Welcome Home

Mothering Sunday is an English and Irish tradition that began in the 16^th century.  It was originally to honor and give thanks for the Virgin Mary — Mother Mary.  It was a day for Christians to return to their “mother church,” a day of family celebration and giving thanks for our mothers.

Welcome Home is the spirit.  Yes, “there’s no place like home.” 

I remember a driving trip Jai and I took through Mexico.  We drove down the east coast all the way to the Yucatan Peninsula, arriving in Chetumal shortly after a hurricane had torn most of the city apart.  I wanted to drive to British Honduras, now known as Belize, but we didn’t have a multiple-entry permit for the car. 

The guy at the border crossing said we could mail in our single-entry permit and wait for new papers.  Remembering how it took a postcard four weeks to get to my mom, I decided to forego the offer.

When we finally got back to Mexico City a couple of weeks later, we were exhausted.  We spied a Denny’s as we navigated our way along this huge nerve-wracking thoroughfare with seven or eight lanes in each direction.  No one paying any attention to the lane markings.  We were so homesick for some American food that we pulled right into that Denny’s parking lot.  It was a big disappointment.  Our hamburgers didn’t at all taste like what we got in Los Angeles.  Definitely no place like home.

Jesus tells a parable to answer the objection of the religious authorities concerning his hobnobbing with notorious sinners.  People who should be cast out of their common religious home.

You know it.  About a father with two sons, one who thought life would be better on his own.  So, he took his share of the inheritance and set off for a far country.

Things didn’t work out as he had hoped.  Especially after he had wasted all his money on high living and loose women.  He’s soon wished to be dining with the pigs, sharing their seed pods.

And you know the end of the story.  As the father spies his returning, bedraggled son far down the road, he opens his arms, running to meet him.  “My son was once lost but now is found!”  Joy and merriment broke out that night.  And of course, we remember how the elder, dutiful brother felt about this homecoming reception.  But that’s another sermon.

Home, for most all of us, has special memories and significance.  It’s a place of last refuge.   As Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”

Unfortunately, many have found themselves far from home.  Not of their own choice.  Not due to their own wandering, but because they had never been fully admitted in the first place.  Our history is replete with those locked out and shut out.

Recently, I stumbled upon a documentary of a group of people whose full personhood had never found a home in the American Dream – stewardesses.  The documentary, Fly With Me, records the history of the first women cabin attendants in aviation.

This is the story of girls coming into full womanhood by dint of their own efforts.  Every step a struggle against male, piggy exploitation.

It was a chronicle of the first ground-breaking women who opened the door for their sisters in aviation.  It all began when Ellen Church convinced Boeing that having nurses aboard flights would put passengers at ease.  As planes were not pressurized, they were limited to 10,000 feet.  This resulted in a lot of turbulence, and most passengers were predisposed to be nervous about flying to begin with.

Soon, airlines began to realize that “sex sells.”  Stewardesses’ uniforms became skimpier and skimpier, demeaning the women as sexpots and Barbie Dolls.  Finally, degrading to “hot pants.”  Really!

Glamor was the ticket.  And a pleasing, compliant personality.  The women must be petite – 100 to 118 pounds, max.  They would be weighed at the bottom of the aircraft stairs every time they disembarked the plane.  One pound over and you’re gone.  You couldn’t have a waistline over 38 inches.  This was just the start of the harsh employment guidelines.

You had to be 22 to 26 years-old to be considered.  Couldn’t be married and must leave or be fired when you reached the age of 32, later 34.  And you must be white.  There were four physical exams required every year.  Pregnancy was instant cause for dismissal.

Did the men have to abide by such standards?  Heck, no.

Fly With Me is the film that records the struggles of a growing cadre of women in a most demanding profession to achieve, and be paid, for their invaluable contribution to the airline industry.  You can see it on YouTube.

Soon, most major airlines were running training schools, lasting in the range of seven or eight weeks, sarcastically known as “Charm Farms” by the women.

Ann Hood, a stewardess – and later a writer, but more about that later – writes a wonderful memoir, Fly Girl: A Memoir[1], revealing all.

Ann notes that on her opening day at the TWA school, Breech Academy in Kansas City, they were tested mathematically, physically, mentally, given drug tests, and divided up into teams to test cooperative and personality skills.

On that first day, their instructor told the seated group, “It’s easier to get into Harvard than to sit in your seat.”  Out of 14,000 applicants only 550 would be hired.  Yes, they were special.

Not special enough to merit a decent salary and humane working conditions, however.  As the country became socially aware in the activist 60s and 70s, these women, and soon a few men, discovered the power of unions.  Through their collective organizing they finally did make a home for themselves in the American dream. 

Many of the sexist standards fell by the wayside, replaced by decent pay, ability to work until retirement age, same as the pilots, and a pension.  They could marry and have a family.  Full womanhood in a profession most of them loved.  They made a home for themselves. 

Fly With Me is a heartwarming story, as is Ann’s book.

Oh yes, I mentioned “more about that later” referring to Ann Hood as a writer.  Some sexist man on the board of one of these airlines expressed the sentiment of many of his colleagues when he opined, “These women have the looks but they have absolutely no brains.”

Au contraire.  Many of these talented women went on to have second careers as authors, teachers, lawyers and highly-placed government workers.  Many went into business or started their own businesses.  No brains?  Give me a break!  Ann has written ten books.  What?  No brains?

No place like home.  And that is our obligation as members of the Jesus Movement, to lay out the welcome mat of full inclusion for all.  And shelter the shunned and those given no chance.

We are now told that ICE is going only after “the worst of the worst.”  Not true.

In the Los Angeles Times there was an article on an Orange County couple who had been living peacefully in the U.S. for decades.  They had three grown daughters, American citizens, living here.

ICE grabbed them up when they reported to their routine check- in as per their agreement to remain in the country.  This happened on February 21, and within hours they were on a deportation flight to Columbia.

Yes, the couple had tried numerous times to gain citizenship, but ultimately the 9^th Circuit Court denied them. 

This couple was law-abiding, hard-working, raising a family and never missed a check-in appointment.

One of their daughters said that “This cruel and unjust situation has shattered our family emotionally and financially.”[2]  Aren’t these exactly the sort of people we should be welcoming?

What happened to welcome the stranger, shelter the foreigner?  All part of Torah Righteousness and Gospel Goodness. 

By the way, how does one know when this administration is lying?  Their lips are moving. 

Like the Loving Father in Jesus’ story, through the prompting of the Spirit, we stretch our arms wide to welcome all home – the foreigner, the disparaged and locked out, the addicted and incarcerated, the shunned. Yes, even the sinner!   And in the doing, there is more joy than in heaven.  “Olly, olly oxen free, free, free.” All home.

Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty nailed it — sentiments straight from this parable.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” 

Can we all say a big AMEN?

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[1] Ann Hood, Fly Girl: A Memoir (New York: Norton, 2022).

[2] Ruben Vives, “An O.C. Couple’s Sudden Deportation Sends Shock waves,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2025.

March 30, 2025
Lent 4 – Mothering Sunday


Joshua 5:9-12; Psalm 32;
2 Corinthians 5:16-21; Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

“Welcome Home”