he ‘needs’ us in order to get us to heaven as his lovers, and in order to do his will in the world. All we have to do in order to frustrate those wishes - to render God helpless - is to say No. But God is not helpless, really, because he has mercy - himself. And what mercy does is convert, change our hearts. Which God never stops trying to do until we are dead.”
How did this man see beyond his circumstances? He lifted his eyes and saw God. And that is what Isaiah is inviting us to do with this passage. He is asking us to put our trust in God even before our wounds are healed. And it is particularly poignant to remember the love of God on this day.
Because if you know what it is like to love a child, you have a glimpse of how God’s heart yearns over us, his children. "See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands,” he says. [v. 16] There is not a day, not a moment, when we are not on God’s heart and mind. And does that image not bring to mind the price God paid to have us restored to him? Can you not see the nails?
And if you know what it is like to lose a child, here in these words you have God’s promise of healing.
“Your builders outdo your destroyers,” says the NRSV in your pew Bibles. But the Hebrew makes it clear that the builders who are prevailing over the destroyers are in fact the sons and daughters of the once desolate Jerusalem. “Lift up your eyes,” says our God, “all [your sons] gather, they come to you. As I live,” declares the LORD, “you will put all of them on like an ornament. The children born during the time of your bereavement will yet say in your hearing, ‘This place is too crowded...' Then you will say in your heart, ‘Who has born me these? I was bereaved and barren; I was exiled and put away. Who has reared these? I was left all alone, where then have these come from?’“ [v. 17-21]
Yes, I know, I know. These words are prophecies of the restoration of Judah, of Jerusalem. Not every woman who wants a child will bear one, not every lost child will return home. But does God’s character change? Does God not grieve for our wounds and waywardness as he grieved for his beloved city? We too are his children, adopted brothers and sisters of Christ, he loves us just as much now, and he loves us in the same way. And he loves us in the same terms, the words of mothering, that unique and powerful bond that is at the very root and foundation of life. No matter how deep the scars that life has left us with, the mother-love of God can restore the broken places, and refill the empty places. Life can - and does - spring from once barren ground, when God, the maker and giver of life, has his way with us. I cannot help but think of God’s gift to me of my godchildren whenever I read this passage. That was not a human solution. And yet it healed not only the pain of childnessness, but also the guilt and shame I felt over what I had done. God restores more than we think he can, in ways that we never would have imagined.
In this technological age, we have a lot more control over events than people in Isaiah’s day. Just look at the sixty-three-year-old woman who gave birth a couple of weeks ago! What would Sarah or Hannah have thought? But people in the Old Testament had ways to try to take matters belonging to God into their own hands as well. In fact, Sarah might warn her what happened when she used Hagar as a surrogate mother! In this age of quick fixes and instant gratification, it’s often tempting to use whatever means are available to get us what we want. And some people will call us fools - or fanatics - if we decide to trust in God instead of following the world’s wisdom, living by the world’s rules. But God’s solutions are worth waiting for. Look what Isaiah’s hearers can look forward to.
"This is what the Sovereign LORD says: 'See, I will beckon to the Gentiles.... they will bring your sons in their arms and carry your daughters on their shoulders. Kings will be your foster fathers, and their queens your nursing mothers. They will bow down before you with their faces to the ground; they will lick the dust at your feet.'" [v. 22-23]
The best Judah would have asked for at this point in their history would be to be left alone, for armies to stop threatening their walls. They would never have dreamed that God would so turn things around that their oppressors would be instruments of their redemption. They could never have imagined something that awesome.
God uses the image of mother-love for good reason. Mother love is powerful indeed, and tenacious. “Can a mother forget her nursing child or show no compassion on the child of her womb?” Most mothers never forget. Most mothers remember to their dying day the child they have lost. It doesn’t do any good, though, does it, just to remember. Because it doesn’t change anything.
But our God, who loves us even more than a mother can, is not only a God of love. He is also a God of power. There is nothing that we have lost that cannot be transformed or redeemed. In the next chapter Isaiah goes on to say, “Is my hand shortened, that it cannot redeem? Or have I no power to deliver?” The children of Israel needed to be reminded of the power of God; they needed to be reminded that the nations - including their own - rise and fall at the bidding of the LORD. And so, sometimes, do we.
In these passages Isaiah tells of the coming of the Savior of Israel, the Messiah, the suffering servant. His hearers did not know who this would be, but we do. His hearers believed that their salvation would be accompanied by political success and material prosperity - and large families. But we know better. We know that suffering is not a sign of the absence of God, but a signal to us to raise our eyes to the One who is eternally present, infinitely powerful, totally loving, and absolutely faithful. “Then we will know that He is the LORD; those who hope in him will not be disappointed.” [v. 23b]
