A Mother’s Day Sermon
Acts of the Apostles 17:22-31
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said,
“For we too are his offspring.”
Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’
This lectionary selections of these passages from Acts have been kind of all over the place. It skips around a ton (in fact, for the next two weeks we’ll be going backwards), so if you have no real context or background, you’ll be totally lost. So you might remember last week, we had a violent passage about Stephen being stoned to death in the streets by an angry mob. And one thing I didn’t get into in that last sermon, was that in chapter 7, verse 58, it’s written that the angry mob lay their cloaks before a young man named Saul, who would later become Paul—Saul, in last week’s passage was a powerful, anti-Jesus zealot, and he fully approved of the stoning, or rather, lynching, of Stephen. And this week… here he is, preaching to a bunch of educated, ultra-philosophical Athenians about the wonders of Christianity and the wrongs of idol worship. I’m not going to get into what happened in between here— about a year ago, in fact, I preached on Paul’s conversation in chapter 9 of Acts, the sermon is on our website if you want a refresher, but I just, as always want to set the stage for what’s going on here.
So since chapter 9, he’s been tagging along with the apostles, preaching and teaching and confessing. He and the apostles have recently been thrown out of a couple other cities, and now they’ve found themselves in Athens preaching to a very different crowd. This is, essentially, a college town. It’s full of a bunch of educated stoics, philosophers who are still pagan, but they’re open-minded, they’re happy to listen to Paul’s speech—probably because they’re able to respect what he’s saying in some capacity. Paul, after all, is thought to be the first true Christian philosopher. He’s smart, he’s cunning, he’s a great speaker; and he seems to know just what to say to these brainy Athenians.
He begins by praising the fact that they’re “extremely religious” (which, if we’re being cynical, could be interpreted as sarcastic, but normally these kind of speeches begin with compliments, and I would think that Paul, at this point, wouldn’t want to get kicked out of yet another major city, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt here)—extremely religious in that they’re so cautious about angering their gods, that they’ve made a random altar in the middle of a city to some unknown, unnamed deity… just in case. It’s a little strange, a little neurotic, sure, but I guess it comes from a good place?
But Paul wants to make it clear to these people that these altars are just idol worship; that they mean nothing, because “God doesn’t live in shrines built by human hands.” He then goes onto use quotes from Greek stoic and Platonic poets as examples to prove his point—that even these polytheists might be moved by. And those quotes are, in my opinion, quite moving—verses 28 and 29, Paul says to the Athenians,
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being;’ as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.”
We are all God’s offspring. The second I saw this part of today’s passage, I realized how perfect this could be for today, when we celebrate mothers— and not just our birth mothers—but all maternal figures in our lives; and also not just celebrate. This is also a day to simply recognize and reflect on what it means to be a mother or maternal figure of some kind; it can also be a day to grieve—to grieve our mothers, to grieve children that we’ve lost, to grieve a future that never was. It can be a day to rethink motherhood a little bit.
Mother’s Day can be tough for some, it can be very complicated. As I said in my Thursday note to the church this week, we never really did much for Mother’s Day—we would recognize it, but my mom was sort of cynical about it, and never really wanted to do anything special for it. But even so, I remember the Mother’s Day ads—for matching outfits at department stores, for deals, for brunches, flowers. Motherhood was so confined to this heteronormative birth-mother ideal. It was so confined to this surface-level celebration of mothers, when, let’s be honest, mothers in this country really get the short end of the stick when it comes to divisions of labor, job opportunities, income gaps, lack of affordable childcare, the list goes on—so I have to first of all wonder—are we really celebrating motherhood in this country? But that’s a question for another sermon. In the materialistic, commercial celebration of motherhood, motherhood is just so… confined. And again—I never thought much of it either way because my mom didn’t care for it.
But church now… now, I have a different perspective. The past nearly two years of my life have been consumed with thoughts of motherhood in so many different ways. A year ago, last Mother’s Day, Chris and I escaped to Montreal to get away from the flowers, the brunches, the matching outfits. A year ago, I was grieving. A year ago, even with our weekend getaway it was impossible to forget the fact that, had my pregnancy gone as it was “supposed to,” I would have been a mother to a month-old baby. But the more I’ve thought about it this past year, the more I’ve thought about it being pregnant now, with a healthy baby, the more I realize that even before I was blessed with this viable pregnancy, I was a mother. And my first act as a mother was to save that baby last December from a short life of suffering. In the months since then, I’ve come to realize that being a mother a parent, maternal actions— will look and feel so different for every person. It can’t be confined to a commercial, or a Hallmark card, some one-dimensional antiquated idea of what it means to be a mother.
Paul makes it known to the Athenians he’s preaching to, “God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” We often want to put God in a nice little box, we want to put everything in neat, nice little boxes. It makes things so much easier, it means we don’t have to think too hard about life, about God. But if we confine God to a little box, if we confine God to some untouchable and intimidating bearded man in the sky, so many people won’t be able to connect with that intimidating figure, this figure that, to me, doesn’t seem all that comforting or loving.
The 12th century Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich, wrote beautiful, confounding texts about her views of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. They were gender-bending, and maternal. She writes of Jesus Christ, “…our savior is our truth Mother, in whom we are endlessly born, and out of whom we will never come.” Out of whom we will never come. Julian of Norwich saw Jesus, despite his male-bodiedness, as this caring, maternal, sacrificial figure; she saw him as true Mother. She goes onto say, “We have our being from [Jesus], where the foundation of motherhood begins, with all the sweet protection of love, which endlessly follows.”
She could not confine God or Jesus to any on gender, to any one type of being. We are endlessly born in Jesus, in this love and this sweet protection, but we are never born out of Jesus. Despite this, he represents true motherhood.
I was listening to a podcast the other day, the curmudgeonly comedian Marc Maron’s podcast— in it he interviews the musical and comedic actor Titus Burgess. The characters Burgess is known for playing on TV are flamboyant, over-the-top, larger-than-life, and hilarious, but in his interview with Maron, he was very subdued and he and Maron talked more about Burgess’ faith than anything else. Burgess, a gay man, grew up in the Black church in the deep south, and when Maron asks him if he ever had to work through anything, wrestle with anything personally regarding his faith and his queerness, Burgess immediately responds, “No. Never. I always knew who God was.” He goes onto say, when it comes to ideas of God as this big bearded man in the sky,
Why would you make God so small? God is only as expansive in our lives as we avail ourselves to God being… If God can be a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, the air, whatever. If God is a shape shifter, then God is transforming. God is transforming, then energy in transmuting… Don’t get caught up in the language.[i]
That’s what Paul, I believe is saying, in a way—don’t get caught up in the minutiae, in these small ideas of God, in which they’re so insignificant and small, you can confine them to a silly little shrine you built just in case. God is so much more than that. Why would anyone ever want to make God so small?
And getting caught up in the language, getting caught up in these fears about judgment and shrines and altars, around what God is, what Jesus is— I think that’s the kind of thing that can make Mother’s Day such a complicated time for some people. We get caught up in this one singular idea of Mother and motherhood. And that means that those who struggle with infertility, or who have lost a child can feel invalidated, can feel forgotten; those who are estranged from their mothers grieve, those who have lost their mothers, either recently, or years and years ago grieve. Those are foster mothers, adoptive mothers, can have complicated feelings on this day because of the specific type of motherhood out society wants to project onto people.
Because in our culture, we try so hard to put everything in neat little boxes, not unlike the Athenians and their neat little shrines and altars. God is this, Jesus is that, Mother means this. But just as God isn’t limited, just as Jesus in his male body and his male pronouns can be thought of our true Mother, motherhood cannot be confined to brunches and flowers. Motherhood cannot be confined to gender or to blood.
This is a day when we celebrate all forms of mothers—if you are estranged from your mother, you can celebrate your found family, the maternal figures you may have found in your life along the way; if you’ve had losses, if you’ve had to make impossible choices, you can take this day to grieve and cry and remember your motherhood is still real. If you’re grieving your mother who passed away, you can take this day to look through photos, to laugh and cry and share memories. If you’re eagerly awaiting to become a mother, awaiting a new life, you can take this day to prepare, to be excited, to wonder what the next phase of life will be like. Mother’s Day can be so many things, church. It cannot be confined to a holiday thought up by the limits of the human mind.
And ultimately, even if some of us have rarely experienced that unconditional maternal love, we know we always that Love in Jesus Christ—Jesus the ultimate Mother, who yes, sacrificed, but who promises us enteral life in love, as Paul says in the end of this passage, by being raised from the dead. That love is truly endless.
I want to end my sermon with one more quote from Julian of Norwich—“…in [true motherhood at work], by grace, everything is penetrated, in length, and in breadth, in the height and the depth without end; and it is all one love.” Amen.
[i] https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/86166329
