5th Sunday of Eastertide: Mother’s Day

 Like a nursing mother

    cares for her children. (First Thessalonians 2:8)

The simile snuck up on me as our pastor read from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonica congregation: “Just as a nursing mother cares for her children, so we cared for you. Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well.” Something more than unloading the gospel is required. Something motherly, something deep and real. 

I suppose the metaphor comes naturally to one steeped in the sacred writings: “As a mother comforts her child, so God will comfort you” (Isa 66:13). Something like our Lord saying, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” (Lk 13:34). Or, maybe better, when Jesus says to his disgruntled disciples: “When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a baby into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” (Jn 16:21-22). All those motherly words: caring and gathering, loving and delighting, pain and joy; used to describe God’s work and presences among his gathered people. The gospel is not The Gospel without such mothering.

On Mother’s Day, we recall such things—that God can’t be conceived apart from God’s mothering. Every mother is more than that, just as God is more than that. But on Mother’s Day we do well to honor that—that mothers, among other things, mother. In my hurt, when the transporters dumped my worthless body on the family room coach; mothers mothered me back to health. My wife Linda, serving as care giver—a euphuism for the gross work of bodily care; Jennifer pitching in; Rachel flying in—all state-of-the-art moms, mothered me. They gave me not only encouraging words; but, as the Apostle put it, they gave me their very selves—the best gift of all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkcJX38tsvo