Prayer of the Day
Pastor: It is Mother’s Day. Whether today brings you joy, grief or gratitude or a complicated mix of all three – you belong here. Let us worship together!
Today we give thanks to and for mothers everywhere. We give thanks for their love, care, concern, and compassion. We lift up especially those who have struggled in their roles as mothers, where the path has not been smooth. We pray for those whose mothers perhaps failed in any way. For those relationships that are strained, grant reconciliation. Where there is pain, bring the healing of Your grace and mercy.
All: We are a part of the family. We belong here.
Pastor: This week has been different for each of us; some of us have had happy news we want to celebrate; some of us have faced grief and need to cry.
All: We are members of God’s family. We belong here.
Pastor: Yet we all come to this same place; all of us seeking God’s presence in our lives.
All: Together we become God’s family. We are part of a family, the human family; the family of faith; our family of origin; the family of our choosing. We are the people of God. Together we are family. Let us worship God together. Amen.
The wise Desmond Tuto shared his dream:
Echoing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tuto writes, “God says to you, ‘I have a dream. Please help me to realize it.
It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts.
When there will be more laughter, joy, and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing.
I have a dream that my children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family, my family.’”
Gospel: John 14.15-21
15 ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
18 ‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. 19 In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.
Sermon: Mothering God.
I will not leave you orphaned, Jesus said.
I will not leave you alone.
This is how our God is. A God who stays, blesses, comforts, sees and hears us. A God who is like a good mother or a good father.
The good people in the old ancient metropolis of Athens where confessing on the inscription of an altar: “To an unknown God,” and Paul as the dedicated apostle of the first Church had to speak up.
According to Acts, Paul courageously and compassionately presented his God as a known God. Everything and anything but an unknown God.
A God who is known through his creation, who made the world and everything in it and who can not be contained in a shrine made by human hands.
A God known as the giver of every breath in every living creature.
A God known through the savior Jesus Christ, send into the broken world to repent, rebuild, reform, reunite and rebirth this world of us.
A God that is known as Jesus Christ. As the Creator. As the Spirit. The God that will not leave s orphaned. A God who is a good mother and a good father.
A God who will not leave us. That is the God we know, and believe in.
One of my greatest fears, when I was a little girl, was to lose my mom.
One of my greatest fears was that my sweet, loving and caring mom would die. My fear was that she would leave me, and I would be lost. One of my greatest fears was that I would become an orphan. A motherless child in a big scary world.
Because she was the center of my life.
The one getting me up in the mornings, serving me breakfast. She was either driving me to school or making sure that I was left on the bike on the right side of the road.
She prepared my lunch, which I sadly would not always enjoy and eat as I was always so busy playing, socializing and being a child.
She picked me up from school or waited at home for me and my siters to come home. Always there to greet us. Feed us. Comfort us. With home baked cookies or buns in the afternoon.
That sense of belonging in a family when I got home from school was fundamental to my childhood. I was so blessed that there was always someone there, when I came home: mostly my mom, or if not then my grandmothers. I was engulfed in motherly embrace.
And I was afraid to lose my mom.
From an early age I carried that fear with me. Because one of my earliest memories was of my dad wailing when his mother, my grandmother passed. My paternal grandmother lived just next to us. And one day when she was biking home from visiting her friends, she was struck by a truck and died. I was 5 years old, my dad 33. And my dad was weeping as were my beloved grandfather, my uncles and aunts, - and I had never seen or heard that before.
So, this sense of losing stayed with me: I too was afraid of losing my mom.
Many years passed, my sisters and I were blessed to have my mom for many fine years. Through childhood, adulthood, motherhood. We were blessed with a strong vibrant mother who not only continued to take good care of us and our children, - but also was the caretaker of my dad when he got Parkinson. Mom was a Mothering Mother, Wife and Grandmother.
It is almost a year ago, that she passed my beautiful mom. On a fine summer day, July 2, last year my mom passed away after some hard years of suffering with Parkinson and Alzheimer’s. My beloved caregiving Mother ended her life’s journey been the one receiving gentle care.
So, this is my first mother’s day for me without my mom. Without ordering flowers for my mom, calling her and making sure she knew how much we all loved her.
So, today I remember my mom like many of you. I still love her even if I lost her. She did not leave me orphaned but still in her love.
It is Mother’s Day. Whether today brings you joy, grief or gratitude or a complicated mix of all three – we celebrate Mother is and this celebration belongs here in this time of worship.
Because we believe in a Mothering God.
We will sing the beautiful hymn “Mothering God” after the sermon.
“Mothering God, you gave me birth in the bright morning of the world” the opening line proclaims.
This is yet another image of God that we can hold. The Good Shepherd. The Way. The Gate. The light. The Creator. Jesus. The mothering God.
A Mothering God is the image of God giving birth to everything: she births reality into existence: a cosmos, heaven and earth, each one of us. Everything and everyone that enters into existence comes from within Mothering God herself.
This image of God brings a certain intimacy into the relationship between creator and human. Between God and us.
A mother gives birth to one who is the flesh of her flesh, the blood of her blood, the spirit of her spirit. Her own flesh, blood and spirit are fundamental elements of the child she has birthed. The child is part of the mother, yet distinct from the mother. At birth, the child is separated from the mother yet inseparable from the mother.
It is mutual belonging. The child belongs to the mother, and the mother belong to the child, They belong together. Their longing for one another is mutual Their love for one another is mutual.
That we belong to God, to our known God of grace and mercy, - is like that mother child relationship of belonging.
Seeing the mother and child’s mutually belonging to one another so cruelly violated, horrified and angered many of us when we learned that children were separated from their mothers at our borders. Witnessing the cruelty of any mother separated from her beloved child, in any situation in our troubled and broken world, - instinctively sadden, angered and horrified us as mothers, children of mothers, fathers and family members.
Instinctively, deep within us, we know how wrong it is to separate children from mothers: in fact, we all know deep deep in our hearts that is unholy wrong – as we are separating what belongs together.
So, what if we were to understand the relationship between God and us, between God and the earth in the same way as the relationship of belonging between mother and child? What is we were to know instinctively deep within, that we belong to God in the way a child belongs to a mother. That the earth belongs to God as a child to its mother. Not as a property. But as a child that is flesh, blood of blood, spirit of spirit.
Instinctively we may know that the way humans treat this sacred creation, the earth, this life, this humanity - engaging in endless wars, condoning poverty and suffering for children around the globe, throwing the earths climate and well being into a crisis, - is every bit as wrong and only as separating a child from its mother.
So on this Mother’s Day as we bring our own personal relationships within our hearts and in our prayers, as we gather in grief, in gratitude, in joy or in a complicated mis of it all – let us remember the dream that God had for humanity: of harmony, humanity, compassion and commitment. Let us see with the eyes of the heart as Demond Tuto encourages us to do.
Echoing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., he writes, “God says to you, ‘I have a dream. Please help me to realize it. It is a dream of a world whose ugliness and squalor and poverty, its war and hostility, its greed and harsh competitiveness, its alienation and disharmony are changed into their glorious counterparts. When there will be more laughter, joy, and peace, where there will be justice and goodness and compassion and love and caring and sharing. I have a dream that my children will know that they are members of one family, the human family, God’s family, my family.’”
Amen.