"What Mothers Really Need"
How the story of the prophet and the widow is relevant to mothers today.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 12, 2002
Texts: 2 Kings 4:1-7; Leviticus 25:39-43
Many years ago, a young mother was walking her child across the hills of South Wales to a neighbouring farm. As she walked across the rugged terrain, as often happens in the wintertime in the mountains of Wales the snow came up and a blizzard engulfed her. So great was the blizzard that she was not able to continue walking and with the child under her arm she fell to the ground. Over the next few hours the wind began to blow and the snow continued to fall and the young mother and her child were almost buried.
Some people were walking through the hills on their way to another farm when they saw this body lying in the ground, buried in the snow. They rolled her on her back and realized that she was dead. As they looked more carefully, they saw she was hardly clothed at all, for all her clothes had been wrapped around her child who was underneath her. The child was still alive.
They held the burial for the mother and the child was eventually baptized. The child that was under the mother was to become world famous. His name was David Lloyd George, one of Britain's greatest Prime Ministers. Had it not been for his mother and the sacrifice that she made on that day in the hills of Wales, Britain would have lost one of its greatest leaders and Wales one of its leading thinkers. Such was the power and the sacrifice of a mother.
But it is not just in the annals of history that we hear such stories. It is not just the famous, or those that we know by name that we can count as those who have been protected and preserved by the love of a mother.
Just this week I was reading in one of the Toronto newspapers the story of a young mother who lived in Tent City down on the waterfront. This is a young woman who had fled abuse at home at an early age. She had given birth to a child and for the next few years, living in destitute poverty, she had done everything in her power to ensure that the child was protected and preserved. There were days when this child was so hungry that the mother had to go without food to ensure that she was okay. This little baby girl was the apple of her mother's eye.
Oh, this woman who had lived in Tent City had tried to find relationships with a number of different men, and the man with whom she is now is not the father of the child, but she did anything she could to make sure that her little daughter, the apple of her eye, was safe. You see, even in the streets of Toronto, even on a wet day like today, there are mothers who are sacrificing themselves and giving of themselves for the sake of their children.
One of the most inspirational writers, particularly over the last century, who has been read at weddings and at funerals and on many different occasions, though not a Christian himself, nevertheless wrote some very wise words. His name was Kahlil Gibran. Kahlil Gibran wrote a word to mothers. He said that the sacrifice and the commitments that mothers make do not mean that they will always be the ones to bring up the children, but nevertheless the sacrifices that mothers make are so important in the lives of children.
He wrote these words to mothers to encourage them:
You may give your children your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the House of Tomorrow, which you cannot visit... You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you for life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
Let me repeat that last line: "You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."
Now all of this raises the question: "What do mothers need? What do mothers in this world really need?"
My answer turns to a Scripture text that is seldom quoted and yet, I think, one of the most glorious statements about what mothers need in the whole of the Bible.
It is from the Second Book of Kings. The story is very simple and very profound and in biblical times, all too common. It is the story of a woman who is widowed. It is suspected that she was, in fact, the wife of a famous prophet called Obadiah, but we don't know that for sure. She had been brought up as a deep believer in God and when Obadiah died, she was left a widow with two sons.
Now as a widow with two sons she would have no outside form of support, nothing to keep her, and she ran into a problem because Obaediah had left some debts. The only way that she could pay the creditor back was if she were to sell her sons as slaves.
Now, the creditor in this particular case is not some criminal. There is no injustice here according to the law for, as I read from the Book of Leviticus, there is a sense in which one does have to pay back one's debts. If the only thing that you could give was yourself or your children, then in fact in those days you would go and work for someone as a servant. But as a servant, after the period of time, on the day of Jubilee, your debt would be forgiven and you would no longer be a servant. You would become free again and have your birthright back.
This woman feared that because of her debts, she and her children would have to become slaves, so she turns to another man of God, Elisha. She asks Elisha what she should do to get out of this predicament. It is a wonderful story and it sounds like a Gospel narrative in so many ways. It sounds as if it could have come from the New Testament.
Elisha tells her to go and find anything that she has of value. She finds one jar of oil. Then he says to her: "Now I want you and your sons to go into the neighbourhood and to ask for more and more jars. Bring them in, as many as you can, and pour the oil into the jars."
So she does as instructed and she finds in the end that as she pours the oil into the jars the oil multiplies to such an extent that she has enough of this valuable commodity to sell. The creditor then can be paid off and she and her sons are free.
Within this magnificent story from Second Kings, there are some clues, I believe, as to how mothers should be treated and what mothers really need. The first thing they really need is the support of the faithful.
Not long ago I was reading an interesting book on the history of Canada's peoples. In it there is a section about the 1950s and the 1960s. This essay was referring to that time as "The June Cleaver Period."
Now, I didn't live in Canada while Leave it to Beaver was on television. I've only seen it in my adult years as reruns. What this essay was talking about was an idealized and very specific view of motherhood at that time, the "June Cleaver model." The only problem is that during that idealized period, when mothers were pictured in a romantic way in popular culture, society was doing things that were actually contrary to that image.
For example: In the Province of Quebec, illegitimate children, to use that phrase, born from 1950 to 1965 were often taken away from their mothers and placed in special schools, because they were classified as feeble-minded. If you had been born outside of wedlock it was assumed that you were or would become feeble-minded and that the state had to give you the proper care and instruction that you needed. Children were taken away from their mothers, in other words.
In the same time period, in the Province of Alberta, they practised eugenics. They would take children away from mothers who might not be completely and absolutely mentally competent by the standards of the day. In that time period, 2,822 young women were sterilized because it was believed that they wouldn't be good mothers, just because they weren't competent by the standards of society.
So the problem is we had set up an ideal mother, the June Cleaver mother, but when real mothers in society didn't live up to the ideal, we as a society took away their children.
Now, in the post-June Cleaver Period, we face another challenge: We are at times in danger of romanticizing single motherhood.
It is a very difficult thing to bring up a child on your own in any society, a very difficult thing, but we sometimes romanticize it to such an extent that I have talked to young women downtown who believe that if they have a child they will be financially supported and they will get the love they haven't had from their own families in their own homes. They put themselves in the most dire situations and my heart goes out to them, because we sell them this picture of an ideal motherhood: that everything is going to be fine. A lot of these mothers find that their lives aren't fine - quite the contrary.
This past week I went down to the Yonge Street Mission, at College and Yonge. I had been there before, but not at lunchtime. I went with the Executive Director of the Mission and my eyes were opened. I couldn't believe what I was seeing: Dozens and dozens of youth standing out in the street, waiting to go in for food. They were given a wonderful meal, but many of those lining up were pregnant girls, no more than 14 or 15 years old.
But what really struck me was what was downstairs. Downstairs was a nursery, with a place for the little children of these single mothers. This is what astounded me: I asked one of the health workers why there was a nursery and she said, "Well, we just take a child for two hours, because many of these young mothers are having to push their children around in strollers nearly 22 hours of the day, and if the children don't get out of the strollers and stand up on their own two feet and get a good meal, their legs do not develop properly."
Now, these were Christians, I am proud and pleased to say, who were helping these young mothers and going out of their way to care for them. It is one of the greatest things, I believe, that we can do as faithful people. In the Old Testament it is clear: A sign of the compassion and justice of society is the extent to which it supports its widows and orphans. The most vulnerable people in our society are the ones who need the care and the compassion of the people of faith.
That is why the story in Second Kings is so powerful: because Elisha came to the aid of this mother. He wasn't like Elijah, a prophet that sort of came and went, who went up to the hills and then came down and made great pronouncements. Elisha was a prophet who was always among the people, just like Jesus. He knew their needs and he was compassionate and he cared for them.
The history of the faith suggests to us that Christianity is at its strongest, the truth of God's spirit is at its most powerful when we are caring the most vulnerable within our society. The mothers of today need our help, wherever they are. They can be in a good home with all the riches and all the support that they need, or they can be on the street. It matters not.
It was interesting this morning to talk to some of the children downstairs as we were presenting the gifts to the Choir School at the 9:30 service. I was asking some of them what they had got their mothers for Mother's Day. One said that he and his dad went out and bought his mother Maple Leaf play-off tickets for the next round. I said: "Well, aren't you just a little optimistic?" (He hadn't really caught the humour of the moment.)
Somebody had bought chocolates, somebody had bought flowers. There were all kinds of wonderful gifts. One of them had given her mother the gift that she was going away this weekend to a Brownie camp, for which the mother was eternally grateful.
There are many things that we might give, but they are all superficial. The gift of the faithful to mothers is love. The gift of Christians to mothers is support.
Now I know that there are bad mothers. Let's not idealize them. They are not saints. We know that there are bad mothers. We have seen that with Randal Dooley. We have seen that in many stories of children who have had to exist apart from their mothers. Sometimes, mothers overwhelm us with too much love, even.
I was reading a delightful story of a mother who wrote to a college president when her son was going off to university for the first time, (and this is a true story). She wrote:
Dear Mr. President,
My son is coming to your college and I would like you to ensure that he has a good room-mate, that the room-mate doesn't smoke or swear, or get up to mischievous activities, or drink too much and has good working habits. The reason I am saying this is that this is very important to me, for this is the first time that he will be away from me since his three years in the Marine Corps.
The guy didn't stand a chance, did he? Sometimes mothers can overdo it with us as well; but the point is what mothers need most, good or bad alike, is the support of the faithful.
There's a second thing that mothers need and that is the help of their children and the help of society. The beautiful thing about this Bible story is that when the sons saw their mother in trouble they went to her aid. They were the ones that went door to door and made sure that they got the jars that were eventually filled with oil. They went out of their way. But not only did they go out of their way, but their neighbours also supplied them with the jars. And so it was a combination, was it not, of the sons and the neighbours supporting their mother.
I have always believed that community and faith go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other. You can't say that you believe and that you want to give support, if a community itself does not give support and a community does not give encouragement. One of the great challenges that we have in the society in which we live is to provide mothers with the support of their children and ensure that children come to their aid and give them the help that they need.
This week I was reading a fascinating article in the Globe and Mail about the state of mothers and children throughout the world. It was about children getting together to debate what is needed in the world. Their primary need really depends on where they live. For some children in the West it is freedom. It is the opportunity to express themselves, the opportunity to develop as full human beings and to be treated as human beings, even as children. But in other parts of the world, it is a matter of survival. It is a matter of health in Malawi. It is a matter of clean water in the Congo. It is a matter of safety on the streets of Colombia. There are children who find themselves in difficult positions because their mothers are in difficult positions.
If as a society and as a world we are really going to take the care of mothers seriously, we have to make sure that those basic needs are met. It becomes a matter of justice as well as a matter of compassion. There is no point in saying that we are in favour of motherhood and we are in favour of families, if we don't provide those things that make families sustainable throughout our world.
One of the great things about Israel, as I said, is that when it was at its greatest it cared for its widows and its orphans, and its prophets spoke out when those widows and those orphans were not cared for. So it is not only the children who have to give gifts to mothers, it is the community itself, because without our mothers and without care for them it's an awfully lonely world.
Some years ago in the Saturday Evening Post I saw a lovely little cartoon of a little boy on the telephone. He must only have been about five or six years old. To the other person on the line he said: "Mother will be in hospital for six days and Suzy and Dougie and the twins and me and Dad will be left home alone." What a thought: Without mother, you are alone.
It is interesting for me because, having not preached this time last year, this is the first Mother's Day that I have preached since my own mother died. It really is true. There is a sense within all of us that without our mothers we really are alone. Something is missing. Someone is missing. So much more the reason, then, when we do have our mothers, to give them all that we can.
There is a final thing that mothers need: the strength of God. The story in Kings is beautiful because as the mother put the oil into the bottles it multiplied. As it multiplied her debts were met and she was free. God had stepped in and saved the day.
There is a wonderful parallel, I believe, to another moment when a son was trying to please his mother. It was the wedding at Cana in John's Gospel, where Jesus sees his mother in a predicament at a wedding where all the wine has gone, and steps in and turns the water into wine.
All of this is miraculously symbolic of God's support, strength and encouragement. What made the woman in the story in Second Kings so marvellous was her faith. She went to Elisha first, because she knew that God and God's people were her source of strength. She turned at her time of need to God and God came to her aid because, my friends, the faith of mothers is not only for themselves, it is also their faith which multiplies in the lives of their children. This faithful mother of Second Kings stands out as someone who first of all, above all, believed and in believing took a step of faith and saved her sons.
I read recently a magnificent part of the will of H.J. Heinz of ketchup fame. He left a word that he wanted those who read it to remember. I'll leave you with this magnificent quote:
Looking forward to the time when my earthly career will end, I desire to set forth at the very beginning of this Will, as the most important item in it, a confession of my faith in Jesus Christ as my saviour. I also desire to bear witness to the fact that throughout my life, in which there were unusual joys and sorrows, I have been wonderfully sustained by my faith in God through Jesus Christ. This legacy was left me by my consecrated mother, a woman of strong faith, and to it I attribute any success that I have attained.
The faith of a mother; the justice of God; the support of the community and the love for our mothers is what we need this day. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.