Psalm 23, 2 Timothy 1:1-5
Mother’s Day
May 10, 2009
Dave
Russell,
----
A young man came home from school with a report card that was less than exemplary. There had been problems with grades before, and this time his folks were clearly upset. That evening at supper, his dad raised the issue. “Son, we have a problem.” The young man responded, “Well, Dad, we have a problem, all right. So, what do you think it is? Is it mainly environmental or hereditary?”
The son tries to throw the blame for his poor grades back at his parents. There is an old saying, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” The person we will be is by no means locked in by virtue of who our parents are, but there is no question that our parents, whether it is because of heredity or environment, have a great impact on our lives.
Paul was writing to a young Christian named Timothy, someone who was already a leader and who had great potential as a future leader in the church. And at the outset of this second letter to Timothy, there is a word of greeting and a word of thankfulness for Timothy, and a recognition that Timothy did not become who he was without some help along the way.
Paul says, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.”
Today is Mother’s Day, which is actually one of the more difficult Sundays of the year for the preacher. Mother’s Day is a secular holiday, not a religious one. On the liturgical calendar, this is the fifth Sunday of Easter. And Mother’s Day has become so commercialized and filled with sentimentality that many preachers would just as soon avoid it. And there are a number of problems with a focus on mothers. Some children here have poor relationships with their mothers, and some mothers here have difficult relationships with their children, and Mothers Day can serve as a kind of painful reminder.
Some became mothers amidst difficult circumstances and perhaps did not want to become mothers. Some women can feel left out on Mother’s Day - some women choose not to have children andd some would like to be mothers but are unable, and there are single people who get tired of all the focus on marriage and family and children. Some have lost their mothers recently and some mothers have lost children, and this can be a hard day. Then there are those churches that recognize the oldest mother present and the youngest mother present and the mother with the most children, and it can get just plain embarrassing. There are a lot of reasons for the preacher to avoid Mother’s Day.
On the other hand, Mother’s Day – much more so than Father’s Day – is so much a part of our cultural consciousness that it is hard to ignore. Robert Fulghum, a minister before he became a writer, said that in his very open-minded, free-wheeling church that gave him great freedom and longitude in the pulpit, he was once told by a parishioner in the week before Mother’s Day, “I’m bringing my mother to church Sunday. You better preach on mothers and it better be good.” Say whatever you want on Easter, but you better be good on Mother’s Day. And then, while the end of the school year may skew things a bit here, nationwide, Mother’s Day is the highest attended day of the year after Easter and Christmas. People don’t come because it is the Fifth Sunday of Easter, they come because it is Mother’s Day. There is a social expectation surrounding Mother’s Day that is hard to fight against, so I’m not going to.
So, as we indeed think about mothers today, I would like for us to think a bit about Lois and Eunice. We don’t know a lot about them. According to Acts 16:1, Timothy’s mother Eunice was a Jewish Christian, but his father was a Gentile and apparently not a believer, and the fact that he is not mentioned here probably means he did not become a believer. We really don’t know a lot more than that about Lois, Timothy’s grandmother, and Eunice, his mother, but Paul obviously knew of them and knew that they had a great impact on Timothy’s life.
For many of us, our mothers play a crucial role. But whether it is our mother or someone who is like a mother to us, we all need a Lois and we all need a Eunice in our lives.
We all need a Lois, someone to build a foundation of faith. It may have been that Lois and Eunice became Christians at the same time, but the way that Paul writes, it seems to be sequential - that is, Lois influenced Eunice for Christ and Eunice and Lois then both influenced Timothy for Christ. And whether that is the way it was for Timothy, that is surely the experience of a lot of people. Faith is passed on from generation to generation.
That was certainly my experience. I didn’t know either of my grandfathers – they both died before I was born – but both of my grandmothers were people of deep faith. Stories and values and faith are passed on.
One of the things I gained
from my sabbatical last summer was a greater appreciation for my family
history. I learned about ancestors who
were people of powerful faith, and even visited a home in
And this is true in our church family as well. We were saddened to hear of the passing of Elnora Huyck this past week. Many of you knew Elnora and her husband Ken, who was pastor here in the 1970’s. The Huycks were among the many who helped build the foundation of faith in this church.
We don’t have the privilege of knowing all of the Loises in our lives – we will not get a chance to know personally all those whose lives have influenced us. But thankfully, we have some of those Loises among us. We even have Loises who are named Lois!
It’s not always a grandmother; it’s not always a grandparent, or even a family member. I look around this church and I see a lot of Loises--folks who have invested their lives here and helped build a strong foundation for those to follow.
We all need a Lois, and we all need a Eunice--someone to lead us and guide us and nurture us in the faith. Often, that person is our mother.
Our call to worship from Psalm 1 spoke of those who delight in God’s law as being like trees that are “planted by water.” That is kind of an image for Timothy - being nurtured by Lois and Eunice was like being planted by water.
Many people in history have
attributed their success to their mothers.
John Quincy Adams said “all that I am my mother made me.” Abraham Lincoln wrote, “All that I am or hope
to be, I owe to my angel mother.” And
John Wesley, founder of the
The guidance and nurture we receive from our mothers is not always what we would like at the time. There are times when we are small that we don’t want our hand held, but it beats the heck out of running into the street. There may be times when our mothers say No, even when it would be a lot easier to say Yes – but they set limits for us out of love, out of concern for our well-being and our growth. Hodding Carter said, “There are two lasting bequests we can give our children. One is roots. The other is wings.” Sloan Wilson said the same thing when he said, “The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom. The realization that this is what the child will always need can hit hard.”
That balance between roots and wings, between support and freedom, is part of what makes being a mother so difficult. No matter how old our children are, they still need roots and they still need wings.
Lois and Eunice gave Timothy roots in the faith. They gave him support and belonging. They taught and guided him. But they also gave him wings. When the time came, they gave him both support and freedom, and he became his own person as a leader in the fledgling Christian church. But even after he was an adult, I can imagine that for Timothy, as for us, there was still a need for roots, still a need for support from his mother.
As Christians, we all need a Lois, and we all need a Eunice. We need those who build a solid foundation for us, who give us roots and support. And we need those who lead and guide and nurture us so that we may spread our wings.
We read this morning from Psalm 23, and there is a strong similarity between mothering and shepherding. Just as the shepherd cares for the sheep, mothers care for us.
Now, I don’t want you to get
the wrong idea. We can have overly
sentimental ideas about motherhood. Anna
Jarvis, who was instrumental in getting Mother’s Day to be a holiday in the
I did not grow up around sheep – or other livestock, for that matter. I know that some of you did. But I do know that shepherding is not always pretty. Sheep are dirty and smelly and not very bright, and shepherding is hard work. It’s thankless work.
Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.” This is a much more powerful statement when we realize that shepherding is not so pretty and easy—when we picture Jesus laying down his life for some ornery, whiny old sheep, not just cuddling cute little lambs. Shepherding and mothering can be quite alike – but they are alike more in the messiness and uncertainty and hard work than they are in being nice and sweet and easy.
We are blessed to have shepherds to lead us and guide us. We are blessed to have Loises and Eunices in our lives. But it is not simply that we need a Lois and a Eunice, we also need to be a Lois and a Eunice for someone else. Which is the same thing as saying, we all need a Timothy. We need to be building a foundation for someone else. We need to be nurturing someone else in the faith, helping to provide both roots and wings for another person.
This is by no means limited to blood relationships. Loises and Eunices and Timothys can come in all shapes and sizes and ages, men and women. And the fact is, none of us come to faith by ourselves, just like none of us raise a child by ourselves. In the family of faith, we have a lot of mothers and fathers, lots of aunts and uncles, lots of brothers and sisters.
Ralph Taylor is a Canadian
pastor whom I met several years ago.
Originally from
There was a couple in the church with a mentally handicapped son named Michael. Michael had lived with his parents his whole life, and now in their later years, they were having a hard time keeping up with the house. They wound up moving to this retirement community owned by the church. But two months after they moved in, the wife died, and then two months after that, the husband died.
And the question was, what about Michael? He had no close family--his parents were gone and he was an only child. There were rules that had to be followed in the retirement home--Michael wasn’t old enough to be eligible to live there, and besides, it was doubtful if he could manage living by himself. But what would happen to him? The board of the retirement community met and pondered these questions.
What they decided was, being Christian was more important than following the rules they had set up, so they all agreed to make an exception for Michael. And since they agreed that he couldn’t make it by himself, everybody decided that they would all look after Michael. Now sometimes, when everybody is in charge, it means that nobody is in charge, but that was not what happened here. Ralph, my pastor friend, says that this community really came through. Every day, several people would stop in and check on Michael. They helped him with meals and laundry and shopping and keeping up with the apartment. They really were his family.
You’ve all heard the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Well, it takes a lot of Loises and a lot of Eunices to raise a child. Sunday School teachers, nursery workers, day care providers, school teachers, youth leaders, adult friends. It takes a lot of Loises and Eunices for us to be the church.
When we understand that we have been blest by our grandmothers and mothers, by friends and family, by people we know and even by people we will never know, part of our response is to pass on that gift by nurturing and guiding and helping another person. Not everyone has been planted by water, and perhaps we need to start by looking for those whose roots are drying up, those who need a caring friend.
We have been blessed by mothers who take part in God’s work of shepherding. We are all called to share in that work. We are called to take our place along with Lois and Eunice and be a church where all sheep share in the shepherding. May it be so! Amen.