A Disruptive Influence

Acts 16:16-34
Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 12, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Mother’s Day is no picnic for preachers. It’s a minefield that we are required to tiptoe through once a year and without a map. A few years of experience will provide some sense of where the safest paths may lie and where some of the most powerful of the mines may be buried. But the Mother’s Day minefield is sown on shifting ground. What was safe in 1980 cannot be counted on now and a well-worn path may turn out to hide deadly hazards. But then I’m not really a preacher who sticks to the safest paths.

In this country we celebrate mothers today. Or rather, we celebrate motherhood. We lift up the important work that mothers do and express our gratitude toward our own mothers. Mothers accept the adoration of their children and all seems right with the world. And what could be wrong with that?

Ah, but this holiday is booby-trapped. There are women who were unable to have children as they had wanted to and perhaps had dreamed that they would. Mother’s Day serves to remind them of the hole in their lives that was never really filled by anything else.

There are women who chose not to have children because they were called to a life’s work that left too little room to raise children well. There are women who knew themselves well enough to know that they didn’t have the gifts and inclinations needed to raise children. Mother’s Day holds up before them an accusatory set of expectations not only about being a mother but about being a woman. We do not honor the women who have chosen to devote themselves to a calling or a cause with such faithfulness that they have decided to set aside having children.

Then there are, tragically, the women who had children once, but have suffered the heart-break of having survived them. Mother’s Day for them is a troubling reminder of all that they have lost. There are those whose children went astray somehow. For them Mother’s Day is an annual occasion for self-blame and shame.

Even mothers who are doing the job well suffer. The expectations today around motherhood are so high, so ridiculously high, that I don’t think there is a mother today who doesn’t secretly feel weighed in the balance and found wanting.

And let’s not forget the women who are not the mothers of the children they are helping to raise,but who nonetheless are doing their best and for their troubles are pinned with that dreaded label: step-mother.

As if all that were not enough there are the children who are troubled by this day. In the normal course of things we will outlive our mothers, but it’s still painful. Those of us who have lost our mothers find this day bittersweet.

There are children whose mothers died when they were young and there are children whose mothers walked out of their lives when they needed them most.

And then there are the children whose mothers have simply failed to meet even the barest of minimum expectations, whose neglect or abuse have left their children maimed. Once a year we remind these children of what they never had. And if, which is the case far too often, this abuse and neglect is still a secret, the thing that everyone in the family knows but no one is allowed to say aloud, they may even be under pressure to pretend that they had the mother they wish that they had had.

You see? There are mines buried everywhere. Does that mean we shouldn’t observe the day? Families may certainly celebrate the day in ways that make sense in their circumstances. It is never wrong—quite the opposite—to thank the people who have nurtured and cared for us and helped us to grow, whoever these people may be, whether parents or teachers or neighbors or others. But when we bring this holiday to church we can hurt people without meaning to. For followers of Jesus that’s reason enough to be careful.

Maybe if the first founder of a Mothers’ Day in this country had had her way this wouldn’t be so hard. Julia Ward Howe, the author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was so aghast at the slaughter of the Civil War for which her poem had provided a significant part of the soundtrack, that she turned to the cause of promoting peace. She was convinced that, if the women of the world could have their way, there would be an end to war. In 1870 she issued a proclamation and called for women to gather at peace conventions around the world to mark a Mothers’ Day for Peace:

Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.[1]

Peace conventions gathered but the movement lasted about as long as she paid the cost of the conventions. In the end, as you know, war went on. Howe’s voice was not heeded.

Two women figure prominently in the story of Paul’s ministry in Philippi. The first is Lydia. We heard about her last week. She was a widow and business woman who underwrote Paul’s ministry there by giving Paul and his companions a place to stay and meals to eat.

The other woman is a female slave whose name we do not know. She had a fortune-telling spirit and her owners used this gift to make money. When she met Paul she appointed herself his herald. While Paul was going about his work, she was announcing, “These people are servants of the Most High God! They are proclaiming a way of salvation to you!” She kept repeating the message. She did it for days. Paul became annoyed.

Finally he ordered the spirit to come out of her and it did. Notice that he was not motivated by concern for her welfare, for this slave woman who was possessed by a spirit. Notice that she wasn’t saying anything incorrect or untrue. But she was a woman. And she was speaking in public which was unacceptable in those days. Paul cast out the spirit. We don’t know whether she had any more to say or not, but in the text she falls silent and is heard no more. She loses her voice.

Slave women in general don’t have much voice in the two-volume work we call Luke and Acts, even though they all tell the truth. The slave woman who identifies Peter as a follower of Jesus in the high priest’s residence meets with Peter’s adamant denial. No one believes Rhoda, the slave woman who answers the gate at John Mark’s mother’s house, when she tells the congregation in the house that Peter is free from prison.

Slave women don’t have much voice in Luke and Acts. But that’s not the way it was supposed to be. When the Spirit of God fell on the disciples on the day of Pentecost and the crowd demanded an explanation and Peter stood up to give it, he quoted the prophet Joel: “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit upon all people. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions, and your old will dream dreams. Even upon my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.”[2]

The community of Jesus followers was a new thing, a new way for people to live with each other, a new way to be human. But it was hard to let go of the old. The early Jesus community fell short of its promise. Especially it was hard when letting go meant that women would do things that they had never done before, when letting go meant letting go of male privilege and power. Paul had a hard time doing it. The reality of having women as partners in ministry was hard; he preferred it when they were silent partners like Lydia. The reality of women proclaiming the truth in the public marketplace was more than he could bear.

Julia Ward Howe’s case shows that it hadn’t gotten much easier even eighteen hundred years later. We would still rather install women safely on pedestals where we can celebrate them when they meet our expectations (and vilify them when they do not) than to listen to their hopes and cries for peace. We still fall short of our promise.

This story isn’t finished, though. We can still take a step toward the promise that Joel made in God’s name. There is nothing wrong with taking your mom to dinner, especially if she is the one who does the family’s cooking. There is nothing wrong with giving her a break from her routine work. There is nothing wrong with giving her a card or a gift. But we might take a step beyond thanking her for resembling what we want her to be to ask her what she needs in order to resemble the dream that God has placed in her heart.

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