C, Pentecost 13 Proper 16 - Psalm 71:5-6 "Pregnant Mummy Tummies"

Pregnant tummies are to be prized. They are the cause of much joy, excitement, and mystery for the expectant parents and family. Pregnant ladies take on a beauty all of their own as God calls them and their husbands into his special role as co-creators; bringing fragile life into a world of great happiness, deep sorrows, enjoyment and frustration, testings, temptations, trials, and times of affirmation, peace and appreciation. Unlike my belly, which is far from pretty, and has come about due to my sinful human nature, the pregnant tummy is a blessing from God.

One only has to be alongside those who yearn to bear children but cannot to know what great a gift it is to be the parent of a life in this world.

God often places many other gifts in the lives of those who can’t bear children, be it because they are called to be celibate and single, or because there is an underlying medical of physiological issue which inhibits them from conceiving and carrying a foetus to full term.

Nevertheless, some still struggle accepting why they have been spared the parental gift of being co-creators of God.

This might be the case because there’s a perception shared amongst those struggling to have children and those with many. The assumption is family is only complete and fulfilled once children are found in the home. But there are a couple of reasons why this is just not true.

The obvious might be testified to by the many parents who know from experience that family often goes in to chaos with children in the picture. Mums of newborns might feel anything but fulfilled when sleep deprivation makes the eyelids feel as though they are going to fall off their faces from tiredness. Or, parents are duly tested by toddlers’ tantrums and defiance at being parented.

But there's a theological reason for wrongly assuming family is only complete once children are born. When God placed Adam and Eve in the garden, he had created husband and wife, and God saw what he had done was not just good, but “very good”! God created family with two, a perfect unity, and children are an addition to what is already good.

Unfortunately, the perfect unity was lost rather quickly, after the first family failed to be faithful to God’s command not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It was only after this their first son Cain was born, and ever since the bearing of babies with God’s call to be fruitful and fill the earth, was tempered with the pain of labour, and the ultimate consequences of children fighting — the first murder, with the death of Abel at the hand of Cain.

The reality of having children in utero or in mischief outside the uterus often shows on a mother’s face. The radiance of youth and the freshness of face evident in those first couple of months of pregnancy when a woman’s body seems to glow from conception is soon overtaken by sleepless nights, the waddle walk, the pain of labour, and the tests of time thereafter.

A mother with babies at breast or bottle can be identified most easily as one with a constant dazed tired look on the face as she continues to bear her children long after they’ve left the womb. Added to this, most mums have the mental, emotional, and sometimes physical scars to prove it.

A valuable observation can be gleaned from the mother with baby on board, be it in the tummy or the child-seat in the back of the car. We Christians are the children of God and he continues to bear us and has so since conception; the conception of both creation and us. Like mothers, he also has the scars to prove it.

The Psalmist declares… For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth. Upon you I have leaned from before my birth; you are he who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you. (Psalm 71:5-6 ESV)

We have to be clear here! We have leaned on God from conception. The different English translations of this verse can miss the mark; most say the Psalmist has leaned on God from birth. But a more accurate reading would have us leaning on God in the womb, from before birth, as the original Hebrew states.

And this makes complete sense when we look at the reality of the relationship between a mother and her child. This relationship does not begin at birth! Both the mother and the child have a relationship that grows from the moment of conception. The foetus cannot exist without the mother, and the mother’s body immediately begins adapting to the presence of this new life, not just physically, but in many other ways too.

When a expectant mother is at the “waddle walk” stage, we might notice the mother rubbing the stomach, feeling the child move – a flutter within. But at times we might see mum holding her hands under the stomach to support it as the strain of the child’s growth stretches muscles and ligaments. It seems the flutters have now turned into a torrent of torturous tossing to and fro. Soon after the walls of the womb give way to the throws of child birth, and the child is seen for the first time face to face.

So too, like a mother, our Lord holds us. He is there with us from conception. The walls of the womb might insulate the child from the world, but not God’s word.

We know newborn babies are comforted by lying on mum – they are familiar with the sounds they once heard while in the womb. And not just the mother’s sounds! A baby in utero is also accustomed to the sounds of salvation, heard in the Word of God, when parents find themselves hearing or speaking aloud, the Word of God.

For we know… the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrew 4:12)

Surely the Word of God does this from the earliest development of our bodies! And we also hear from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians… In him you also (received the inheritance, or, were chosen), when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory. (Ephesians 1:13-14)

Therefore, we realise the importance of being in the Father’s presence to hear his word of comfort, just as a child hears and is comforted by the familiar sounds of its mother. In utero we hear not only our mother but also our Heavenly Father who gave us to our earthly mum and dad.

In addition to this God is with us through our lives. Just as our mothers never stop being our mums, God never stops being our Heavenly Father. From youth to old age God seeks to be your God, he wants to love you and care for you, even more than a loving mother.

God tells us in his Word that he is the founder and perfector of our faith (Hebrews 12:2), in other words he gives us our being as his children. He, like a pregnant mother, caries and undergirds us, but he also stays with us to the end. To the completion of our faith!

In fact, this completion of our faith is our death. Some think death is the end but it is really the beginning of life. This new life is a reality face to face with God. We who are carried by Christ are in a type of utero in this life, even outside our mother’s womb. At our death we will pass through a birth canal into the eternal light of God’s presence.

At the moment we can only hear his sounds, his Word, yet we trust him and know him as our Heavenly Parent. If we decide while living in the darkness of this womb type world that God is not our Heavenly Parent, and tear ourselves away from his protection, we sever our relationship with God.

Like a mother who loses her baby trough miscarriage, some make a decision to cast off God as a miscarriage of faith. And like a mother who’s lost a child, God too grieves over those who reject his care.

But for you and all who trust their baptism into him, he gives the Holy Spirit as a deposit or as a booster injection, which enables us to keep living as his children until it’s time for us to be taken into the eternal light of his presence.

So it is God’s will that like the Psalmist we too might proclaim… For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth. Upon you I have leaned from before my birth; you are he who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you. (Psalm 71:5-6 ESV) Amen.