There’s just something about mothers -- they are without a doubt the stubbornest people on God’s green earth.
Mothers are stubborn, mothers stick with it, mothers stay with something until the cows come home. Mothers are persistent, mothers are consistent ... I think I said it best at the beginning ... Mothers are stubborn.
Can I get an amen from the youth pews in the back?
Mothers will get on your case and never get off it ... they are stubborn. Mothers, like my mother, will tell you over and over again that you are stubborn, which only proves how stubborn they are for continuing to say it!
I just believe that mothers are the most consistent, predictable, stay with it species that God ever made. We have a bird’ s nest right outside our basement door ... and every time I go out that door, there is the rustle of wings, and I have to duck down ... but as soon as I leave, here comes mother bird, right back to her nest. And meanwhile we are serenaded by the awfulest angry squawking you ever heard. But she’ll be back; she will be back, because she’s a mother! Mothers are stubborn!
And you know what? We can thank God that they are! Where would we be if they weren’t?
The police go out and arrest a drug dealer. He’s been making all kinds of trouble in the community he’s been working havoc on everybody for blocks around, and the whole neighborhood breathes a sigh of relief when he’s finally put away ... and his mother says, Well, he’s made some mistakes, he’s not all that he might be, but he’s my baby... I’m going to fight for him. Mothers just don’t give up.
Sad to say, all too often marriages break up and couples split ... but who is that as often as not walks out of the house? The father does ... I agree not always voluntarily, but he’s the one who usually ends up leaving ... and the kids are kept by whom? By mother. Because mothers just will not abandon their children, mothers will not give up, mothers persist, mothers are stubborn.
There’s an old folk wisdom saying to the effect that a son’s a son ‘til he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all of her life. Permit me to change that ... permit me to alter that to fit the case this morning. I’d have to say that a mother’ s a mother all of her life. A mother’s a mother, all of her life, she just won’t quit.
I enjoy reading Mell Lazarus’ comic strip “Mama” in the morning papers. “Mama,” as you may know, has three grown children, all of whom she thinks neglect her, fail her, disappoint her, and ... her favorite word, aggravate her … in a thousand ways. But the thing is that Mama cannot forget about them and go her own way ... no, she has to keep on being Mama. She calls Francis at his bachelor pad at 7am to remind him that he needs to go out and get a job to replace the one he quit because they actually expected him to work. She pushes Marylou at an assortment of doctors and dentists and other eligible and promising men, only to follow Marylou on her dates to make sure not too much happens. And she keeps a room with Teddy bears and baseball gloves ready for Thomas, her married son, just in case he comes to his senses and leaves his sloppy wife and remembers that he is first and foremost Mama’s boy.
Mothers are – what? Stubborn! Mothers don’t give up.
But guess what ... so is God! So is our mothering/fathering God. The Spirit of our God won’t give up. Our God as the Holy Spirit chooses to stay with us, hang in there with us, get stubborn with us. The Holy Spirit is the persistence of God ... a God who as father created us ... a God who as Jesus Christ became our brother, God with us for a moment of history … but God the Holy Spirit is really a mother God who just won’t give up on us. Remember how Jesus said, “I will send you the spirit, and the spirit will be with you forever?” The spirit-mother God is the stubbornness of God.
Now don’ t be upset about this mother language I am using about God the Holy Spirit. Don’t read me out because I’ve said that. I do not intend to replace prayer to God the Father. After all, Jesus himself called God Father and I can’t do any better than to follow Jesus. But I find it strange and wonderful on this Mother’s Day, which is also Pentecost Sunday, that there are feminine images of God in the Bible, mother images of God, and they seem to have to do with the Spirit …the Holy Spirit, that way of God being God which emphasizes God’s staying with us, keeping on our case ... I don’t think it’s wild at all to think about a Mother Spirit God ... because when we do so we are really trying to see what it means to have a God who will not give up on us.
About fifteen years ago, when I was Baptist chaplain at the University of Maryland, we came to a commencement exercise, and they always asked two chaplains to offer prayers. This particular year they asked me to do one and then asked the Christian Science chaplain to do the other ... and when he began his prayer Our Father Mother God, you could hear a gasp and a murmur all over the crowd. Somehow we never have thought of God as mother before.
But let’s not get hung up on language this morning. I’m not here to push feminism this morning, although I think it is a good thing to push ... I’m here to lift up something else … something powerful and wonderful, good news:
That our God, Spirit, motherlike as God is, will not give up on us.
That our God, mothering us and staying with us, does not bring us out into some sort of desert and then abandon us ... that Spirit God brings us through to where he wants us to go if we will but hear and follow with faith.
In the passage I read from Isaiah, the setting is Jerusalem in the years following the exile and the return. I do not have time to remind you of this bit of Biblical history as I would like, but let’s just recall that it’s in about the sixth century before Christ, that sometime before this the Jewish people, having spent seventy long years in exile in Babylon, have been returned to the homeland, and now they have to rebuild the city, they have to rebuild the temple, they have to reconstitute their society ... they have a tremendous amount to accomplish. And it’s not going well. They have a whole lot of problems getting done what they were told they ought to get done. And the temptation is to think that God has abandoned them, that God has forgotten. Here we are, trying to be God’s people, and where is this God? Maybe he’s given up on us, maybe he’s forgotten about us, maybe he just plain quit.
But the prophet says, No, God is like a mother, “I will comfort you in Jerusalem as a mother comforts her child.” And therefore God is stubborn, God can be counted on.
God is like a mother ... and he has brought his people to the very point where something is going to be born ... but, says the prophet, "Do not think that I will bring my people to the point of birth and not let them be born" Do not think that I will bring my people to the point of birth and not let them be born …No, you will be like a child that is nursed by its mother, carried in her arms, and treated with love. I will comfort you in Jerusalem as a mother comforts her child.
No, people of God, do not suppose that God has walked out and left you. God is a stubborn mother who cannot forget what she has promised to her children.
No, people of god, do not think that just because times are tough that you can give up on yourselves, because God has not given up on you.
No, people of God, just because sometimes you know that you are very ugly, very unpretty, very much out of character ... just because you have marred and tarnished what God has given you ... well, you have a face, as they say, that only a mother could love, and this mother spirit God does love you. This mother spirit God does care about you, and has not forgotten you.
You see, a mother’s a mother all of her life. She does not quit mothering just because you’ve grown up... a mother’s a mother all of her life. And so is God. God is always God, all of his life.
There are two things I’d like us to see and to feel out of all of this. Two great truths to take home.
The first is that God’s mothering us, God’s stubbornness for us means that when we are called by this Spirit to be something or to do something, then we need by faith to believe that He is going to accomplish it .. and not get discouraged. We need to know that this mother spirit God will not abandon what he has begun in us ... and I know of no other scripture that says it so well as the one we heard from Paul earlier
... “God, who began a good work in you, will carry it on ‘til the day of Christ Jesus.”
Jesus one day told a story about a woman .. I’d be willing to bet she was a mother … who lost a coin and swept the whole house looking for it. I tell, you, she was probably a mother, because mothers know how expensive it is to feed and clothe children, and she needed that coin to fix up little Isaac for lunch at the synagogue school! But Jesus’ story is saying, God is like that mother, who looks and looks for that lost coin and finds it, never gives up ’til the coin is found. And when you and I get to feeling lost and lonely and abandoned and forgotten, well, we are for the moment anyway, lost coins, but God, the Mother Spirit, will find us. He will complete what was started in us.
"Do not think that I will bring my people to the point of birth and not let them be born:" God who began a good work in you will complete it.
Will God bring you through years of education and then tell you to stand by and do nothing with your life? Not this stubborn God.
Will God offer you the gift of salvation and then not empower you to share your witness with someone else’? Will God plant a shout of joy in your heart and then tie your tongue so that you cannot witness? No, not this mother spirit God
Will God bring you into this church and into this family of faith and then not give you meaningful tasks to do in his kingdom? Not this God, not this stubborn persistent God, who like a mother who is mother all of her life is God all of his life.
In our membership we have one brother who quit his job several years ago, felt the Spirit’s call to ministry, knew that a call to ministry was also a call to prepare, paid the price of three years of seminary education ... all the time affirming and believing that is was the leadership of His lord. And now it’s been a year since graduation, and no call to a church, no denominational staff job, not much of anything substantial. But let us give John Gravely credit ... over and over as we have talked and strategized, he has said, I know that God did not bring me this far just to drop me. And that’s right, that’s exactly right. Whatever it is that God has started to do in your life... it may seem as though for the moment it’s on hold ... and there may be some reason for that ... all right. But do not count out this Mother spirit God who says "Do not think: that I will bring my people to the point of birth and not let them be born." Do not count out this mother spirit God about whom the apostle says, the God who began a good work in you will bring it to completion ... to perfection ... because this God is like a mother who is a mother all of her life.
And the second great truth I see in all of this is that you and I must not give up on each other either. If God is not giving up on us, then we just cannot give up on each other. We all need to become mothers, stubborn mothers, who care so deeply for one another and believe so deeply in one another that we just do not give up hope.
Some of us are parenting children who do not appear to hold our values any more. One day someone said to me in tears, “I know the scripture says, ‘Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old when will not depart from it,’ but I just cannot believe that right now ... we did our best and he is rejecting it all.” Yes I know what that feels like ... and yet I have to say, be a mother, be stubborn, be persistent, keep on loving, don’t give up on that child. Our Mother Spirit God doesn’t give up on us, so we cannot give up on one another
Will God give you children just for the sake of aggravation, like Mama in the funny papers? No, God gives us children to love and to cherish forever, even when, especially when, they are hard to love,
Will God lead us into marriage and then be happy with us if we casually toss aside our marriage vows when things get tough? No, God gives us to one another and the vow ‘til death us do part is one he expects to keep if at all possible. The Spirit mother calls on us to show some stuff, to be steadfast and certain in our relationships.
And let’s not give up either on this church. Let’s not jump ship, let’s not forget what we are about, let’s not think that it’s all over for us. God has not given up on Takoma Park Baptist Church. One of you said to me several years ago that the Lord may have only one more chance for Takoma to be the church and to survive. I do not know about that ... but I know that these days we have a chance ... whether it’s the last one I cannot tell ...but we have a chance to be the church, if we simply, faithfully believe that there is a future here.
On this Mothers Day … on this Holy Spirit Day ... praise God for that stubbornness which like any good mother, just won’t quit. And remember, we too have come this far by faith, because God is God all of God’s life ... just like any mother is a mother all of her life.
