God is a Midwife
A Sermon
When I was in college I decided that I wanted to be a midwife. I was obsessed with reading birth stories and midwifery memoirs. I served on the board of a birth center. I spent many hours at the Missouri capital lobbying for legal midwives. And eventually, finally, I got to be in the room when a woman gave birth.
It was four in the morning in the north Georgia mountains. A woman labored quietly but powerfully in her home, with her partner at her side. Her watchful midwife hovered nearby. At just the right time this mother delivered her child from her womb to the world. The sun rose with a new soul suddenly among us, and I knew I would never be the same.
I went on to become a nurse, a doula, a midwife’s assistant, and a lactation consultant. And about five years after that formative experience in Georgia, I birthed my own baby into my midwife’s waiting hands, and God dwelt among us.
Last week I talked about the importance of a humble posture, and today I will focus on God’s relationship with our pain. Last Sunday I spoke of the Holy Spirit as a Laboring Mother on the brink of delivering her infant, the new Church, and I suggested that collectively we are the Spirit’s midwife. But the metaphor works the other way around, too. Imagine with me this morning that we are the ones in labor, in pain, and God is our midwife.
The word “midwife” means “with woman,” and that’s what midwives do: they are with you through it all. They empower and guide, safeguard and witness, but they do not save. Midwives facilitate the birth process, but they don’t — they can’t — take the pain away. They don’t “deliver” babies; their clients do. They are trained professionals who, like physicians, monitor the health of parent and baby, and who can manage a cord around a baby’s neck or stop a postpartum hemorrhage. But they mostly rely on the power of presence to bring babies earth-side.
Many of us were raised with the idea that God is essentially an obstetrician or an anesthesiologist — a deity who delivers us from our trials, or who takes away our pain. We were told that God is an interventionist. Someone who shows up and takes charge. A savior who is good, sure, but primarily powerful.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this view. It’s only natural to hope that God can save us from our pain. On the Mount of Olives, even Jesus asked God to spare him from the crucifixion — “Father, take this cup of suffering away from me.” But God did not take the cup away from Jesus, and the supposedly interventionist God has been quite disappointing in my journey, too. I became a Christian in a very conservative context which posited that God is omnipotent and utterly sovereign over everything, down to who is destined for salvation & who for condemnation. I was told God was like an obstetrician who could perform life-saving c-sections, but I’ve never seen him left a scalpel. I was taught that he was a cosmic anesthesiologist who could rescue me from overwhelming pain, but so many times I cried out for his epidural, and he just stood there.
I’ve watched a woman die in childbirth. I’ve miscarried a pregnancy into a Walgreens toilet. I’ve held my sobbing friend at her child’s funeral. And what of slavery? The Holocaust? 9/11? COVID? The genocide and famine in Gaza?
You live in this world long enough, you’re going to feel pain. At some point you might experience excruciating pain. It makes all the difference in the world whether or not you see God as capable of removing your pain. Because eventually you will ask, or at least hope, that God would make the pain stop — and the pain won’t stop. What then? Is God all-powerful but can’t be bothered to intervene in our misery? Or is God a midwife?
In today’s Scripture we observe that the psalmist initially approaches God like an interventionist who just doesn’t care. “Why are you so far from saving me — so far from my anguished groans?” The psalmist laments. “Are you indifferent, above it all, leaning back on the cushions of Israel’s praise?” Then, midway through the psalm, the author changes his tune, seeing God instead as a faithful, abiding presence. “…She didn’t despise or detest the suffering of the one who suffered. She didn’t hide Her face…No, She listened when I cried out to Her for help.”
When Jesus the Rabbi quoted this psalm on the cross, I think he was experiencing the same spiritual journey the psalmist had traversed before him. I imagine Mary standing near the cross, and drawing her breath in when she heard her baby cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” She knew the Scriptures well too, and while watching Jesus labor, she likely remembered quoting this psalm in her own labor. Perhaps she continued the recitation of it as Jesus lost the breath to continue: “And to think you were midwife at my birth, setting me at my mother’s breasts! When I left the womb you cradled me; since the moment of birth you’ve been my God.” Mary would have recalled, as mothers do, that it felt like labor would never end. Of course her labor did end, and Jesus knew his would as well. As part of his farewell discourse in the Gospel of John, Jesus likens himself to a woman in labor, and tells his disciples that he will birth joy from pain. I imagine that Mary and Jesus, mother and son, were together embracing a deeper theology that only emerges when the obstetrician god has failed and died: the Divine is a midwife.
This is not a sentimental journey in which the psalmist, the Christ, or anyone simply levels up their belief system, like installing the latest update on your iPhone. It is a brutal ordeal, an agonizing birth, a crucifixion. You will feel pain more intense than you can fathom. And you will become angry, even enraged, with the deity or people you think can save you.
My husband felt angry with our midwives during my labor with our oldest child. He told me afterwards that when he’d felt helpless to relieve my pain, he’d look at our midwives and think, ‘Do something! Don’t let her suffer like this!’ But my midwives did a lot. They stayed with me continuously. They whispered encouraging words. They monitored my health and my baby’s well-being. They prayed for me. They suggested position changes to speed up my labor. They showed me how to make my pain an ally instead of an enemy. They caught my baby when he finally came out, and they placed him right on my chest.
We are not accustomed to this kind of support, and we need to get mad at the assumed interventionist before we can come around to the gift of a midwife, the gift of presence instead of relief. Researcher and author Brene Brown once said, “I hoped faith would be an epidural for pain. Turns out to be a midwife who says ‘Push. I’m here. Sometimes it hurts.’”
Don’t misunderstand me — not all pain is purposeful. Not all pain results in a healthy baby or a resurrected Jesus. If you are experiencing abuse of any kind, please seek help. This isn’t a sermon about white-knuckling it through horrors or glorifying trauma. This is a sermon about viewing God’s interaction with your pain differently. And if you are currently having it out with the interventionist god, and you aren’t ready for God the Midwife, please, keep yelling at the god who isn’t relieving your pain! The psalmist and Jesus give you full permission. It’s an important part of the process.
My process, after many years of yelling, has led me to conclude that God Herself is not the seat of power, but a mirror who reveals that the seat of power has always existed within us. God is not in the business of saving. Not because She won’t, because She can’t. That’s not how divinity works. Divinity is not found in the hoarding of power but in the divestment from it! In the book of Mark Jesus gets aggravated with his disciples for fighting about who will have the most power in his new kingdom. He tells them, I know you’re used to rulers who show off their authority and order people around. They let power go to their heads. BUT THATS NOT HOW I ROLL AND ITS NOT GONNA BE HOW YOU ROLL. You wanna be great? Be a servant. “… for the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve & to give his life to liberate many people.”
And the Tao Te Ching, a sixth century Chinese text, says of midwives, “You are a birth servant. Do good without show or fuss. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge. When the baby is born, they will rightly say: ‘We did it ourselves!'”
This is what I know: God doesn’t have drugs, and God doesn’t do surgery. But She is a birth servant. She wipes our brows, and squeezes our hands, and holds our hair back when we vomit. She’s with us, whether the outcome is joyful or horrendous. And She never forsakes us.
When I was in early labor with my second child, I texted a good friend who had just given birth herself ten days prior. I complained about the pain of my contractions and I joked, “You do it for me.” She laughed because of course she couldn’t, though she understood the longing! What is obvious about childbirth is less obvious about faith: No one can do it for you. Not even God.
That labor was really hard. I never cried, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” But I did use all the curse words, and I let out many anguished groans, and I said, “I can’t do this anymore!” And my midwife looked at me with tenderness and awe, reminded me that I was already doing it, and she stuck by me til the end.
By the way, my husband was not annoyed, let alone angry, with our midwives during my second labor and birth. He was my rock throughout: he put counter-pressure on my back, and took walks with me, and slow danced with me, but he knew by that point that I was my own savior. He’d become not only a believer in midwifery, but a midwife himself.
About eighteen hours after I texted my friend that she should do my labor for me, my daughter was born in a compound presentation — she came out with her elbow bent over her head. I screamed bloody murder. My midwife couldn’t fix it, but she validated it. She couldn’t save me, but she helped me save myself.
Midwife isn’t only a noun, it’s a verb. And it’s not only who God is, it’s what God does. It’s a way of being. It’s a way of relating. With woman. God with us. The Divine Midwife has no narcotics, no forceps. But She never, ever abandons birthing people. Amen.