WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 5/14/06 Mothers’ Day

1 Thessalonians 2:6-13 “We Loved You So Much”

It’s always a pleasure when Mothers’ Day comes around, and we have a chance to pay tribute to all the mothers here. Not everyone, of course, is privileged to be a mother – even among those who would like to be - so we cannot all fully grasp what that special role is like. But we all had or have mothers, and we learned more from them than we shall ever know. It’s worth reflecting on that, and thanking God for our mothers, on a day like this.

1) A Mother

My mother died in 2000, and my father a year ago. In the five years between their deaths, I suppose I was preoccupied with my father’s welfare more than I was mourning my mother’s passing, but now that they are both gone, it’s easier to think back to what I owe to each of them. My mother was born in 1914, and her father died of wounds he received in WWI when she was a year old. For the next 25 years, she and her mother developed that special kind of relationship that women can have, in which they become more like friends and sisters than mother and daughter.

When she married my father in 1940, he was already in the British Navy, and for the next 5 years she saw him on occasional leaves and endured his long overseas postings. When WWII ended, they found themselves - as so many young people did – living with in-laws, raising young children, scraping along on rationed food. It was not an easy way to start a marriage. My mother gave birth to three children: a daughter who died at birth, me, and my younger sister Judith who has Down’s Syndrome. How my mother dealt with her family situation became the defining part of her life, as it is for so many women.

It was not easy, but she worked prodigiously hard at it, physically and emotionally. Judith required a lot of care in her early years, and programs for training, educating and helping handicapped children were still rare in those days. I was a kid who needed constant activity, and so was sent off to my grandparents in the city of London for many long summers – which I greatly enjoyed. Judith would be my mother’s constant care until she was 35 and my mother was in her 60s. I still remember the intense family discussions over Judith’s finally moving to a county-run residential program, where to our astonishment she flourished like a teenager who had found her wings.

My mother taught me a lot about perseverance, about getting done what has to be done. She read constantly, and as a child I was sent to the library to bring home 6 or 8 novels at a time which our village librarian picked out for her. She was Welsh by birth, and loved music – Wales being known, at least by its own people, as “the land of song.” Like all Welsh people she also loved to talk. My strong image of teenage years was the hours of intense conversations on every subject under the sun. Being Welsh also meant being ready to express your emotions: the famed “stiff upper lip” is an English (and Scottish) trait, which was in my father’s genes but not in my mother’s. I have inherited my share of each!

My mother cared, passionately, about everything. There was a right way to do things and a right place for everything (she had learned these things from her grandfather, a very English butler); for her there were no “small matters.” She had a hard time letting go of her children, Judith and me. She was devoted to the welfare of children and then adults with Down’s Syndrome, and ran clubs and outings and activities for them for many years. Her faith in God was strong, but often submerged; she made sure I went to Sunday School, but I think never felt at home in our local church; in her later years she returned to the strong evangelical faith she had been brought up in thanks to her Congregationalist lay preacher grandfather.

I learned from her that love and devotion and energy and talking things out can solve many difficult things. I learned that there is no more valuable work than what you do in your own home with your own family. I learned that faith in God can sustain you through years of hard work, even when that faith is only barely visible at times, and can flourish in your later life.

2) We Loved You So Much

As I read again this past week the passage that the Apostle Paul wrote to the young Christians in Thessalonica, I was reminded of the similarity he saw between the pastoral role of nurturing young Christians and the parental role of nurturing children. The question for every parent, and pastor, is how to do it right! What are the priorities? What are the goals? How do you get there? What approaches to parenting and pastoring are Godly and productive? What do we – you and I here now – remember and value most from our parents, or from the churches, that have nurtured us down through the years? What did we learn, and how can we teach what is most important?

The phrase that jumped out to me this week as I read this passage was “We loved you so much...” That surely typifies what every parent feels about their children; to be sure, mothers are more likely to say it, but fathers feel it even of they don’t know how to express it! But what does “loving them so much” mean parents should do for their children?

Paul gives us several clues. He worked hard – very hard – “night and day,” in order to provide for his children in the faith. He wanted never to be a burden upon them, but always to be a support for them. In that way, he models what we all strive for as parents: by our labors to provide for the needs of our children. We do not work so that we can have a new car, but so our children can go to college. We do not take two jobs so that we will have money for grand vacations, but so that our children can grow up in a good school district. We recognize that the pattern of parenting is that we spend ourselves for our children’s benefit, and we accept that this is the way it is meant to be.

We learn from Paul too that there are times when parenting and pastoring involve care and gentleness. He is not afraid to depict his ministry in feminine terms: when his children in the faith were young, like infants, he and Silas and Timothy were to them “like nursing mothers.” But when the children had grown up a little, they dealt with them “as a father deals with his children, encouraging, comforting and urging” them on. Paul reflects the culture of his day – mothers cared for the young, fathers had the responsibility of training and education as the children grew older. In our culture, those roles are different, and both men and women now take their parts at all stages of their children’s lives.

Most importantly, Paul says that he, Silas and Timothy “shared their lives” with the Thessalonian Christians. It was never just a matter of instruction or education or leadership – it was always about sharing life together in all its dimensions. If they had had kitchens as we know them, I can see Paul in there with his sleeves rolled up, helping in preparation and clearing up a communal meal. I do not think he would ever have differentiated between “men’s work” and “women’s work,” as though there were some things that were beneath the dignity or notice of a man – or even of an apostle.

In all this sharing, caring, encouragement of people he loved dearly, Paul had a goal in view. All this was done “so that they would live lives worthy of God.” His aim was maturity, responsibility, and righteousness in the lives of his children in the faith. The means of their growing up that way was the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Word of God. He preached it, he lived it, he encouraged the Christians to embrace it and to see that God was at work within them by his Word. He loved them so much that he wanted to be sure to give them the thing that he had come to treasure most: a life of faith in Jesus Christ.

3) Loving Parents

How are we doing as parents, as mothers, or as fathers? Are we gladly spending ourselves for our children – or our grandchildren, or other people’s children, or the community’s children or the church’s children?

Are we tender and caring when that is needed, and comforting and encouraging when that is more appropriate? Are we “urging” our children on when they get to adolescence? Or is it by then all too much effort? What are the priorities we are setting for our children and ourselves? Does growing in faith in Jesus Christ figure into our “Top Ten” list? How does it compare, for example, with sports or music? What will happen when schedules clash? How much parental capital will we expend in getting our teens to be an active part of the church? Will it matter enough to us that they have a good peer group, or will we give up the fight early on in the face of competition from sports, girl friends and boy friends, needing more sleep..? (I ask all this with feeling, and not just rhetorically, as a father whose two sons have both stopped attending church, much to my sense of shame and failure as parent!). What are our priorities, as parents and as a church, for our children? Do we think the church youth group will make up for what we don’t do as parents? Be sure that no church youth group is better than the parents who support it!

When we say to our children, or in our hearts believe, that “we love you so much,” what will that prove to mean? What will we show them is important enough to us to devote time, care, encouragement, urging, to? Lying on the couch drinking beer and watching TV? They will learn that very quickly! Reading? Roaming the Internet? Music? Christian faith?

The fact that all of us are even here this morning testifies that at some level, we have found that faith matters in life. But if we are only here “so the children will grow up in Sunday School,” we can’t be surprised if they and we leave the church as soon as they can – typically after Confirmation. And if we are here because we sense that our adult lives demand more than a “Sunday School faith,” or we have learned that God’s call on your life does not stop when you are 17, then are we courageous enough to transmit these convictions to our children? Are we willing to spend any parental capital in commending the Christian gospel to our children?

When we say “we love you so much,” is it all about material things, about opportunities to succeed, about not depriving them of anything our culture offers? Or does it reflect our deepest values, or sense of calling, our experience of God’s work in our lives? I struggle, as you do, to convey my priorities to my children, even as my parents struggled to do so for me. None of us excels as parents, and we all need God’s grace and strength and wisdom to do better. Thank God he still calls to himself and works in our children, despite our failings as parents.

But remember Paul’s confident words to the young Christians he has nurtured: “we loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you... our very lives,” and not just that, but also “the gospel of God.” Let us be confident that if we will present the gospel to our children, God is able to make it a living word in them as he has in us, and to start a work in them that will bear fruit all their lives, to his glory and to their blessing.

Let us pray...