Easter 6

Loving, mothering God, it was you who formed my inward parts;

    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

    Your works are wonderful, and I know it well. Amen

Mothering God

                      Happy Mother’s Day to all of you — to all of us. Mother’s Day is a time to celebrate God’s nurturing, all-loving power, especially as we watch Mother Earth’s great work of spring. Through God’s good grace, life bursts forth — budding, sprouting, hatching, birthing, greening, blooming, and growing, from Mother Earth’s fertile womb — breeding lilacs out of the dead land, as T.S. Eliot writes. It’s just true that not all of us had a happy childhood or a good relationship with our biological mother, and that others grieve their mothers now and still. 

           Yet each of us — no matter who we are — can pray for, look out for, and BE the mothering love that we all need for each other. This is God’s tender, nurturing message for us, today and every day. Despite its obvious physiological connection to pregnancy and childbearing, mothering is not automatically linked to gender, age, or biological relationship. Nurturing and caring for life is loving, mothering activity — done by mothers — regardless of their actual gender, age, or biological role. Mother’s Day is celebrated in about 14 countries, including the United States, on the second Sunday in May. France is on its own on the last Sunday in May. 

           Mother’s Day is a fairly recent and largely secular observance that grew out of Anna Jarvis’s early 20th century work to honor her own mother’s to improve public health and sanitary conditions, reduce infant mortality, and support soldiers on both sides of the Civil War.  Anna Jarvis’s original vision was personal: a day to honor and thank one’s own mother. Some of you may be familiar with Mothering Sunday, celebrated in the UK and Ireland on the fourth Sunday in Lent. While Mother’s Day and Mothering Sunday are celebrated in many of the same ways today, Mothering Sunday is older and distinctly Christian, rooted in medieval England. The fourth Sunday in Lent was a day to return home to your “mother church,” the place of your baptism that nurtured and formed you from infancy. Over time, Mothering Sunday became a rare Sunday off for servants and workers to visit their families, giving the day a warmer, personal feel, although it was still deeply rooted in the church. 

           Even though Mother’s Day and Mothering Sunday are now celebrated in many of the same personal, family-based ways, Mothering Sunday’s origin — the idea of renewing our connection to our mother church — helps us see that mothering, nurturing, loving, and caring are active, holy verbs — the very activity of God. People who mother, regardless of relative age, gender, or biological relation, have compassion. They see and serve another person’s needs and pain just as surely as a mother kisses a hurt and makes it all better. People who mother are servant leaders, and God means for us to notice this! As we read from Acts this morning,

          In God we live and move and have our being, For we too are God’s offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. We are God’s offspring, made in God’s image. 

           So what does God look like? Clearly not like gold, or silver, or stone, or any image formed by the art and imagination of mortals, as our Acts reading makes clear. We don’t have to stand next to one another for close comparison to see we don’t look alike. Even if we look at two people of the same race and gender, from roughly the same culture, of similar age and even professional experience, we don’t look one bit alike, and yet we know we are each made in God’s image. So if God’s image is not our physical appearance — our height, weight, age, race, gender, or sartorial choices — what is God’s image? 

           I believe God’s image is in how we live and move and have our being, as the reading from Acts affirms. God’s image is in gracious, compassionate service given in humility, empathy, and kindness. Living and moving in God’s image isn’t about doing things the easy way. It’s about being your best self and living your best life — telling the truth, and always being kind. Scripture tells us that loving, nurturing, mothering activity is God’s own work. God’s love is deeply maternal, and God’s faithfulness is like a mother’s love. It is no accident that we see maternal images of God throughout scripture! We are meant to see God’s essential compassion, mercy, service, and tender love, not only in love incarnate — Jesus — but throughout the Hebrew Bible and the poetry of the psalms. God says in Isaiah 49:15:

Can a woman forget her nursing child,

    or show no compassion

for the child of her womb?

Even these may forget,

    yet I will not forget you.

In Isaiah 66:13, God says:

As a mother comforts her child,

    so I will comfort you;

    you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

In 1 Thessalonians 2:7, the Apostle Paul says:

  though we might have made demands as apostles                                   

 of Christ, we were                         

  gentle among you,

 like a nurse tenderly caring         

 for her own children.

And in Luke 13:34, Jesus laments:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings... .

Our gospel reading today gets to the heart of this kind of tough, loving, unglamorous, selfless, simple service:  If you love me, you will keep my commandments.  What are Jesus’ commandments? They are a mother’s tough love: to love God with all their heart, mind, and strengthen, and to love one another as God loves each one of us. Hillel the Elder, a 10th century rabbi, summed it up this way: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation. Keeping God’s commandments means practicing — every single day — the selfless kind of nurturing, loving, caring, mothering activity done by God’s own self. 

           Keeping Jesus’ commandment to love one another means always trying your best to do the NEXT kind thing, good thing, honest thing, fair thing, and right thing. Even when it’s difficult, even when you don’t want to, and even when others wish you wouldn’t. Keeping Jesus’ commandment to love one another means doing the kind of selfless, difficult, sometimes thankless motherly work that Jesus himself did, even standing up for what he knew was right when everyone wished he wouldn’t — and dying on the cross for his beliefs.  

           Look right and look left. I think you’ll see in each other examples of God’s own holy, loving, motherly, life-giving care wherever you turn. I think of all of our nurses — Valerie, Deb V., Deb D., Jackie, Margaret, Danielly, Kate, Lorraine, Caroline and others whose life work is caring, and who now nurture our community in countless ways. And what about our teachers, tailors, doctors, fixers of things, settlers of accounts, cooks and all helpers, and participants in all ways in hospitality of all kinds? This is the activity of our loving, mothering God, a love looks like effort, curiosity, patience, sacrifice, prayer, and a thousand hidden acts of mercy. Mother’s Day reminds us that God’s very nature is love. Amen