The Mother Clothed with the Sun

(artwork by Anna K. Cole)

"The Mother Clothed with the Sun"
Alison Longstaff
Pentecost Sunday, May 11th, 2008
Church of the Good Shepherd
Acts 2: 1-4, Rev 12: 1-9,13-16

Well, I set myself a tall order when I accepted the preaching gig for today. There are three themes going on for us this week: first, it is Mother’s Day, which though secular, does have certain spiritual overtones; this is also Pentecost Sunday, which is celebrated throughout most of the Christian world and is considered the birthday of the Christian church; and finally, in connection to the birth of Christianity and uniquely Swedenborgian, we are beginning the build up toward the birthday of the New Church which happens in just over a month, and which Swedenborgians celebrate on the 19th day of June.

So, how do I combine Pentecost—with it’s rushing winds and tongues of fire—with gentle, loving Mothers’ Day and June 19th?

For me, the logical way to tie all of it together is with the image of the woman clothed with the Sun. In the text from the book of Revelation this woman gives birth, which makes her a mother—a mother clothed with the sun, making her perhaps one of the most beautiful mothers found in the Bible. She is clothed with the sun, which means (in Swedenborgian terms) that she radiates love. The natural sun is pure fire, and it represents God’s love to us: the same love that filled the disciples at Pentecost and urged them to go out and spread this love throughout the world. That is why tongues of fire appeared above their heads. They were lit from within by God’s love for the human race and all of creation. And that is why they could speak in every language, because God’s love crosses all cultural barriers and longs to sweep all peoples into his loving embrace.

So, who is this Mother Clothed with the sun, and what meaning does she convey? To start with, she probably represents the same thing that all princesses, damsels, and wise women represent in all the fairy tales—she represents all that is soft and beautiful, nurturing and life-giving in the human spirit. She represents all the gentleness, compassion, and tenderness that typify the archetypal Mother. No, we flesh and blood mothers never achieve such a perfection of gently beauty. We are clumsy and goofy and we get zits. We have PMS and bad hair days, and each of us has our emotional and spiritual stuff that we have to work through—which means we often fall seriously short of motherly perfection. But that’s not the point. We still honour motherhood, today and every day, for the loving care our mothers did achieve, and for that incredible, God-given, self-sacrificing love that we have all seen and long for and cherish in our human community.

In Swedenborg’s writings we discover that this Mother clothed with the Sun represents "the church." But be careful: "church" here does not mean the specific religious group we belong to or even more abstractly, organized Christian religion. The Mother clothed with the sun represents the great collective of all the good people on the earth who are trying to live good and conscientious lives. This collective crosses all denominational boundaries. And any one group that claims they are IT, has missed the boat. In particular, the woman clothed with the sun represents all those people who are able to incubate, nurture and give birth to a healthy, living understanding of what it means to live a life according to God’s Word, which means God’s love. Sometimes, that is you and me. And most specifically, this woman represents God’s love. She radiates such love that the only way to describe her is "clothed with the sun." Have you looked at the sun lately? It can be blinding in its brilliance.

So, in our story from Revelation we have a beautiful damsel in distress, she is in labour, which is probably the most vulnerable time ever in a woman’s life. And right then a dragon appears! (I hate it when that happens)—a big red one with seven heads and ten horns. This dragon’s sole intent is to eat up the tiny new baby. That’s just creepy. What is this dragon doing in God’s Word? What message is it telling us about our human struggle to become loving people? This dragon is identified as "Satan" which in Hebrew means "Tempter" or "Adversary." The dragon represents all the things that distract us from God’s love and make us afraid. The dragon is a natural side-effect of being born not omniscient, not omnipotent, and not omnipresent. We can’t help it. We just get afraid. We worry about things, and then we try to control things and manipulate people so that we won’t be hurt. And we tend to invent formulas and rules and we think they will be our salvation. We are scared of the dark, and we line up our defences so we’ll be safe. We can’t help but be sure that there is a monster under the bed. We are afraid to trust God. We are afraid to love. Loving can feel WAY too vulnerable.
God knew this is what we would do, and that’s why the dragon is in the story. It’s not a warning; it is just what we do while we are learning. The dragon continues to be in the story and cause problems until it is no longer in the story. Eventually we stop being afraid and we stop trying to control things and we open up to love. God knows this will happen too. That is why the dragon disappears from the story, never to be seen again. The dragon never wins. In the end, fear never wins.

There are many theories out in the world about this dragon, with most of them full of fear, and asserting that this dragon is or will be some specific earthly organisation at a set time in history doing some bad things. *Sigh.* The eternal and timeless nature of God’s love and God’s Word is never so limited and specific. God’s Word speaks to all humans of all time, and is uniquely designed to do so. No one story, not even one abstruse and fantastical prophecy in the Bible is secretly about helicopters or bar codes or which nation controls the land west of the Jordan river. God’s Word is incapable of being so limited. The Bible is about spiritual human dynamics. It is about the individual journey of the human heart towards God. It is about our struggle to learn to trust God and trust the process. We don’t need to be afraid of any story in the Bible. Even the number 666, or "the mark of the beast" is simply describing the nature of religion when it stops teaching love. When we are loving, we embody the best of what is human. But when we forget compassion and loving-kindness, when we think we need to be afraid and to judge and to make religion about rules and a certain lifestyle, we look more like a beast. We become inhuman. The number 666 is a simple spiritual representation of "getting it all wrong." 666 means we completely missed the boat. *Buzzer sound* "Try again. " And the beauty is, we can.

Yes, sometimes we are the beast. Sometimes we are the dragon, but God’s plan is for each of us eventually, finally, and completely to become a part of the enormous, beautiful, blindingly radiant woman clothed with the sun.

So, in our story, right on cue, the brave knight shows up to rescue the princess, or in this case, to rescue the new mother. There is a great battle with swords and everything. Swords are "truth" or in this case remembering that love and compassion are the heart of the life of religion. You and I battle the dragon with our swords when we hold fast to the thought, "I am to treat each person with loving respect because he or she is a child of God." Period. The dragon and his thinking would say something like: "There are the right sort of people and the wrong sort of people. I don’t respect the wrong sort because they believe such-and-such, or they wear such-and-such, or they like such-and-such.... Those people are the problem and I am okay so long as I reject them." I would guess we’ve all been on both the giving as well as on the receiving end of such an attitude from time to time. It is no fun. It does not feel good. It does not feel like God.
Fortunately, the dragon has no power over God’s love. It is finally cast out of "heaven" in the story, which means we eventually really, really learn that the fearful, judging way of doing religion doesn’t produce heaven in our lives. We really get that it doesn’t belong anywhere near heaven. That is when the dragon is cast out of heaven.

This arc in the Bible that tells the story of the Mother clothed with the Sun and the Great Red Dragon has a sort of muddled, repetitive nature to it. It seems like the dragon is cast out for good, only to show up again and make more problems. There’s something familiar-sounding in that. Isn’t that how it so often goes in our lives? We think we’ve licked something, and then it shows up again in a slightly new form and all the trouble starts again. That’s just the way things go on this epic journey. It’s not our fault. It’s the shape of things. Maybe it’s in the Bible, not to tell us we are losers, but to give us heart.

Remember, the Bible is also the story of the journey Jesus made on his path from human infant to Divine Human. That means even Jesus had to battle this spiritual dragon, and it didn’t want to go away for him either. I think we see it when the devil promises him "Just bow down to me, and all the world will be yours." It must have been very tempting to want to simply force us all to be good—to take control, to remove the process and zap us all into instant perfection. We can be so slow to learn! And we do such horrible things to each other in the process! We did such horrible things to Jesus. He must have been tempted to simply eliminate all the struggling and pain and suffering.

But He also knew that to do that would not be the most loving thing, though that can be hard for us to understand. Eliminating the struggle for us also eliminates the overwhelming joy and triumph we will feel when we finally reach the end of the race. This spiritual journey is a marathon, and it is worth every drop of sweat and every ounce of stamina and patience and endurance. It draws these qualities out in us, and teaches us compassion. Good things take time. Very good things take a very long time. If it wasn’t worth the time it takes, God wouldn’t have created it the way it is.

So, on this lovely Mother’s Day, celebrate all the forms of love in your life. Honour everyone who has "mothered" you on your journey—old and young, male and female. Celebrate all the ways this church and others have been a spiritual mother to your spiritual life. And celebrate the good home this church has made—that we make for each other here by trying our best to be as fair and loving as we can be. And on this Pentecost Sunday, let the love of God so shine in your life, that you—that we all—can be clothed with the sun, if only for a little while.
God’s blessing on us all on this Pentecost, Mother’s day Sunday. Amen.

"Though the human body is born complete in one moment, the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process. It is being birthed in every experience of your life. Everything that happens to you has the potential to deepen you. All the possibilities of your human destiny are asleep in your soul. You are here to realize and honour these possibilities."
-John O’Donohue- Anam Cara (pp 6,9)