Are you my mother?

by Robert Mohns

P.D. Eastman once wrote a classic children’s reader entitled Are You My Mother? Perhaps you are familiar with the work. It’s about a newly hatched bird whose mother left him for a time. The story follows the little chick’s adventure to discover who his mother is. The story ends on a happy note with mother and chick reunited.

The Apostle Paul came across a Christian community in the province of Galatia that seemed to be suffering from identity dysphoria. At first, they had heard and received the Gospel, but then they returned to their former slavery under the Law. In the fourth chapter of his letter, Paul uses the allegory of Abraham’s wife Sarai and his concubine, Hagar, and the child each bore to explain the disconnect.

St. Paul writes: “These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” (Galatians 4:24-26).

St. Paul wanted the Christians of his day, and us in our day, to know that our true spiritual mother is the Holy Christian Church. Martin Luther, in his Lectures on Galatians, reminds Christians that “Sarah, or Jerusalem, our free mother, is the church, the bride of Christ who gives birth to all. She goes on giving birth to children without interruption until the end of the world, as long as she exercises the ministry of the Word, that is, as long as she and propagates the Gospel; for this is what it means for her to give birth.”

These are timely words for us in our day and our struggles with identity dysphoria. We are not to look to the base things of this world for our identity. Again, Luther teaches in his Sermons on the Gospel of St. John : “If you want salvation, you need different parents, who will bring you to heaven. This Christ does. By means of Baptism and the Word of God He places you and your Christianity into the lap of our dear mother, the Christian Church. This He accomplished through His suffering and death that by virtue of His death and blood we might live eternally.”

Are you my mother? The question is profound, as is the answer. Against the great plague of identity dysphoria we live in today, and the tremendous anxiety and despair it has wreaked upon us, Christians bear witness to a true and certain hope: “I know who my mother is.” She is the One, Holy Christian Church. She has given birth to me, through Holy Baptism and sustains me with the pure spiritual milk of the Gospel throughout all the days of my life. Though I cannot see her now, for she is spiritual and invisible, my Lord has provided physical and real signs of her presence in Holy Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the communion of the saints so that even the youngest one of us can see and understand.

In Jesus Christ and His Holy Bride our identity is made clear and certain. We are God’s holy children. We live and move and have our being out of our identity as God’s children. We grow up from childhood, go about our various vocations, and marry and beget children out of this identity, baptizing them that they too may be children of God. And so, the generations pass one after another with one Lord and Father of us all and one mother, the Holy Christian Church. And the family of God grows and expands.

In this life, and with our earthbound eyes, we see crumbling church spires, and declining, decaying, and failing churches. We see our earthbound identities challenged and attacked, and eventually the earthbound things of our identity will disappear. But our identity as God’s children remains.

The Scriptures urge us to keep our eyes focused on things above and not on earthly things. They warn us not to become distracted or confounded; nor to walk away from our Lord Jesus Christ or our mother, the Christian Church; nor to forsake our identity as God’s children. We need not seek after another mother or another identity. We have our true mother, the Holy Christian Church, and our true identity is found in Christ alone. He now lives in us and we in Him.

With our Saviour and with His bride, the Holy Christian Church, we offer up endless songs of praise and fervent intercession that we might be kept in true faith in Christ and live in the womb of our mother, the Church. We pray that many more brothers and sisters might be born anew into a living hope and eternal life as children of God, within the womb of the Christian Church.

Rev. Robert Mohns is Lutheran Church–Canada (LCC)'s West Regional Pastor.