It
is probably best to acknowledge at the outset that today is Mother’s Day, a
holiday that gets only a slightly greater observance in our household than its
June complement, Father’s Day. A parish I served in Michigan was very big on
Mother’s Day. Year after year on this Sunday the ushers insisted on handing a
rose to every woman who entered the church. Every year I would rather
facetiously ask what we were going to do for the men on Father’s Day. I never
received an answer, and so one year I took matters into my own hands: I drove
over to Costco, bought several cases of those small spray cans of WD-40, and
instructed the ushers to present one to each man as cheerfully and lovingly as
they had the roses to the women. While the ushers were a bit grumpy about it,
the guys actually liked it. I left that parish before I could follow up the
next year with rolls of duct tape. So yes, it is Mother’s Day: not a church
holiday exactly, but an occasion that invites us to reflect on some
characteristics like nurture and care, qualities we ascribe both to parents and
to God.
Today
is also the Fifth Sunday of Easter, and you may have noticed that in this
season our Sunday readings are organized not around the gospel but around the
unfolding story of the earliest Christians as told in the book of Acts. Acts is
the book that comes right after the gospels in the New Testament, and it tells
how the followers of Jesus found themselves first bereft, then empowered, and then
living out in their own lives the ministry of Jesus. The early church
discovered, somewhat to their surprise, that after the death and resurrection
of Jesus, they were now actually the body of Christ in the world. As we heard
over the past few weeks, the early Christians found they had the same powers to
heal and forgive that Jesus had. And as we hear in today’s Acts reading--the
stoning of Stephen, our first martyr--they encountered the same kind of
resistance too.
It
is not incidental that Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was a deacon. As
you know, in its early days the church developed three orders of ministry which
we still have to this day. Bishops were the successors of the twelve apostles,
and they came first. Deacons are the second order, and they were set apart to
assist bishops and to do the essential service ministries of the church.
Priests—people like Susan and Warner and me—were created last, and our job was
essentially to stand in for bishops as the church expanded both in numbers and
area too big for one person to cover.
So
Stephen, our first martyr, was a deacon. Why would the crowd rush together
against him, and then drag him out of the city and stone him? [Acts 7:55-60]
The book of Acts suggests that the crowd was offended by an incendiary speech
Stephen gave right before his stoning. That may well be, but there is a second
explanation that goes along with the first.
The
Roman Empire was not very kind to people who were sick or poor. As the
historian Peter Brown has argued[Poverty and Leadership in the Later Roman
Empire]
the Christian movement represented something altogether new in the
Mediterranean world. Though Romans had a long tradition of public philanthropy,
they essentially left the sick and the poor to fend for themselves. But
following the example of Jesus, Christians organized to pay them great
attention—to feed the hungry and tend to the sick. And the people they called
upon to do this were the deacons.
Earlier
in Acts [Acts 6:1], we are told that the apostles decided to set apart seven
deacons because some of the “widows were being neglected in the daily
distribution of food.” In the
first several centuries of the Christian movement, the deacons became a kind of
social service agency. The kinds of relief they offered to the poor and the
sick went directly against the laissez-faire values of the Roman Empire. As one
of the first deacons, Stephen was charged with carrying out this
countercultural social service. I would argue that he was stoned not so much
because of his theological views but because he was serving the people the
Roman state and the culture wanted at best to ignore.
So
(and perhaps this is just a coincidence), on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, which
also happens to be Mother’s Day, our scripture readings ask us to think about
how we both experience and exemplify the kind of love and nurture we meet first
in Jesus and then in Christians like Stephen. Our Acts reading sets the stage,
and our other reading this morning, from John’s gospel, develops the theme.
Today’s
gospel [John 14:1-14] is one we often hear read at funerals:
Jesus said, “Do not let your
hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house
there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I
go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will
come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be
also.”
In this beloved passage, Jesus goes on to tell us
that he is “the way, and the truth, and the life.” These are wonderful and
comforting words to hear in the midst of grief. The assurance that Jesus has
both provided for us and given us a path can be deeply reassuring.
But it is something he says
a bit farther on in the gospel passage that speaks to us this morning:
Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father
is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.
Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that
I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the
Father.
“The one who believes in me
will also do the works I do.” The real miracle of Easter is not confined to the
empty tomb. The real miracle of Easter lies in the way the life and ministry
and purpose of Jesus continue in the lives and ministries of those who gather
in his name. Jesus loved and healed and fed the sick and the poor. These
actions were a direct threat to an empire whose values were based on
oppression, power, and success. That empire crucified Jesus in an attempt to
put an end to his kind of compassionate justice and love. The good news of
Easter was not only that Jesus was now alive; the good news of Easter was also
that Jesus’s love and justice and compassion would now be carried on by those
who would be his body in the world.
“The one who believes in me
will also do the works I do.” The same can be said for Stephen, a Christian who
died at least in part because he dared distribute food to the widows. A world
organized around power will never understand the love of a God who rejects the
very idea of force. The love and justice embodied in Jesus and Stephen cannot
be stopped even by Rome, much less by Rome’s successors. If Easter is about
anything, it is about God’s persistence in coming towards us in love and
working through us as stand-ins for Jesus as ministers of healing and grace in
our personal, social, and civic relationships.
And that, I believe, is
Easter’s connection to Mother’s Day. Sure, there are all kinds of ways in which
a holiday like this can be syrupy and false. Our culture will always exalt the
sentimental and undervalue the authentic. To be sure, we all have complicated
histories with our parents. So I would not presume to hold up any one human
parent as an exemplary stand-in for God. But there is a deeper sense in which
you and I as Jesus’s followers understand that all real nurturing love—whether
raising a child or visiting a person in the hospital or even calling your
Congressman—is an expression of the kind of love we see when Jesus healed the
sick or Stephen brought food to a widow.
“The one who believes in me
will also do the works I do.” Both Easter and Mother’s Day are occasions to
give thanks for the love and nurture that have carried us thus far along the
way Jesus talks about in today’s gospel. But it wasn’t only the early
Christians who believed themselves to be the body of Christ in the world. When
we say the creed together, you and I proclaim the same thing every Sunday. The
kinds of love and nurture and justice we meet in Jesus and observe in Stephen
and recall from our own mothers—those divine attributes are now on offer
through us. You and I are now the body of Christ in the world. You and I are
the deacons of the 21st century, those called to stand against the
selfish individualism of our own imperial culture by seeking and serving the
hungry, the poor, the grieving, the sick and being for them who Jesus and our
mothers at their best were for us.
“The one who believes in me
will also do the works I do.” Thank God for Jesus and for Stephen and for all
who love and serve suffering human beings. Thank God for our mothers and other
nurturers who have showed us this same kind of love along the way. And thank
God for the continuing call and opportunity to be the heart and hands of Jesus
in the world he loved and which we all inhabit together. Amen.
