This is a sermon I preached at my beloved Trinity Church of Austin over a year ago, and then I preached a similar version at Lakeshore Baptist Church in Waco several months back. I had forgotten that I never posted it here! The sermon was originally part of a series of sermons by women in the congregation on the theme: The Stories That Shaped Us. In it I was able to tie together the strands of my experience to explain how I came to be who I am: reverend, mother, doula. It’s highly autobiographical, with a bit of God-talk thrown in here and there. It is, after all, a sermon.

In the sermon I reference a passage from the beautifully gut-wrenching article, Mothers as Makers of Death, and the Biblical passage describing the strange meeting between the devout man Simeon and the baby Jesus and his parents (Luke 2:25-35). At this meeting Simeon is so overcome with emotion that he composes the Nunc dimittis, a song which has been a bedrock of Christian prayer since the 4th century . You don’t have to go read these texts to understand my words here, but both are worth your time.

Below is the audio recording from Trinity, for those of you who like listening, and the written version, for those who like reading. They don’t match exactly, because sermons are like that. I type mine all out, word-for-word how I plan to say it, but then when I actually say it out loud in a house of God, sometimes things go a little off manuscript. I blame the Spirit. But the recording and the text are mostly the same, so if you listen or if you read, you’ll get the idea of what I was trying to say. I hope you like it, and also learn something. ♡

Image from page 126 of "Legends of the Madonna, as represented in the fine arts. Forming the third series of Sacred and legendary art" (1852) https://flic.kr/p/oeBFWQ

This series is about stories that have shaped us. My story is:
I am a reverend. And a doula. And in between there I became a mother.
And it happened pretty much in that order: reverend, mother, doula.
I went to seminary—a Baptist seminary, Truett seminary at Baylor in Waco, because I was born and raised Baptist. Not sure why I went to seminary, really. I think I was looking for answers. Which I got, but maybe not the ones I was looking for.
I didn’t go to seminary thinking about being a preacher. The only preachers I’d ever heard had sermons with three points and a sports analogy, usually football-related. There was also usually some shouting involved. And I don’t like shouting.
So, the first time I ever heard a woman preach—and she spoke in her normal woman voice, and told a story, and used zero sports analogies—I was blown away. I realized for the first time that I could do that, and better yet, I wanted to.
But, while Truett is a moderate Baptist seminary, where women were encouraged to take preaching classes, when it came time to graduate, we were not offered the same opportunities as our male classmates in finding church ministry positions. There are certainly Baptist churches out there with female clergy—the church I attend in Waco is one. But these churches are few and far between.
At the same time I was getting ready to graduate, I got connected with a tiny United Church of Christ congregation outside of Waco who were looking for a pastor. With me and the UCC, it was love at first sight. A denomination that didn’t bat an eye at ordaining women and/or LGBT ministers? A place where I could simply do the work of ministry that I felt called to, without constantly having to fight and justify my place at the table? Sign me up!
For five years I pastored that congregation. They ordained me. They loved me. They taught me a TON about how church families are not so different from biological families. There’s a lot of dysfunction, but also a lot of love, which *usually* is sufficient to smooth over the rough spots. They hosted my wedding to my dear husband whom I met while I was their pastor. And then after a while, it was time to move on.
Now, I didn’t always know I wanted to be a pastor or a doula, but I always knew I wanted to be a mom. My husband is 8 years younger than I am. I was 33 when we got married, he was 25. Bless his heart—he still wanted to marry me when I told him I didn’t want to use birth control from day one. I knew that my mother and my sister had had miscarriages—I know now (but I didn’t then) that 1 in 4 women will experience miscarriage in their lives. 1 in 4. But many women never talk about it. Chances are good that one of the women next to you or in front of you or behind you today has lost a baby they wanted very much. May we all offer grace to one another, not knowing what hidden grief another person carries.
I didn’t want to wait and increase my risk not being able to get pregnant. I know now (but I didn’t then) that 1 in 8 couples will experience infertility. And we ended up being one of those 8. Every month I didn’t get pregnant was a crushing blow.
In this period of trying, we moved to The Netherlands, where we both started working on two-year Master’s degree programs. We figured if it hadn’t happened by the time we moved home, we would look into our options then. And then, I found out I was expecting. Surprise! Joy! And then I realized I’d be giving birth in a strange land and have to learn to navigate a medical care system that was foreign to me.
But this is where I got SUPER LUCKY. The Netherlands defaults to a midwifery model of care. Pregnant people are attended by highly skilled midwives who are fully integrated into the medical care system, unless there is a complication that requires the care of an OB. I had no idea about the tremendous benefits that midwifery care offers, but I soaked it all in, gratefully.
And then after the baby is born, every single parent in The Netherlands gets a postpartum care worker WHICH IS PAID FOR BY INSURANCE. For free, a woman came to my house every day for a week to check on me and my new baby, do household tasks that needed doing so I could spend all my time healing and bonding with my baby and figuring out how to breastfeed her. That woman was a source of strength for me in a very vulnerable time. I will always be indebted to her.
Not just for how well she supported me, but because she, and my midwives, and my prenatal yoga class—all of these women together showed me a new way.
Becoming a mother is terrifying, but it also can be empowering. I had never known this was possible.
But once I knew, I didn’t want to keep this information to myself. After we moved back to the US, I became a doula, because I knew that American mothers were not getting the kind of support that I had benefitted from in The Netherlands. And I wanted to do what I could to change that.
So for those of you who are asking yourselves, “A do-what? What did she say she became?” A doula is a person who works with new and expecting families, giving them informational, emotional, and physical support.
A birth doula provides prenatal support and actually attends the birth itself—but not as a medical professional. Doulas are not midwives, though lots of people get us confused with them. We are also not just for home births. In fact, in the over 100 births I have attended, not one has been a homebirth. The vast majority have been in hospitals, with OBs attending to the birthgiver’s medical needs, while I provide guidance and empathy, grounding and love. It’s an amazing job.
In addition to birth doulas, there are also postpartum doulas (and many doulas, like myself, do both)—who do what that Dutch woman did for me—come into the home in the months following a birth, and nurture the birthgiver, so that the parents can focus on bonding with their new baby.
A doula provides informational, emotional, and physical support to new and expecting families. And to that list I would add spiritual support—after all, I *am* a pastor at heart. And new mothers NEED spiritual support.
We are so tempted to gloss over how heavy it is to give birth. It is physically and emotionally and spiritually grueling to carry and birth a baby, and whether the baby came out through her vagina or her belly, that sort of experience is not something to “bounce back” from. And yet that is what we expect from mothers, that they jump right back to the life they left, only now with stretch marks and a newborn.
Did you know that the United States is the only industrialized nation NOT to provide any sort of paid leave for mothers?
Do you know what that does? It erases us. It erases our experience. It makes the public policy assertion that we do not need support. We are FINE. We can go right back to work a couple of weeks after giving birth, because nothing all that important has just happened here. Move along people. There’s nothing to see.
We see what we want to see when it comes to new mothers, and we as a society do not want to see anything below the surface. Let’s stick to the pastels and the perfect nursery. And if any hint of misery should rise up to the surface, let’s be quick with the assertion that “All that matters is a healthy baby.”
Which, by the way, is one of my biggest pet peeves. Please, for the love of all that is holy, do not say this to a newly postpartum parent, ever. Yes, it matters that the baby is healthy. But how the mother is treated matters, too. How she feels MATTERS.
In the non-scripture reading I selected for today, the author wrote (and we heard read to us before):
The conversations I had with other new mothers stayed strictly within the bounds of the list: blankets, diapers, creams. Every conversation I had was the wrong conversation. No other mother congratulated me and then said: I’m overcome by the blackest of thoughts. You?
These sentences resonated with me deeply, because in my own experience as a new mother and in facilitating support groups for new mothers, these are the conversations new mothers are DESPERATE to have with one another, with anyone who wants to really listen, really see who they are and who are willing to plumb the depths of what they are feeling. And so, every chance I get, I provide space for a mother to pour out what is in her heart, no matter how dark or scary it may sound.
Because as scary as it sounds, mothers *are* makers of death. We know how it feels to have a piece of ourselves walking around in the world, open to any harm that may blow through. And our children are actual, literal pieces of ourselves—I tell my children all the time: I MADE you. I created every bit of you in my womb, so you better believe I get to tell you what to do.
Mary the mother of Jesus knew this, just as much as, maybe even more than any new mother. I mean, a lot of stuff had already happened with her—a visit from an angel, that donkey ride while extremely pregnant, giving birth in a barn, and then those smelly shepherds showing up out of nowhere before she’d even stopped bleeding.
So now, when she and Joseph head into the Temple to present the baby Jesus to the Lord, she is probably not even surprised when some really old guy asked to hold him and then burst into song. But then I wonder whether she was surprised at his last remark to her. Really in an almost offhand way, he tosses out this statement: “and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”
Most (almost exclusively male) Bible commentators have no idea what to do with this statement. They remark on how it doesn’t seem to fit with what came before, and offer a couple of half hearted suggestions on what it might mean, but ultimately shrug their shoulders and move on to the verses they can make head or tails of.
But when I read that line, I knew EXACTLY what it meant. It meant the same thing to Mary as it means to every new mother. We are run through with the terror, the blackness, the sure knowledge that this beautiful and precious baby that we just brought into the world, will die. And there is not a damn thing we can do about it. It stops us in our tracks and breaks our hearts into pieces.
As Claudia Day wrote: “This is why mothers don’t sleep…This is why mothers don’t look away from their children. This is why, even with a broken heart, a mother will bring herself back to life.”
And we do. At least we try to. Not every mother is able to overcome the blackness. The weight is too heavy, especially when there is no one near who will help carry this load.
Did you know that 1 in 7 new mothers experience postpartum depression? Did you know that 1 in 10 dads do? Because it is not just hormonal. It is also situational, and being a new parent rocks your socks, shakes you to your core.
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My doula business name is revdoula. Which is weird, and a lot of people don’t get it. They think the rev stands for revolutionary, not reverend. And I purposefully leave it a bit ambiguous, because I would love to participate in a revolution in the way we treat mothers. I am part of that fight.
But ultimately, I named my business revdoula because I wanted to try to pull these two halves of my story together, to weave together my advocacy for mothers and my theological reflection on birth-giving.
Because each of us have participated in this act, the act of birth. Not all of us are mothers, true. But every single one of us has a mother, who gave birth to us. Who carried us, created us, and brought us into the world.
And I believe that each one of us can learn something about who God is, and how She relates to us, by reflecting on birth. I believe we begin to learn about who God is from the very beginning, from the moment of our own births. For good or for bad, we form beliefs about who God is based on how our mothers nurtured us, from the very beginning of our lives.
And so is there any more important work for us, as people of faith, who want every soul to know they are loved by God, than to support the mothers in our midst? If we can show love—by ensuring that they get the care they need, physically, emotionally, spiritually—as they make the rocky passage into motherhood, then not only will that woman benefit, but her child will know from the very first moments of life, the nurturing and enfolding love of Mother God through her. Everybody wins.
And you don’t need to be a reverend or a doula to do that. You just have to have eyes to see the struggle that every. single. mother. is going through, no matter how much she tries to put on a brave face. You just have to make room in your conversation with her for her to feel safe enough to share the fears she harbors in her heart.
You also have to recognize that the structure of maternity care in the US is not what it should be, and you have to join the fight (dare I say, the revolution?) to bring more humane and compassionate care to birth-givers and to the tender, vulnerable months afterward.
Any one of us can do that. And every one of us should. Amen.