Death, Life and Motherhood

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Ruth 1:1-17:

The first attempts to create a day for mothers was begun by Julia Ward Howe, best known for writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  It wasn’t a day to honor mothers the way we do today, but instead in the wake of the civil war, in which so many mothers had lost their children, it was a day for mothers to come together to call for peace and disarmament.  The first Mother’s Day as we know it was celebrated at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, the precursor to the United Methodist Church, in 1908.  Anna Jarvis wanted to create a day to honor her mother, who worked promoting female education, and through her to honor all mothers.  At the 1912 general Conference, which is the administrative body of the Methodist church, they called for Mother’s Day to be celebrated at all Methodist churches, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national celebration as a day to recognize all the women who had lost sons in war, which we should note is the same year world war 1 began.  Unfortunately for Jarvis, by the 1920’s she believed that the holiday had become so commercialized that she began to regret having created the holiday. 

I think that Mother’s Day is one of the hardest sermons to deliver every year.  While Mother’s Day tends to be a high attendace day as people come out to celebrate their mothers, I also know that there are people who consciously avoid church on Mother’s Day, or at least dread coming, because they don’t want to have to deal with the pain that mother’s day brings.  There are those women who wanted to have children but were unable to; there are women who chose not to have children, and who feel judged for that decision, especially in the church; there are who have lost children; there are those who have lost their mothers; and there are those who mothers were unwilling or unable to be a mother to be their children and somehow I have to bring those altogether and or at least recognize those realities, to mourn and to celebrate, to recognize pain and to honor, and I think to proclaim a message of hope, love and appreciation, and I think that Naomi and Ruth do all those things.

The Book of Ruth is one of only two books in our Bible named after a woman, does anyone remember the second?  (Esther)  The book begins with a key indicator of what the story is going to be about, but it is very subtle and so to catch it you would have to be very aware of Biblical storytelling, and that is that we are told that the family are Ephrathites.  It is said that Bethlehem, was founded by the descendants of Ephrath, who was the wife of Caleb, and so the family is identified not by a male clan name but by a female name indicating that this is a story about women and the descendants of those women.  There is also a sort of ironic meaning to this usage as well, as the word Ephrath comes from a root word which means fertile or productive, and at the moment neither the land nor the sons are matching that description, and so they have to leave Bethlehem, which means house of bread, although eventually there is not only fertility in the land but also fertility in the family as well as Ruth will give birth to a son.