Easter 4: Mother's Day

1 John 4:7-21
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.


On the second Sunday in May 1907 at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1907, the observation of Mother’s Day in the United States was born. The service was organized by a Methodist laywoman, Anna Jarvis, to honor her mother, who had died on May 9, 1905. By 1908 Anna Jarvis was advocating that all mothers be honored on the second Sunday in May, and in 1912 the Methodist Episcopal Church recognized the day and raised it to the national agenda.

So be proud of your church today: without the Methodist Church, there might not be a nation-wide celebration of Mother’s Day and we might not have a day on which we all take time to recognize the ones who have been our mothers and what they have given us. Good for Anna Jarvis for recognizing that mothers are essential to the health and stability of the family! With children everywhere today, we celebrate the ones who have given us birth, given us life, who have helped us find joy, who have taught us life lessons, and who have modeled for us the extravagant love of God—the kind of love that the writer of 1 John has so carefully described in the 4th chapter, our passage for today.

This text is so appropriate for Mother’s Day: a rich description of the love of God for us and how it is shown. In my discernment around the meaning of this text for us, I found my reflections pouring out in the form of a letter, my own kind of epistle. I would like to offer it today as a gift to mothers and those who have been mothered, especially to one of my own whom I have never seen but have come to know through the love that her life gave to others.



Dear Joy,

I write to wish you a happy Mother’s day, and it might be a little strange that since we have never met that I would be wishing you happiness on this day, but your mothering has had a profound influence in my life, and I’d like to take a few moments to thank you for the ways that your love has found its way into my own life and heart.

But before I get started, I’d like to assure you that Dave is doing just fine. He has turned out to be the kind of person of whom I am sure you would be very proud. He has answered God’s call into the life of ordained ministry, and he has opened his heart to people who are searching for their own calling, their own relationship with God. He is very good at what he does. He’s very smart and he’s good with people. His heart contains a vast amount of love, and he is more than willing to share it wherever he finds another heart in need, or just whenever he finds another heart.

Even though we never had the chance to meet in this life, I feel as though I know you. There are a few pictures around and many stories shared that have given me a bit of insight into who you were. From what I can tell, you were intelligent, confident, faithful, and deeply loving. All of these things I know, of course, because members of your family have been your witnesses to those of us who weren’t lucky enough to know you while you were alive. Not only has Dave told me about you but so has Lisa, and what an incredible aunt/second mom she has been for him. They are like 2 peas in a pod—just like your mother, our beloved Juggy, used to tell me! But I also know these things about you to be true because I see evidence of them in your child. Now that we have our own Joy, I am more aware than ever before how much the children in the world really do learn and are formed into the people they become by the world that surrounds them. What a good life you gave to Dave while you were with him!

You know, we have been married now for more than seven years, and there is so much I have learned about you in that time. I know that you valued education because I know the high value Dave places on it for himself and for others. I know you taught him to be confident in himself and that he must have had a good example of that in you because he understands how important it is to believe in yourself so that you can believe in others. I have heard the stories of how you held your family together, sometimes just on faith that you were doing the right thing and not much else, and I can certainly see that value alive and well in the way Dave lives his life. Family is so important to him, especially now that we have Joy—it must be for him like having a second chance at the kind of joy being part of a family can bring.

But I think the strongest lesson you passed on to your son was about love. You must have been a living example of the love of God—being one who clearly abided in God because of the great love you had and shared. And so God abided in you, too, and now you abide not only in God’s love but in God’s eternal presence that will now be forever unchanged for you. Even though we cannot see God, we can see evidence of God’s love all over the world. Even though I cannot see you, I can see evidence of you all over Dave’s life and who he is—especially in how he loves.

He loves completely. He loves people even when they mistreat him. He loves with a deep love that overcomes fear and hatred. He loves the way God intended us to love: without reserve and with justice and equality. And he loves in the model of Christ—the one who was sent in love, lived in love, died in love, and was raised from the tomb in love. He treats people with respect, and he works at making decisions that follow the way of Christ.

While he is not naïve to the ways people often take advantage of others’ love and trust, he continues to offer it. It’s like what I once heard Dr. Joseph Lowery say about all the fights that the church has started over issues of sexuality and the search for proof of one argument or another in the Bible or in church tradition: “If we’re going to err, I prefer that we err on the side of love.” You clearly gave him the example of striving to be the truest form of what God has made each of us to be, even when we fail. You showed him perfect love, the love that is shared between us as a result of the love we have received. You were, for him, the representation of what the perfect love of God is for us—a gift that cannot be earned but can be given over and over again.

And more than any other way that I have seen in our life together, I see the evidence of your presence in Dave’s life through the way he loves our new Joy. She has brought your presence to light in his life in a way nothing else has. We intentionally named her for you, you know. He chose the name because of his love for you; I chose it because of your love for him and how it has made him into the person I am proud to love and call my life’s partner.

I have gotten to know you through knowing and loving your son. And I will continue to get to know you by knowing and loving your granddaughter. I don’t think it is a coincidence that whenever we pass by your childhood portrait that now hangs in our house that Joy smiles and seems to want to linger an extra moment. She and her daddy are both are a living testimony of your love and your life through the way that they do and will give love to others—a love that can never and will never die.

So thank you, Joy. Thank you for giving Dave the example of the love of God that he could always rely on in his life no matter what comes to pass. Thank you for teaching him that reflecting God’s love in the world is about giving it away to others freely, with no strings attached. Thank you for teaching him all about love so that he could be the most loving parent I could ever imagine for my child and so that he can now teach others what real love is about. Thank you for loving him and continuing to watch over him and us now, too. And thank you for connecting with your granddaughter in a way that we can really see not with our eyes but with our hearts, across time and space in a way that only that great cloud of witnesses can do, so that she will have a personal experience of the hope of resurrection as she grows in faith and love with God. Thank you.

May God’s eternal light and rest be upon your soul, Joy. Happy Mother’s Day!

Love,
Susan