A Homily for Mothering Sunday

 

So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.

—Galatians 4:31

 

 

            This Sunday, mid-Lent Sunday, is known in the English-speaking world as “Mothering Sunday.”  There are many customs associated with Mothering Sunday, which was and is the English Mother’s Day.  According to the oldest custom, this is the day when everyone went home to visit his or her mother, bearing a gift, traditionally a simnel cake and a bunch of violets.  But Mothering Sunday originally got its name from the Epistle lesson, taken from Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

 

            In the Epistle lesson, Saint Paul contrasts the mothers of Abraham’s two sons.  Hagar, the Egyptian slave-girl, was the mother of Ishmael; Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was the mother of Isaac.  The story of these two mothers is told in Torah, in the first book of Moses, called “Genesis.”  It is a story that all of Paul’s Jewish readers knew by heart. 

 

            This is the story, as it is found in the eighteenth through twenty-first chapters of Genesis:

 

            Abraham found favour with God, and God promised Abraham that he would be the father of a great nation, with descendents as numerous as the sands.  But Abraham was old, and his wife was getting old; and when a mysterious angelic visitor told Abraham that his wife would bear him a son, Sarah laughed. 

 

            As time passed, and no child came, Abraham and Sarah grew anxious.  Sarah sent her servant girl, Hagar, to Abraham, so that Abraham could conceive a child with her.  In due course, Hagar bore a son, who was named Ishmael. 

           

            But God was not through with Abraham and Sarah.  At long last, when Sarah was very old—Scripture says she was ninety—Sarah, too, bore Abraham a son.  And that son was named Isaac, which means, “laughter.”  And Scripture says that it is through Isaac that Abraham’s descendents are reckoned.

 

            Ishmael was Abraham’s son according to the ordinary ways of the world.  But Isaac was Abraham’s son according to God’s promise.  What was impossible in the ordinary way of the world was possible for God.  And God is true to his promises.  Abraham and Sarah were wrong to have doubted that God would make good on his promise that Sarah would bear Abraham a son.

 

            There was a problem, however.  So soon as Hagar knew that she was pregnant with Abraham’s child, she became insolent and disobedient toward Sarah.  And, after Isaac was born, the older boy teased and tormented him.  It finally became so bad that Sarah demanded that Abraham cast Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert, which he did.

 

            God had mercy on Hagar and Ishmael, and preserved them in the desert.  God promised that he would make a great nation of Ishmael, also, and so he did.  We call the descendents of Ishmael, “Arabs.”

 

            And God fulfilled his promise to Abraham through Isaac, and his son, Jacob (who was surnamed “Israel”), and Jacob’s twelve sons.  It was this people, the descendents of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob, that God chose as his own, to fulfill his redeeming work for his creation.  In the first chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, the evangelist traces the genealogy of Jesus, beginning:  “Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, and Jacob begat Judah and his brethren . . .”

 

            For a thousand years, or more, before the time of Paul, this story was understood to describe the origin of the Hebrew people.  In Genesis is written, “it is through Isaac that Abraham’s descendents are reckoned.”  Scripture goes on to tell how Jacob/Israel and his family were invited to settle in Egypt, and were subsequently enslaved by Pharaoh; and how, after hundreds of years, when the descendents of Israel had become very numerous, God, through Moses, led them out of Egypt, drowning Pharaoh and his soldiers in the Red Sea; and how, at Mount Sinai, in the Arabian desert, God, through Moses, had given them the Law.

 

            In his letter to the Galatians, Paul gives a new meaning to this story; or, rather, he reveals the meaning that had lain hidden in the story for a thousand years.  Paul was not one of those for whom Scripture has a literal meaning and only a literal meaning.  Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Isaac and Ishmael were, of course, real people; and Scripture tells us about their lives and their relationships. 

 

            But, at the same time, their story is an allegory, which is to say, it is a story in which the characters represent things beyond themselves.

 

            Paul reminds the Galatians that the Ishmael, the son of Hagar the bondwoman, was born after the flesh, while Isaac, the son of Sarah the freewoman, was born according to God’s promise.  Already, Paul’s readers know that it is better to be free than to be a slave, and it is better to be the child of promise than to be the product of mere carnal desire.

 

            Then Paul introduces a twist into the story.  Hagar, he says, represents the Law given at Mount Sinai, and she represents the earthly Jerusalem, including the Temple with all its rituals and sacrifices, and the whole of the Jewish people and religion.  The earthly Jerusalem is in bondage:  she is literally occupied by the armies of the Roman Empire, but, beyond that, she is caught up in the affairs of the world, in the corrupt and sinful activities of human beings.

 

            On the other hand, Sarah represents the heavenly Jerusalem.  The Jerusalem that is to come.  The Jerusalem of God’s promise.  As Hagar and Ishmael persecuted Sarah and Isaac, so the world as it is, the world of fleshly desire and bodily gratification, persecutes those whose home is in the world to come. 

 

            We Christians are the children of promise, of God’s promise to Abraham, which was fulfilled in Jesus the Christ.  Unto Abraham and his seed was the promise made; not to “seeds” which are many, but “seed,” singular, meaning Jesus.  The descendents of Abraham, the great nation of which he is the father, are, ultimately, not reckoned through Isaac after all, but through Christ. 

 

            In baptism we are born again.  As Nicodemus says, we cannot, when we are grown, enter again into our mother’s wombs to be born, but that is not necessary, because our new birth is not birth according to the flesh (according to the way of the world), but birth in the Spirit (according to God’s promise).  We Christians, then, are Abraham’s great nation, and the heavenly Jerusalem, represented by Sarah, is the mother of us all. 

 

            As was true 3,500 years ago (during the lifetime of Abraham and Sarah), and 2,000 years ago (during the lifetime of Paul), so it is true now that the children of the world as it is persecute the children of the world that is to come; the children of the flesh persecute the children of the spirit. 

 

            The world as it is, the Jerusalem that now is, is not a comfortable place for Christians.  Even here in the United States, in this twenty-first century after the birth of the Christ, the secular order is at odds with the spiritual.  Prayer and Bible-reading were banished from our schools forty years ago; and thirty years ago abortion—the cold-blooded murder of the most helpless of our brethren and sisters—was declared a constitutional right.

 

            The Boy Scouts are being driven out of public buildings and parks because they insist that members and leaders do their duty to God and their country and keep themselves morally straight.  The second highest federal court has prohibited schoolchildren in this state from pledging allegiance to one nation under God, and the Supreme Court may make that prohibition final within the next few months.  Scientists are presuming to create human embryos in their laboratories in order to experiment on them and cannibalize them for spare parts. 

 

            Just this year, judges and other politicians in Massachusetts, California, Oregon, and New York, as well as in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, have presumed to redefine marriage to include the union of homosexuals.  In one protestant denomination, an openly practicing homosexual has been enthroned as a diocesan bishop; and, just yesterday, a church court in another protestant denomination held that homosexuality is not inconsistent with Christian doctrine.

 

            All around us, the mass media promote the acquisition of material possessions and the gratification of carnal desires.  Sexual promiscuity is a principal them of motion pictures and “reality” television.  Advertisers proclaim that we only go around once in life, so we must grab all the gusto we can get.  Corporate officers and “omnimedia” stars lie and steal to get their hands on a few more dollars.

 

            If we were citizens of the Jerusalem that now is, and not citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, we might well despair.  But we do belong to that Jerusalem that is above, we are the children of promise, and God is true to his promises.  The world will persecute us, but be of good cheer, for God, through his Christ, has overcome the world.

 

            We Christians belong to the Jerusalem that is above, which is the mother of us all.  In the words of a sixteenth century hymn:

 

Oh, Mother dear, Jerusalem, when shall we come to thee?

When shall our sorrows have an end?  Thy joys when shall we see?

 

 

Church of Our Lady of Walsingham

Corona, California

21 March 2004

 


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