Sunday, May 11, 2025

Sermon Notes

Happy Mothers’ Day, remember the Mothers’ Day Bake Sale, raising funds for the Relay for Life and the American Cancer Association.

For many of us, our mothers are an example of unconditional love. While our fathers may love us unconditionally, sometimes their love feels like it needs to be earned. While the metaphor of God as father is prevalent throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, God as mother is also present. God is described as a mother eagle watching over her nest, a mother bear who fiercely protects her cubs, and the mother hen that we heard a few weeks ago. One of the names for God in Hebrew scriptures, El Shaddai, can be translated ‘great breasted one,’ which Isaiah uses to picture God as a nursing mother.

The persecution of the early church drove the disciples to spread the gospel “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Philip, one of the Deacons chosen alongside of Stephen, flees persecution in Jerusalem and brings the good news to those in Samaria. The Samaritans were a semitic people related to the Jewish people who shared some of their scriptures, but were not fully accepted by them. A Divine appointment sends Philip to the road to Gaza where he meets a eunuch from northern Africa. The eunuch is reading from the scroll of Isaiah about the suffering servant, and invites Philip to help them understand it. A simple question, “what is to prevent me from being baptized?” invites Philip (and the whole church) into contemplating the boundaries of God’s grace.

Questions

What boundaries do you think exist around who is and can be a part of the people of God?

Are those boundaries different from the ones that you grew up with?

How is the motherly love of God different from the love of God as father?