An AHA moment on Mother’s Day [illustration by Dave Baab]
by Lynne Baab
The setting: the worship service on Mother’s Day a couple of decades ago.
The AHA moment: the prayer that gave permission for people to struggle on that day.
About 20 years ago on Mother’s Day, my good friend and colleague was leading the prayer time in the worship service. Over the years, I had sat through many prayers on Mother’s Day that expressed thanks to God for mothers, a good thing to do. This was the first time I heard a prayer that expressed those appropriate thanks to God, but also acknowledged that Mother’s Day is hard for some people. My friend mentioned couples who struggle with infertility or had lost a child, women who were single and wished to be married and have children, and those who had difficult relationships with their own mothers or their children.
It truly was an AHA moment for me. For various reasons I had never liked Mother’s Day very much, and here was someone naming some of my ambivalence and struggle. Her words conveyed such freedom and acceptance to me.
Right now I’m teaching an online class for Hope International University on leading communal spiritual practices. In some of our online discussion we have talked about the fact that all leaders of communal spiritual practices need to lay out the goal and structure of various practices with optimism for the great experience spiritual practices offer. However, at the same time, leaders need to affirm that people come into those practices with diverse feelings, and they will have different experiences as they engage in the practices as well.
As leaders in any setting, we have to make room for people to talk about, pray about, and think about their gratitude for the great blessings they experience, as well as the sadness, sense of loss, and unfulfilled longings they experience. Both are real. Both sets of feelings can and should be brought into God’s presence.
With respect to motherhood, I suspect most mothers have at least some mixed feelings, no matter how much they appreciate the gift of children. In the previous paragraph, I mentioned feelings of great blessing, sadness, sense of loss, and unfulfilled longings. I suspect that most mothers experience all of those at various times. I know I did when my children were still living at home. Sometimes I still do.
Many people have experienced great blessing, sadness, sense of loss, and unfulfilled longings related to their relationship (or lack thereof) with their own mother.
What does it look like in Christian spirituality to praise God for the good gifts we experience and also allow honest expression of the thoughts and emotions we consider to be negative? What does it look like to encourage thankfulness and praise, while also giving people permission to pray and talk about the struggles?
And what does it look like for someone who loves Mother’s Day to make room for those who experience the day as a mixed blessing? And vice versa?
The Psalms provide a powerful model for the movement between thanks, praise, sadness, anger, loss, and lament. I’ve been praying the Psalms for many years, and the variety of emotions in the Psalms has helped me bring my own mixed and complex emotions into God’s presence so many times.
But what about those emotions expressed in the Psalms that we’re not feeling? Someone once told me that whenever we come across an emotion in a psalm that we’re not feeling, we can pray that verse on behalf of the people around the world who are having that experience.
I wonder if we could adopt that strategy on Mother’s Day. In prayer, we can express our own emotions about the day, but we can also enter into the feelings of those who experience the day differently. The Psalms model God’s welcome of everything we feel, as well as God’s compassion for those whose experience is different from ours.
Swans Craig Goodwin http://www.craiggoodwinphoto.com/ Used with permission.
by Emma Morgan
Opening Prayer
God with a mother’s heart,
You gather us as your children.
You comfort and hold us in your warm embrace.
When we hurt your arms enfold us.
When we are afraid your wings protect us.
When we are hungry you feed us with the bread of life.
God with a mother’s heart,
Your love surrounds and supports us,
In good times and in tough,
In the midst of joy and pain,
Always and everywhere.
You will never leave nor abandon us.
God eternal and loving one,
God with a mother’s heart,
We thank you this day,
For being part of your family.
(prayer by Christine Sine)
Communion
Set up: Farmhouse style table setting eg. buttered scones, oat biscuits, a big jug of red juice, a display with eggs, fruit and vegetables in a basket.
Remember when Jesus gathered the children on his knees? (Matt 19:14)
Remember when Jesus said “How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” (Luke 13:34)
Remember when Jesus said ‘Come to me.. and I will give you rest.’ (Matt 11:28)
With Jesus’ spirit close to all those who call on him, we come to Him now.
Let us read together:
Jesus we invite you this table
Stay with us
Be our guest and also our host
May we know you at this table
In the sharing of this meal.
Come and take some food and drink and hold onto it so we can enjoy it together.
Serve food and drink and play relaxing music.
Let us breathe in the goodness of this moment, the rest of Jesus in this moment.
Space for reflection.
The Lord Jesus, on the eve of His death, shared a meal with His followers.
Taking the bread, He gave thanks, broke it, and offered it to them with these words:
This is My body broken for you. Remember Me whenever you eat.
After the meal, taking the cup of wine,
He gave thanks, and offered it to them with these words:
This is My blood poured out for you, Remember Me whenever you drink.
And so, we eat and drink in memory of Jesus and His great love.
And in this simple meal
We acknowledge the living Jesus.
We celebrate the life and rest he gives us, even today.
The meal is enjoyed.
Communion liturgy taken in part from A Communion Liturgy for Palm Sunday
Blessing on all the Women in our community
A basket of chocolates is taken around to all the women and girls of the community.
We have a gift for all the women and girls in this room this mother’s day. We are blessed by all you give to this community and to the communities around you. Enjoy these treats as we pray a blessing on you.
Prayer of Blessing in honor of Women
God of Sarah and Hagar, Naomi and Ruth, Esther and Deborah,
God of Mary and Elizabeth, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, Lydia,
and all the unnamed women of scripture,
as you anointed these women with the oil of faith and calling,
so anoint women everywhere.
as you blessed these women with finding the courage and strength, persistence and perseverance within them, so bless women everywhere.
as you transformed the world through the vision and work of these women,
continue to transform the world through the vision and work of good women everywhere.
From Australia to India, from Russia to Uganda, (alteration to original)
May women continue to form and build community in ways that birth justice, love and peace among us.
In gestation and through the laboring, keep them focused, strong, steadfast and unwavering.
God, bless the women who continue to work tirelessly, often unnoticed,
but full of beauty and power, for all manner of good.
Continue to make them vessels of your sustenance; instruments of your peace; an inspiration to all. Amen
(Prayer by Erin Matteson.)
by Lilly Lewin
I have found myself whining a bit more that usual this week… about the stress of politics, the stress of dealing with an old dog on his last leg, about my lack of productivity and the fact that my to do list keeps getting longer rather than shorter. Recently I read somewhere that May is one of the most stressful months of the year. In the states, it’s usually the mad dash of end of school activities before summer begins. And sadly we no longer have the lazy days of summer; instead there are camps, swimming lessons, work, conferences, family trips, and DIY projects that fill up the calendar. Sometimes we just need to stop and rest! We all need to be a little more like Mary and a lot less like Martha. Take some time this weekend to sit with Jesus and just BE. And make the time in the next few weeks to be more Maryesque and less Marthaish
SITTING WITH JESUS
LUKE 10: 38-42 At the Home of Martha and Mary
As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Are you too busy to sit with Jesus?
Are you too busy complaining about other people to just BE with Jesus?
SIT DOWN
Consider all the conversations happening in this passage.
Those in the kitchen, those in the living room.
What about the disciples? Are they hanging out with Jesus too?
Or are they looking for snacks in Martha’s kitchen?
Are they getting in her way?
Is Martha whining to herself before she confronts Jesus?
Or is she whining to someone else?
Where are you in this story?
Are you in the Kitchen working hard?
Or are you sitting at the feet of Jesus being present with Him?
Consider how you are living right now.
Are you really being present with Jesus?
Or are you just whining in the kitchen?
Are you complaining that others aren’t helping you?
Do you really just need to STOP and rest in the presence and love of JESUS?
Sit down here with Jesus and BE PRESENT.
Have a conversation.
Take the Time.
Put away your whining and your busyness.
BE WITH JESUS!
REST
BE STILL
SIT with Jesus and Listen to Him
BE WITH JESUS!
This is the REST station from the “At the Table with Jesus” Sacred Space prayer experience. found at freerangeworship.com
By Inspiration takes time I think. Being present to what IS. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting what is already there as if with new eyes, new ears, new hands, new lips – appreciating with reverence and joy or delight the sacredness of ordinary things. In this way: rocket from a friends garden, dived potatoes and tomatoes, eggs picked up by a housemate who also brings back that first coffee of the day. The meal is symbolic of more than the sum of its parts, overtones of love and life, aromas of sharing and community, flavour and savour more than mere fuel. I wish everyone’s life could be made up of recognising these things that make life worth living… we get busy and we get blind.
I will taste the joy of being awake.
by Shonnie Scott
“The 21st century agents of change—across the world—are women,” Dr. Salim Munayer announced in a slow, deliberate, hear-this-if-you-don’t-hear-anything-else voice at a conference. Dr. Munayer is an Arab Christian who grew up in Israel, a renowned missiologist, and an authority on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and reconciliation. Such an audacious and unforgettably empowering declaration from such an impressive man sent a shiver down to my toes. Not of trepidation; it was rather a jolt of conviction, responsibility, and courage. Boom!
At the time, I was in the thick of nurturing a fledgling congregation. Talk about serving as a change agent! Women church planters are still a very, very small group amongst pastors, but there are at least five reasons the world needs more women church planters serving as God’s change agents.
1. Women church planters are a real-time demonstration of God’s original, very-good plan for humans—that at creation, men and women were given an equal responsibility to bear God’s image, have dominion/”rule” over creation, and be fruitful. As a woman pastor, I have never thought of my ministry as a “right” or “equal opportunity,” but rather as a God-given, ordained-at-creation equal responsibility (Gen 1:26-28).
I say “yes!” to whatever assignment God gives me. Period. Women church planters are a living testimony to the world of what it looks like when men and women take equal and full responsibility to become all God intended, and partner alongside each other to fulfill God’s mission—God’s kingdom come and will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!
2. The church may have travelled through a couple millennia accustomed to mostly male leadership, but history is on an irreversible redemptive trajectory, fueled by the incomparably great power of Christ’s resurrection (Eph 1:19). And we are presently living in the “afterward” the prophet Joel spoke about (Joel 2:28, 29), and Luke repeated in Acts 2:17-18: “‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy… Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.”
Not only will women prophesy, they will exercise all the Spirit’s gifts alongside men. Nowhere does the New Testament mention gender-specific Spirit-gifts.
3. Women are extraordinary models of courage and obedience when they say “yes!” to God. Deborah, Esther, Mary who birthed Jesus, Mary Magdalene, first to return to Jesus’ tomb and witness to his resurrection, just to name a few biblical examples. God’s call on women for extraordinary assignments subverts and surprises a patriarchal world. Humans look at outward appearances (including gender) but God looks at the heart (1 Sam 16:7). Some think that history-making, change-agent women are the rare exceptions, yet over and over in Scripture and history, ordinary and unlikely women are lynchpins in fulfilling God’s mission.
“We have seen it in so many places: When things get rough, when things are at their worst, when everyone else flees or is in hiding, very often it is the women who stand up, offering themselves, becoming completely vulnerable as they submit to the risk of death. That is indeed their strength and their power.” (Jim Wallis, “While the Men Were in Hiding, Women Delivered the Greatest News the World Has Ever Known“).
4. Having been on the receiving end of oppression and discrimination, women are experientially positioned to identify with other marginalized and less-empowered humans, and vice versa. The least, last, and lost often experience women as safer and more credible than men because there is an unspoken understanding: “you have walked in my shoes.” Everywhere we look, past and present, Christ-following women are on the frontlines of the hard, slow, heart-wrenching work of justice ministry. Women church planters are especially primed to “do justice, love mercy and walk humbly” (Micah 6:8).
5. Out of necessity or limited options, women often go or are sent and are willing to minister in less popular, more challenging places. For example, in the early 1800s, opportunities for single women to support themselves through full time ministry in the US were almost non-existent. That, combined with significant public opposition, prompted the movement of many single women overseas to the foreign mission field where they were far away from church hierarchy. From the church’s perspective, they were “out of sight, out of mind,” but God was powerfully using these willing laborers! Today, women are disproportionately called or sent to smaller, aging, and/or rural congregations. Women tend to be drawn to difficult and dangerous pioneering work. It’s a good thing because “the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few!”(Luke 10:2).
These are just a few reasons the world needs more women church planters, and why women church planters are mission-critical change agents in the kingdom. While women planters may encounter resistance, they must remember this truth spoken of Peter and the apostles by the wise Gamaliel: “Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God” (Acts 5:38-39). God is calling women church planters to be unstoppable change agents! And when God is for us, who can be against us?
Further recommended reading:
Mary Kate Morse: https://www.faithandleadership.com/marykate-morse-how-women-plant-churches
Karina Kreminski: http://juniaproject.com/why-women-make-excellent-church-planters/
Carolyn Cutsis James: http://www.missioalliance.org/indispensable-women-plant-churches/
Shonnie Scott (MA Fuller ’87, DMin Portland Seminary 2010) most recently spent 6.5 years as a solo lead pastor, launching the first satellite campus of Bethany Community Church in Seattle. Her passion is serving as a pastor, mentor, and spiritual director to women pastors and church planters everywhere!
This article was first published on the CBE blog
On Saturday we will hold another plant sale at the Mustard Seed House. This year we have lots of tomato starts, succulent gardens and much more. If you live in Seattle and are still looking for a gift for your mother, this is the place for you. Email me at seasickdoctor@gmail.com if you need the address.
By Jeannie Kendall —
Last Sunday I was preaching on the woman at the well, a story very familiar to some people but quite extraordinary in the breath-taking way in which Jesus flaunts every social convention of his day to reach out to a lonely and marginalised woman.
However it is a story which – it seems to me – has been misinterpreted. The woman has always been presented as promiscuous, because she has had five husbands and is cohabiting. But this assumes a control over her life that women at that time simply did not possess. Whilst in those days men could leave their wives for the most trivial of reasons, women could not leave their husbands and were entirely reliant on them financially. To have had five husbands opens the possibility of this woman – unlikely to have been young – being divorced or widowed or abandoned more than once. Did she have children, and if not was this part of her distress or – even worse – why she had been left? Was she living with a man, for survival, who would not marry her? What inner scars she must surely have carried. Who knows why she finds herself so isolated – coming to the well outside her village (which would have had a water supply) and without the safety of other women. People can be very cruel, and many of us carry so much shame that we detach ourselves.
What we do know is that Jesus chose to make himself vulnerable by asking her for a drink, and then gently engaged her in conversation, not accepting her diverting into a theological back alley but quietly persisting to get to the heart of her spiritual searching. I think the conversation must have been longer, but Jesus (who must have told John what was said) honoured her secrets and gave enough to intrigue and challenge us but to keep her identity and history between them.
He still does that for us.
The woman at the Well – John 4
I still remember the heat that day:
Sucking air from my lungs and vitality from my body;
The ground as parched as my throat and arid as my womb – and life.
I watched my feet, despondent,
Not looking around lest I encounter hostile stares
In the unlikely event of a fellow traveller.
My friendless journey somehow a metaphor
For my increasingly isolated life.
And then I saw him;
Indistinct at first, framed by the sun
And I almost turned and ran.
But then he asked me for a drink
And, against all those man-made rules
We began to talk.
He was unlike all the other men –
Declaring love until it called for sacrifice
Then quick to abandon me
Uncaring of my gathering, unseen, scars.
Instead, he sensed my soul-thirst;
Looked at my eyes and not my body:
And so, hesitatingly at first, I gifted him my secrets
And found them not only safely held
But honoured.
And, looking back, I realised
That, as I extended him the cup,
He was offering me new life
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