DESERT PALMS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Sun City West, Arizona

Faith Of Our Mothers

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Dr. David S. Hodgson

MAY 9, 2010

Psalm 8

1 O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. 2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger. 3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; 4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? 5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor. 6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. 9 O LORD, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

2 Timothy 1:1-7

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, for the sake of the promise of life that is in Christ Jesus, 2 To Timothy, my beloved child: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. 3 I am grateful to God--whom I worship with a clear conscience, as my ancestors did--when I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day. 4 Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. 5 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. 6 For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; 7 for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

            You are probably wondering where Linda is. Stan, have you seen her? Linda had a prior commitment before she joined us to preach at old, historic First Presbyterian Church in downtown Phoenix this morning. And so, she did that. Let us hold her in our prayers, as she will be with us as well in spirit.

            My text is taken from the Book of 2 Timothy, Chapter 1, Verse 5: “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and now I am sure, dwells in you.” 

So………. Do you suppose there is any chance that maybe God didn’t call Paul to spread the faith to the ends of the earth? I mean, suppose in reality Paul just loved to travel, and used the gospel as his excuse for not spending much time at home? Now I dare to say this based on the assumption that when I get to the pearly gates it’s Peter on the gate and not Paul. That may seem like idle speculation except for the fact that there comes a moment in every life, especially as we get toward the end of life, when we look back on the lives we have lived and consider all the battles we have waged, all the crusades we have launched, and in that moment of reflection begin to wonder whether all of them were as urgent and important as we once thought they were. Sometimes from that moment of reflection, every now and then we catch a glimpse of the fact that maybe had we been a little gentler, a little kinder, a little more patient, loving, forgiving and nurturing we might have been more effective than we were.

Those moments come to all of us. I suspect you and I are in such a moment at this time in life: the privilege of looking back with a sense of perspective. Since that moment comes to us, surely it had to come to Paul. Paul, looking back over all the crusades he launched, and wondering about the way in which he carried out what he thought was the will of God. I think Paul is in just such a moment in our scripture lesson this morning. This is an old man named Paul writing to a young man named Timothy; Paul, at the end of his ministry; Timothy just at the beginning. Paul with a well-seasoned perspective of reality, worn, weary; Timothy, with unblemished idealism and enthusiasm. We meet him there as he writes the letter, “To Timothy, my beloved child.”

Given that perspective of hindsight we have to know this is no casual salutation. This sounds more like a last will and testament, for something is being transferred from one generation to another, from an old man to a young man. Paul had planted the faith in churches around the world. In that process he upset a lot of people, stirred up the status quo wherever he went, tore down as many institutions as he ever tried to build, offended the principalities and powers wherever he went and now, by these words, he intends to transfer his legacy to young Timothy.

“I am reminded of your sincere faith,” he writes. We need to call that what it is: smoozing. This is Paul smoozing. Paul is a master at using praise to get what he wants. The Bible is filled with it; I will take you on that journey some time and show you. Paul is buttering Timothy up: “sincere faith.” And then words that surely must have caused him to wonder about the wisdom of his ways: “ … a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother, Lois, and in your mother, Eunice, and now I am sure dwells in you.” 

I want you to see this old man taking his pen, putting it down, and reflecting on the irony of it. The contrast here is amazing. Paul, the man who took the faith single-handedly to the ends of the earth, just discovered that while he was away God was passing it to the close of the age from grandmother to mother to child, without causing any interruptions or disruptions. Where Paul sought to turn the world upside down and inside out for Christ, God was apparently turning the family system right side up with faith being passed from mother to daughter, from daughter to son. It had to give Paul pause to wonder whether or not he may have been a little bit too aggressive, a little bit too self-centered, a little bit too preoccupied with his own sense of destiny to realize that while he was out changing the world, God was at home changing lives. One, spreading faith to the ends of the earth; the other, passing the faith silently, graciously, to the close of the age. 

Because Paul’s moment is similar to mine I have done some reflection of my own. Because for forty-five years I, too, have been out spreading the faith across the landscape of life, this text has given me pause to consider how God passed the faith from my grandmother, Mary, to my mother, Margaret, and on to me. There was no one time that I can remember when either my mother or my grandmother taught me church doctrine or any attitudes of scripture or of theology or of life that were exclusively related to Christianity. My grandfather was the Baptist preacher, but my grandmother, his wife, and my mother, his daughter, seemed to know that they would be able to influence my life with their faith more profoundly than he by his preaching. I think they were right   in so many little ways.

I remember coming home more than once, angry at some injustice that had been done to me, expecting they would set the world right for me. They didn’t do it. Instead they told me how dangerous is would be for me to carry a grudge across a span of years. They told me how crippling it would be to the mind, and how destructive to the heart and spirit of my life. And so, at an early age I learned the extraordinary experience of liberation that comes from forgiveness. That kind of experience changes everything.

There were times when I lost faith in myself. They reminded me in little ways that God still had faith in me. I remember that season of life when all of my friends—well, most of them—were experimenting with tobacco and alcohol. This was long before drugs were on the menu. My grandmother and my mother never preached about the evils of such things; they simply took that season of life to remind me that the human body is the dwelling place of God. My job was to take care of it as best I could so that God would have a suitable dwelling place. I remember them explaining that more than once, and it was enough.

The list, perhaps, is endless. Times when I was depressed and sought to blame others for the way my life was unfolding, only to be taught the joys of being responsible for my own life choices and how my life unfolded. Times when I wanted to be like everybody else. I wanted to look as handsome as everybody else, be as blessed financially as everybody else, be as successful as everybody else. In those seasons they found wonderful ways to tell me about God’s unique creation in every human life. They let me know there was only one of me and that nobody in all the world could be me better than I. What I needed to do was just learn how to be me the best way I could.

Lessons like that, passed gently, naturally, when the time was right to share them, and by some ineffable mystery, in their faith I came to know something of the personality of Christ, something of the will of Christ, something of the love, forgiveness and work of Christ. My grandmother, Mary, my mother, Margaret, passed the faith, and now it dwells in me. That’s how I know Paul must have marveled at the way God passed faith from Lois to Eunice to Timothy while he was out trying to change the world. In his reflection, though, it must have seemed particularly ironic because he lived in a patriarchal world, where most if not all of the change that ever took place was patriarchal, and God was home using a matriarchal system to set things right. 

As you know, we have a Thursday morning pastor’s back door seminar. We have now grown to twenty people. I have promised never to use this place for political posturing, not for your sake but for God’s. I made that promise a long time ago, but I told the group that anybody who sneaks into my office on a Thursday morning at eight o’clock in the morning, everything is on the table. And so, we were talking away about the global problems of the world and all the crises in different parts of the world. 

From somewhere on my left side the subtle suggestion was gracefully made that maybe if we’d been trying patriarchal solutions for millennia and getting nowhere, maybe there would be some merit in searching for a matriarchal one ... Somebody just said “Amen” . You got the ‘men’ part ... That’s when I heard the voice of God say, well, there’s your agenda for next week. I may have been the only one in the room to hear it, but I am asking for any and all who have examples of ways in which women have touched the world with grace and transformed it into a place of beauty to come and share. It could be stories of home, stories of neighborhoods, stories of the market, the business world, stories of culture and society or of the global economic marketplace. I want to spend Thursday morning talking about the matriarchal perspective on life. 

I have allowed fifty minutes for that discussion. Fifty whole minutes to begin, because I suspect that while men are driven by a sense of adventure to change the world in some ways, God still uses women to transform the world in others, and among them, the way faith is passed from one to another to another for the healing of the nation. 

So, what are the odds? Do you think God actually called Paul to go out to the ends of the earth to preach the gospel? Or could it be that God called him to the ends of the earth just to get him out of the house and away from home so God could pass the faith beautifully through time, without being distracted by Paul.

 It is St. Peter on the pearly gates, isn’t it? Good. Happy Mother’s Day, everyone. Let us pray. For the gift we have been given, for the faith that has been bestowed, for the love that claims us and the will that moves us, in all things, O God, we give you praise. Amen.