Easter 5B 2006 (Mother’s Day) John 10:11-16

Today is an eventful day. It is Mother’s Day. Being mindful of the admonition of a female relative of mine – an in law by marriage, not a blood relative – “to say something about mothers on Mother’s Day – and it had better be good”, I thought I would give it a try.

In fact, I confused last Sunday – Good Shepherd Sunday – and this Sunday and I wrote this sermon for last Sunday. Only when Pauli reminded me that I had gotten it wrong – late on Saturday night – you should have seen the scramble in front of my computer eight days ago.

But as I was writing about the Good Shepherd, I began to wonder about the obviously absent Good Shepherdess. No Good Shepherdess is mentioned in the Gospels – and surely, Mary the Mother of Jesus was one – and as today is Mother’s Day, I wanted to wander into a bit of church history and talk about two famous mothers who were good shepherdesses in the early centuries of the Church.

Both were women in times when the status of women was not very good, even though they were both high born women. Both exercised great influence on their sons through whom they shaped the course of history and the development of Christianity. Both are considered saints in one part of the church or another. They lived in sequential times. One, Saint Helena, was born in 311 AD and died in 330 AD; the other, Saint Monica, was born two years later and died in 387 AD. These two women were the mothers of two giants in church history in the Fourth Century AD. Helena was the mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great, who adopted Christianity as the favored religion of the Roman Empire and called the Bishops into the Council at Nicea from which came the Nicene Creed. Monica was the mother of Augustine of Hippo, a saint in his own right, whose writings still shape the Christian theological enterprise.

Helena married the Roman general Constantius Chlorus who divorced her when he became Emperor in 292. She officially became a Christian at the time her son Constantine imposed Christianity on the Roman Empire. Her conversion was sincere. She was so devout that her contemporaries thought she had been a Christian since her childhood – and she might have been one of the many women of that time who secretly followed the faith. She dressed quietly and modestly, gave generously to churches, to the poor, and to prisoners. She made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where tradition has it that she was instrumental in arranging the preservation of many of the Christian holy places in Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem. She died on this pilgrimage which she had undertaken at the age of eighty.

She was recognized as a saint in both Eastern and Western Christendom because she was the mother of the first Christian Emperor – Constantine is venerated as a saint in Eastern Orthodoxy, not n the West. Helena was also venerated because of her effort in finding the True Cross.

Monica is better known to us because of the writings of her son Augustine, especially in his memoir known to us as The Confessions of Saint Augustine. She married a man, Augustine’s father, who was both dissolute and violently tempered. Her mother in law was a member of the household and added to Monica’s difficulties in marriage. Monica overcame a tendency to heavy drinking and by persistent patience won over both her mother in law and her husband. Although her husband was frequently unfaithful to her never hit her or otherwise physically mistreated her. Perhaps under her influence, he was baptized the year before he died.

Monica applied the same persistence patience to her son Augustine over a similar period of man years. When he was young, she enrolled him in a class for catechumens – those preparing to be baptized. But his irregular and borderline dissolute life caused her so much suffering that she at one time banned him from living in her house. But she relented when she realized the time for Augustine’s baptism had not come – he simply wasn’t ready to assume his obligations and responsibilities as a baptized Christian. So Monica stopped nagging him and turned to prayer, fasting, and vigils, hoping that this would succeed where argument had failed.

Eventually Augustine went to Rome and on to Milan, where Monica followed him. In Milan Monica was highly esteemed by its Bishop, Saint Ambrose. Ambrose helped Augustine toward a deep moral conversion – the young man was well acquainted with sin by this time – and a true acceptance of the Christian faith. After a year of preparation he was baptized in 386 AD. The next year he and his mother began a journey to back to North Africa but Monica died as she was awaiting a ship at Ostia.

Just before she died she told Augustine that all she had wished to live for was to see him a Christian and a child of heaven. “God has granted me more than this in making you depose earthly happiness and consecrate yourself to his service.” Monica appears on the Episcopal Church Calendar of Saints on May 4, earlier this month.

Two mothers, good shepherdesses -- and saints, too.

AMEN

Drawn from Lesser Feasts and Fasts and the Oxford Dictionary of Saints.

Wicomico Parish Church
PO Box 70
Wicomico Church, Virginia 22579