NUCC

May 13, 2007

Easter 6

Mother’s Day

Acts 16:9-15

Revelation 21:10, 22 through 22:5

John 14:23-29

            Our lesson from Acts is a good Mother’s Day text.  It is about one of the “mothers” of our Christian faith.  A woman named Lydia.

• Recall the story with my once more.
• Paul has a vision.  He feels God has called him to change course.  Instead of preaching to the members of the Jewish Diaspora in the thriving centers of what we now call Turkey, he hears a call to go to what we now call Europe ---- to Macedonia.
• He boards a ship and lands at the port of Neapolis.  (This is what it looks like today.)
• Paul travels inland to the city of Philippi.  But he doesn’t go inside!  Rather he goes outside the gate, and, to use the words of our opening hymn, “gathers at the river” with some interesting people.  Mind you.  This is the Sabbath!
• Among this interesting vital people is a woman named Lydia.  Most likely she was a Gentile woman, perhaps originally from the city and area of Lydia.  But the Bible tells us that she is from Thyatira.  (The arrow shows where it is on the map.)
• God opens her heart and she is ready to hear all the good news Paul has to tell about Jesus.
• She listens to Paul and they talk for a long time.  She becomes so enthused and so filled with God’s welcoming spirit that she invites Paul and Silas to her home.
• Lydia becomes one of the founders of Christianity in Europe.  She is truly a “comma momma” ----- in the sense that she was open to God’s message and then acted upon it.
• Because of this Lydia there have been more Lydias.  One of them was my grandmother, Lydia Alleman Mohr, born of Swiss immigrants in Iowa.  I remember her as a gentle, quiet, yet determined and concerned mother and grandmother.
• Here she is with her family:  husband John, and sons George, James, and Carl.  Even after each became well established in his life’s calling ---- two of them as ministers ---- she worried about her sons and wanted everything good for them.
• A good thing that happened to her son George was that he found a Dutch-American girl from Sheboygan named Dorothy.  And he married her in 1944.  This marriage produced three sons.  The oldest you see here.  Do you recognize him?
• Today I also think of another mother named Lydia.  She grew up in a little town in Germany named Ersrode.  She is my father’s cousin.  After working in the big city of Frankfurt during World War II she married a fellow named Hans Ross and had two sons.  Like the biblical Lydia she has practiced hospitality for us and many others.
• I would call each of these women a “comma momma.” They join other “comma mommas” --- from Mary, Jesus’ mother through Lydia of Philippi to Mother Theresa of Calcutta to each of you mothers seated in this church today.
• “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.”  Each one of you has certain qualities which qualify you to say:  “I am a woman of the cross and comma.  I follow Jesus and am open to God’s calling.”

What do we note about a “comma momma?”

1.      She is open to God’s spirit.

2.      She is hospitable.

3.      She is loving.  

A Comma Momma is open to God’s spirit.

Look at Lydia.  She was a business woman.  Most likely she was pretty well off from her business of handling purple cloth.  She was economically secure.  She could have said to herself:  “I have it made.  I don’t need God.  Let me just have a good time.”  But Lydia, even in her comfort and wealth, knew something was missing in her life.  She needed God.  She needed the fulfillment that only trusting in God and God’s way shown to her through Jesus Christ could give.

Lydia was willing to take a chance.  She was not stuck in one way of doing things.  She was willing to sit down with Paul and engage.  To use our United Church of Christ motto, Lydia “never placed a period where God had placed a comma.”

During the past week I’ve been talking with our confirmands.  Each one that I’ve talked to has been grateful for all the things they have learned in studying the Gospel of Luke, talking with mentors, and participating in the Urban Immersion trip.  But our confirmands also know they still need to grow and that God has more in store for them.

You mothers have learned this in your lives as you have grown with your children.  They challenge you.  You even learn some things from them.  Sometimes you even have to put aside some cherished assumptions and ways of operating because of your children.

Just this week I finished a book entitled The Invisible Wall.  Harry Bernstein wrote a memoir of growing up in a working class street in England.  He lived on the Jewish side of the street.  The Christians lived on the other side of the street.  No one dared cross the “invisible wall” between the two ----- except for his sister who fell in love with a Christian boy.  In spite of objections from Harry’s mother they got married, and they have a child.  At first Harry’s mother made as if her daughter were dead, but one day she decided to visit her new grandson.  She knew she had to hold him and love him in spite of the wall.  She had to place a comma, where once she had placed a period.  And she became a “comma momma.

1.      Secondly, a comma momma is hospitable. 

Think again of Lydia in Philippi. What did she do after talking with Paul and being baptized along with her entire household?  She invited Paul and Silas to her home.  She wanted to welcome them with hospitality.

            As I was preparing for this sermon I read comments posted on a sight for preachers called Midrash.  Local pastors shared their thoughts and struggles with the Bible readings we had for today.  Several people, especially women clergy, shared their memories of a mother who had opened her house in hospitality to their friends and even to their former friends, like a former boyfriend who was having difficulty with his own family and needed support or the weird friends of one girl who didn’t have any other place to “hang out.”

            Hospitality is the mark of a Christian, especially a Christian mother.  I think of my father’s cousin Lydia in Ersrode, Germany.  Back in 1970 she and her husband Hans welcomed our family with open arms to their home.  She did so several other times, including two years ago when I felt so comfortable going to her home that I went in the back door.  Just this winter our daughter KJ was there.  Even as she enters her mid-80s Lydia offers hospitality.

I offer a third point in honor of my father, whose 88^th birthday would be today.  I make this a three point sermon as he so often did.  The first time I preached at the church where I grew up, was confirmed and ordained, one of the members who happened to have been the President of Lakeland College, John Moreland, joked as he went out of church:  “Ah, preaching a three point sermon, just like your father.”  I could do a lot worse.

My third observance about a “comma momma” is that she is open to love.  Lydia, our friend in Philippi, was recruited by Paul to the new commandment of love, and she showed it in her hospitality.  She became a leader in this new community, which eventually would be called Christian.  A while later the writer Tertullian would report comments from non-Christians and how amazed they were that these Christians could love one another with such commitment and fervor.

Today we remember the Christian love that Jesus expressed by the pool, even healing on the Sabbath.  Breaking the rules.  Today we remember that Lydia confessed her love for Jesus on the Sabbath ---- and that Lydia was, to use the words of our lesson “outside the gate.”

Today we join countless “comma mommas” throughout history in reaching “outside the gate” and “breaking the rules” to join their savior in open hearted, hospitable loving.  Thanks be to God.

Amen.