Homemaking and Peacemaking
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
6th Sunday of Easter (Mothers’ Day) – May 13, 2007
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Acts 16:9-15/John 14:23-29]

Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. John 14:23

A homemaker, so the dictionary says, is someone who manages a household. It’s a word that entered American English usage in 1876. Ninety or so years later, it was denigrated by Betty Freidan, and others, as a term which marginalized women. I don’t want to open old wounds or crawl back into the culture wars of the sixties this morning (any more than I want to get into a polyester double-knit leisure suit), but I think the role of homemaker – occupied by female or male, and preferably by both – is central to a whole and healthy life for individuals and for communities. Please allow me to explain my point as we worship and reflect on this sixth Sunday of Easter, Mothers’ Day, or in some churches, the Festival of the Christian Home.

The core of the matter is “home.” We all know the old adages about home; among them “a house doesn’t make a home” and “home is where the heart is.” Who doesn’t remember Dorothy and her heel clicking? Or, for that matter, who hasn’t clicked heels together in a moment of stress and said, “There’s no place like home…..there’s no place like home.” Home is our place of origin, our safe place. When we are “at home” we are relaxed, comfortable and able to really be ourselves. One who makes a home makes this comfort, this safety, this deep hospitality available. I think that Lydia, whom we met in the reading from Acts, sought to be a homemaker in this sense. To be a homemaker, in my mind, is one of the best things anyone can be and it should be something we all strive to be.

Homemaking is more than “keeping house;” that is, homemaking is more than making sure the residence is clean, making meals, or making sure that there are clean clothes available. Those elements may be a necessary side-effect of making a home, but they are not the core. No, the core of homemaking isn’t physical. Rather, the core of homemaking is spiritual and attitudinal. One could go into a house, perhaps as grand and well-done as one by a professional homemaker like Martha Stewart or Rachel Ray might have, and find it perfect in all of its physical aspects and yet not feel it is a home, because it lacks warmth or heart. Being “at home” is ultimately in the head and in the heart and that is the product of relationship, not a stove, a washing machine or any other appliance.

Jesus tells us that to love him is to keep – that is to observe and practice – his word. His word has been to love as he has loved – fully, completely and with reckless abandon. When we love and live in this manner, Jesus says that the God who creates, redeems and sustains – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit –will come and make a home in us. It boggles the mind. God dwells within us. God dwells with us. God is with us at all times and in every circumstance. The in-dwelling God then transforms us, from the inside out, so that we are enabled, empowered to love as God loves us and then God makes us into homemakers – welcoming the stranger, taking in and caring for those in need, reaching beyond the confines of our earthly dwellings to make a house, yes even a meeting house, a true home.

Those of you who are mothers, and we celebrate and salute you today, are far better able, in many ways to understand what I’m trying to say. You’ve carried another life within you. You’ve felt that life develop and grow. You’ve experienced all of the ups and the downs, the agony and the ecstasy of bearing and birthing a child. For nine months you were your child’s home and you have a relationship to the one you have borne that is beyond verbal description. As the child was in you, so are we to be in God and God in us. And, as there are mothers – true moms – who have never given birth, but yet love their child just as intensely, so ALL of us can live and love in this way. That is the promise, the hope and the destiny of the Christian

Long ago, Augustine said of Mary, mother of our Lord, that she conceived the Lord in her heart long before she conceived him in her womb. Whether we are male or female, we are called to conceive God in our hearts and give birth by the way in which we live. Lydia did that – touched by God, transformed by God’s presence – and her hospitality, her homemaking is remembered to this day.

Homemakers are also peacemakers. How many times at family gatherings do the Moms keep the peace or make the peace? Today Jesus tells us that the homemaking God would also make peace – as Paul described, “beyond human understanding” – not “as the world gives.” The peace we most often experience or seek is about absence. Worldly peace is the absence of strife, contention or conflict. As storyteller/theologian John Shea says, “The peace of the world comes and goes. It is dependent on outer circumstances. Whenever everything is going well, we can manage a certain amount of inner calm. However, when bad times come, calm is replaced by anxiety and fear. We shake with the wind, vacillate with the circumstances.” [The Relentless Widow, p. 140] The peace Jesus promises and the peacemaking he calls his followers to do is different and flows from an inner, not an outer source.

Jesus gives us the peace that is the presence of the living God within us. In Jesus, God has conquered death and the ultimate fear we humans face and have – our own liminality and mortality. We have a possibility of a deep, abiding relationship with the God who makes life out of death and can turn lives around to that which is right and good. Jesus calls us to follow in the way of being homemakers and peacemakers – giving birth, mothering, nurturing and rearing loving relationships in the midst of a needy, war-torn world.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” (Matt. 5:9) I believe that we should also say blessed are the homemakers, understanding that ALL of us are included. To be a follower of Jesus Christ means to have his love, his Father’s life in us. It means that we are to be homemakers and peacemakers in every aspect of our lives. Our world is going through so much. We read of the displaced and suffering in Darfur. We hear of the victims of ongoing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. We see the suffering of those who have been hit with natural disasters close to home on the Gulf Coast and in Kansas. The world needs homemakers and peacemakers, reaching out without troubled hearts or fear, reaching out to make a difference. It’s a difference that begins in us and spreads person to person. Homemaking and peacemaking begins when we open ourselves to the presence of the living God and allow the homemaking, peacemaking God to make a home, to make peace in us. How did the old song go, “Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me”? Homemaking and peacemaking starts very close to home – and so it should.