First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Acts 16 and Revelation 22

“The Way We Are”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

May 13, 2007

Mothers Day

The Watertown Daily Times does something I admire as much as many people despise. They write actual obituaries. When you die, not to be dire, but it is not a hypothetical, when you die someone will write a short account of your life. If you married and if you divorced, it will be there; if you were lauded or jailed it will be noted; and so on. This can be a painful moment for families as often at the time of death the faults and flaws no one had any problem pointing out just days before are now glossed over in platitudes and generally good speak. As the saying goes, “it’s not good to speak ill of the dead.”

I admire the honest obituaries of the Times more than the ones printed by other papers, the written tributes of families for two reasons. The first is that I have interviewed hundreds of people about what would make for a good eulogy and there was only one common answer: a good eulogy is an honest one. In other words don’t gussy me up. The second reason is that family tributes tend to be written by the children of the deceased and hence they give a pretty narrow view of life of the one who has died.

In Washington I would read the obituaries every day and every day I would shake my head. Somehow every man who died spent every waking moment hunting and fishing. According to the tribute submitted to the paper every man hunted and fished. And in like fashion every woman loved to cook for her family and was devoted to a garden. Knowing many people who passed away and were described in such terms I can tell you it ain’t so. My assumption is that young boys and girls looked to their parents in categories and ideals and these were the notions that rose to the surface when their mother or father died. What did your dad love to do? Hunt and fish. What did your mother love to do? She loved to cook for us and garden. It didn’t matter much if the father only went hunting twice and never caught a fish to provide a meal and the mothers were more prone to Applebees than making a casserole.

Just in case when I die there is any question let me put this out there now: I am the one who loves to cook. And while I’ve tried my hand at both hunting and fishing I can tell you that if we needed to live off my success in this category we would starve soon and very soon. My wife doesn’t like to garden, she likes to landscape. If Kathy had her way she would much rather have a backhoe and an auger to speed her designs than a row of green beans meant for canning.

A number of years ago I read a book entitled, The Way We Never Were. In many ways what I just articulated is the thesis and conclusion of the author, Stephanie Coontz. The stereotypes are often far from the lives people actually live. Coontz took the image of Ozzie and Harriet and Ward and June Cleaver and said, is this really what families were like in the 1950s and ‘60s? As you can guess by her title the answer she found was: we were never like this.

Factoring everything from shorter life expectancy to the mobility afforded by the automobile, families were not staying together, staying put, or just staying for that matter. One of the key factors was the issue of employment. Ward Cleaver must have had a nice job some place that bought the pearls for June and the nice yard as well as his early arrival home each evening to read the paper in his private study where Wally and the Beave made a cautious entry to confess their latest shenanigans. And for all intents and purposes such households did exist replete with matching bedrooms sets and plenty of pancakes in the morning as there were nice jobs at this time. The problem with the picture, Koontz discovered, is that there weren’t that many of them.

Most men were likely to visit the bar on the way home rather than rush home to the newspaper. Some mothers dressed to the nines as June did, but most worked or kept a big garden or lived on a farm or tried to go it alone after losing a spouse to the war, to an accident, or to the road.

As luck would have it Stephanie Coontz taught at a local university. So I gave her a call and asked if she would like to come and speak at an adult forum after the congregation had a chance to read her book. She readily agreed and a date was set. In the meantime about forty people read her book and a little more than that showed up to hear her speak.

As the evening progressed all went well until she said, are there any questions? What followed wasn’t a brawl, but it was a fight. The members who read the book weren’t disputing her scholarship, although they did chafe against her main conclusion. Their contention was simple, we may have never been like this, but everyone wanted to be. We may not have been the Cleavers but they were important. With each exchange Coontz reiterated her points and members struggled to articulate how little the points reached their experience as many in the crowd were alive during the era of her research.

The more I listened the more I grew to see something historians need to appreciate. Ideals, while they may not be achieved in whole, are experienced in bits and pieces, glimpses and moments of glory. The television show “Leave it to Beaver” ran for six years, not forty. Who is to say what happened after the brief glimpse of Wally and Beav was done? Maybe June and Ward split up; maybe Wally got weird in college or was drafted into Vietnam; maybe the Beav was never really able to forgive himself for destroying his father’s baseball with all the great signatures on it. Yet, and this is the strange piece I didn’t anticipate, those six years were a glory.

The episodes, the icons, the stereotypes while not achieved were hoped for. They may never be realized but their power was in what could be. Most important though was the notion that no matter how it was achieved, they were a nice family who shared meals and didn’t want for much. And the people who tried to argue with the author did everything in their power to say, how significant this was, how much they wanted the same thing, even if it was a fragment or in a different form or just for a time.

In our passage from Acts we have what appears to be a truly stereotypical woman. Lydia invites Paul and Luke to come over for dinner; she is opening her home to offer them hospitality as any woman should. What I truly love about this passage though is how little Lydia fits the image we project of women into the ancient times. First she is not silent, anonymous, the powerless companion of her husband. She is a merchant who speaks for herself. The Bible describes her as a seller of purple cloth. Now it may be a bit of inference, but a seller of purple cloth means you deal with high end clients as purple is the color of kings and thus she is probably the Vera Wang or Versace of her day. Changes things a little doesn’t it?

Next is the challenge she poses to the apostles: if you believe in my character, if you trust my faith, come to my house. This is not the pleading of the powerless, but the taunting perhaps gentle goading of a player. She is asking the disciples to trust her. It wasn’t her husband saying you need to taste her cherry pie, it’s the best. She was speaking for herself, saying, you may have some misgivings about who I am, but don’t let that get in the way of our friendship.

And then there is the message I like the most, Lydia is most likely trying to keep the apostles from harm and hardship. Who knows what experiences led her to see the needs of the apostles, but if ever there was a group of people who could use some protection from themselves and others, it was them. Somehow she got this and said, come with me.

Now it may just be a guess, but I am going to guess that most sermon writers will take the image of Lydia being hospitable and run. They will say, here is a positive image of a woman who is nice and caring and say, “my mother was just like this. Happy Mother’s Day!” And all of a sudden a powerful person looks nice, but weak; the woman who is a merchant is recast as someone who loves to cook for her family and tends a garden. Which there is nothing wrong with that. My mother actually makes fantastic pies and truly does love to cook for her family. My mother-in-law, God bless her, while she loves her family ran vet hospitals and leaves most of the cooking and the gardening to Kathy’s dad.

Here is my second guess: Lydia loved her family and wanted to achieve a real sense of harmony. I don’t make this guess because Lydia is a mother or a woman, but because she is human. Lydia had ideals and desires for goodness and rest and peace. And these ideals may have even had icons. There may have been people or families or a man or a woman in her day that said, this is good; this is a good life.

Lydia may very well have felt she didn’t live up to this, was far from this mark. Yet, if the responses of the members to the professor are any indication of what is common to all, she held these icons and ideals as dear. Many of us may never achieve an Ozzie and Harriet life; many of us would rather die than live the lives of Ward and June Cleaver, all the while hoping for the very same sense of connectedness and peace those images exude.

Perhaps those tributes in the paper, although highly inaccurate and reductive, were also hopes. Maybe, maybe they were what children hoped their father or mother had enough time to enjoy or would do again. My father would rather die than go hunting or fishing, yet there are things I hope for him, and some of these are things he certainly doesn’t do all day. There were many family meals around our table where life was not ideal. My mother’s summer squash was something to be endured not prized. Yet, even then there was this hope, this ideal about gathering together and being together, and perhaps there would be peace.

All of these images are ones that I cherish but have no confidence to find them at a dinner table with my children on a regular basis. In the same way, glory is not something I expect to have as a string of unbroken years, forty years of perfection. Most likely the moments of goodness Kathy and I will share will be just that, moments; harmony and peace will be punctuated and rent by arguments over bedtimes and who wore whose sweater last and who gets the privilege of mowing the lawn. The absence of glory doesn’t erode the hope. I believe there is a city of gold, of fountains and light and glory. I hold this image, but I live on Ten Eyck Street.

I do harbor a desire to come home like Ward Cleaver did and read the paper in the late afternoon. It is not so much a sexist thing as it is a desire to read the paper when I amfully awake. And if I could I would provide pearls for my wife not as the trophy of my hunting and fishing, but because she likes pearls.

Lydia, the purple fabric merchant, helped the apostles. I hope and trust she was not an icon of womanhood for the apostles; I hope she was Lydia, a good friend. She was mostly likely filled with ideals and hopes, perhaps even moments and glimpses of glory. It is my hope that the person the apostles saw was not an image of what a woman, or mother, or gender ought to be. I hope what they saw was a good person, a merchant, and now sister in Christ. Which is a rather long and awkward way of saying, “happy mother’s day.” Amen.