May 8, 2005 John 17:6-19
What Would Your Mother Say?
Sometimes I do sermon research y reading weighty theological tomes. At other times good material just shows up in the mail, unsolicited, like this from a church newsletter.
"What My Mother Taught Me"
My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE:
"If you're going to kill each other, do it outside, I just finished cleaning!"
My mother taught me RELIGION:
"You better pray that will come out of the carpet."
My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL:
"If you don't straighten up I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week!"
My mother taught me LOGIC:
"Because I said so, that's why."
My mother taught me FORESIGHT:
"Make sure you wear clean underwear in case you're in an accident."
My mother taught me IRONY:
"Keep laughing and I'll give you something to cry about."
My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS:
"Shut your mouth and eat your supper!"
My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM:
"Will you look at the dirt on the back of your neck!"
My mother taught me about STAMINA:
"You'll sit there 'till all that spinach is finished."
My mother taught me about WEATHER:
"It looks as if a tornado swept through your room."
My mother taught me how to solve PHYSICS PROBLEMS:
"If l yelled because I saw a meteor coming toward you would you listen then?"
My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY:
"If I've told you once, I 've told you a million times - Don't Exaggerate!!"
My mother taught me THE CIRCLE OF LIFE:
"I brought you into this world, and I can take you out."
My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION:
"Stop acting like your Father!"
My mother taught me about ENVY:
"There are millions of less fortunate children in this world who don't have wonderful parents like you do!"
THANKS, MOM!
Well, we laugh, but it is a somewhat nervous laughter, because it does reflect some of the ambivalence we might feel about mothers and our relationships with them. If we’re lucky, we have felt the love that is behind comments like these, and we’ve been blessed with wonderful mothers; but I also hear from people whose relationships with their mothers are less than ideal and sometimes even destructive.
Turning to the Bible, we discover that even Jesus had problems with his mother. Mary doesn’t really understand him at first, in fact at times seems downright perplexed by him, and more often than not, Jesus seems exasperated with her. When it comes to Jesus and Mary, the Bible doesn't exactly give us the ideal model of a Mother-Son relationship. But perhaps it gives a rather realistic one.
This is the day, of course, when we are supposed to celebrate and honor mothers. It goes back to Anna Jarvis, who lived in Grafton, West Virginia, and who spent forty years developing the concept of Mother's Day. Finally, in 1914 a presidential proclamation by Woodrow Wilson made it a national occasion. But it's a day that is increasingly problematic, not just because as Anna Jarvis feared, the day seems to keep the greeting card and horticlural industries in business. This was brought home to me by an article (Mary T. Stimming: "Crucifixion Amnesia", CHRISTIAN CENTURY, 5/7/97, p.436) by a woman who had recently lost her mother, and who herself is unable to bear children. She points out that all the fuss over mothers is certainly well-deserved, but she wonders how it is all received by the couple that has "buried a child or experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth; the single person who longs for a spouse and children; the woman who has undergone an abortion or placed a child for adoption; the child who has buried a mother or is witnessing a mother's illness; the mother who is alienated from her children or the child estranged from his or her mother; the stepmother who has not yet found her place in the family or the mother not awarded parental custody." These people, she suggests, do not find much comfort in the unabashed and sentimental celebrations of the day. In other words, what does Mother's Day mean when one's experience of motherhood is not picture perfect?
A possible remedy to this, she further suggests, is to lift up Mary the Mother of Jesus -- not as the model for ideal motherhood, but as a mirror of motherhood as it actually is.
Mary began a bit scared and confused -- a teenage mother-to-be, pregnant under suspicious circumstances. There was the charge of illegitimacy. Her future husband wondered whether he ought to go through with the marriage. And while the poetry of Christmas does present a picture of a blissfully happy family, it is short-lived. Later there is the story of Jesus running away, giving his parents fits. His father disappears all together. And then Jesus, who had most likely stayed at home, helping provide for his younger brothers and sisters in the absence of a father, leaves home himself and sets out on a crazy journey that ends in his death.
During his ministry, his mother and his family clearly do not understand him. He practically disowns them, and certainly disavows them -- as in one incident where he is teaching in a house and the disciples come and tell him that his family is outside. "Who are my mother and brothers and sisters?" Jesus asks. "Only those who do the will of God!"
Clearly, Jesus and his mother didn't get along all that well. It wasn't a perfect picture, some would say even disfunctional. And yet, the Gospels also tell us that although she didn't understand him very well, Mary also hung in there, and she followed him all the way to the end. Indeed, she is pictured as being there, at the foot of the cross while her son suffered and died.
This is what I call "the love that lets us leave, but will not let us go." It is the love of a mother that hangs in there. After it brings to birth, and nurtures and cares, this love watches its creation take wings and leave. It's an interesting dynamic. A child is born weak and helpless and totally dependent. But at the moment of birth it begins a journey of separation, of independence, of growing away, until at last it is the parent who is helpless. Such parental love allows children to grow up, make their own mistakes, go their own way, become their own person. It's not easy. You teach them to think for themselves, and then they do! That's why there is often misunderstanding, conflict, and even estrangement. That's why many a mother has such a hard time giving up control. They get controlling and caring confused. It's possible to care without control. To let your child leave -- but not let them go -- is an art and a grace that few really master. Having lived in the “empty nest” for most of the last four years, I can testify as to how true this is, as I know many of your can!
In the end, and after much struggle, I think Jesus' mother got it right. That's why she was there at the cross, and why it is reported that she joined up with the disciples after Easter.
It's never easy being a parent. One mother wrote a "telegram to God" -- "I'm tired of being a mother. I'm confused and worn out. I'm doing a terrible job, and I don't know where to go from here. I've had it. This dynamo of untamed life you call a child is too much for me. Take it back, and let me do something simple for you -- like paying off the national debt, or running Congress, or achieving world peace!"
Feeling that way, the picture of idealized motherhood may lead to more despair. But when Jesus' own mother is considered, a mother who herself had doubts, and pain and grief -- who wasn't perfect but at least hung in there in her caring -- it may give some hope to the rest of us who struggle with all of this.
"The love that lets us leave, but will not let us go" is best expressed, I think, in the prayers of a mother. We don't know what Mary's prayers were, of course, but we do have a purported example of Jesus' prayers, and it is reasonable to assume that Jesus learned something of prayer from his mother. Our scripture lesson for today is part of a long prayer that Jesus makes before his death. Naturally this is not an historical account -- no reporter was listening in and writing it down -- but the scene does give a dramatic picture of the way the early Christian community experienced the presence of Christ: as one who prayed for them, who cared for them and their welfare. Here Jesus is portrayed as engaged in intercessory prayer -- the most selfless kind of prayer – praying for his disciples, praying that God will protect them and guide them, now that he will no longer be with them in the flesh. "Protect them that they may be one," he prays. "Protect them from the evil one." "Protect them." Isn't that precisely the prayer of a mother, sending her child off to school for the first time, or out on to the football field, or off in the car, or to college, or out into the world? Protect them! And what is more powerful than the prayer of a mother?
And through their prayers and their words, mothers really can change the world! Because God listens, and we listen. I think of the mothers who marched for temperance, and for suffrage. I think of the "mothers of the disappeared", who gathered in the squares of Latin American towns and who brought down dictatorships. I think of the mothers of Northern Ireland, whose constant witness won them the Nobel Peace Prize and brought a bit of sanity to that war torn country. I think of the Mothers Against Drunk Driving, whose vigilance is having an impact – small but growing -- on that social scourge. And what of the "Million Mom March", held just a miles away just before I moved here, hoping to put and end to gun violence. And each year on Mothers Day, they ask that worshiping communities pause to pray about this issue. "If our legislators won't listen," they say, "we know someone who will!" And I pray that these prayers will make a difference!
Mothers' prayers and mothers' words have a powerful impact. I have witnessed grown men - men of influence and power in their own right -- cower before their mother's voices and change their course of action. Who kept J.R. Ewing in line all those years, if not Miss Ellie? Had it not been for her words and her prayers, he would have gotten into far more mischief! And, in the non-fiction world, it was reported that former Soviet President Gorbachev's mother was a Christian. Do you suppose that had something to do with the eventual fall of the Soviet empire? What do you suppose former First Lady Barbara Bush says to her son the President? I sometimes think the world would be a far better place if instead of city councils and state legislatures, instead of Congress or the U.N., we simply had instead "Councils of Mothers" to run the world.
In the meantime, perhaps we'd be better off and the world would be different if before doing anything, we'd just ask ourselves the simple question, "What would my mother say?" And I don't mean this in the sense of giving mother control over our lives -- control that she should have long ago relinquished – control she should have been glad to relinquish if she'd done her job well (just like God relinquishes control)... Rather, it is to remember a mother's prayers, and a mother's caring, a love that lets us leave, but doesn't let us go. And it is to remember the values and the faith and the example that a good mother gives us.
It was reported that the distinguished theologian Karl Barth was once asked by a skeptical professor from East Germany, "How is it that such a learned, civilized, intelligent man like yourself can believe in something like the resurrection?" To which Barth is said to have replied, "Because, my friend, my mother told me."
That's what I want to honor today -- the things my mother told me -- not just in words but in her actions, and most importantly the things she said in the prayers she prayed on my behalf, and prays still. To which I say, “Amen!” and “Thanks be to God!”
