Born
I John 5:1-6
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For years now, I have avoided preaching on Mother’s Day. Or rather, because it is my job to preach on most Sundays, I have avoided preaching about Mother’s Day. The reasons for this are varied. For one thing, it simply isn’t a church holiday, it’s a civic holiday- one designated over a century ago in this country by President Woodrow Wilson. In the life of Christ’s church today is the seventh Sunday of Easter, the final Sunday of the season that forms the very heart of our faith. One of the things I’ve observed about middle-class, mainline Christianity is that we are often far more eager and comfortable celebrating ourselves and these civic observances than we are attending to the One whom alone we are commanded to worship and serve. Which means that a church service on Mother’s Day runs the very real risk of making that the focus of the service, rather than God. That alone is reason enough for me, but it not the only good reason to exercise caution.
As a friend of mine posted to Facebook this week, “Mother’s Day is complicated.” She herself is an adoptive mother of three, one who struggled for years with issues of infertility and still feels the sting of a culture in which a woman’s ultimate value is often determined by her fertility; one where all kinds of assumptions get made about a woman who doesn’t have children- without bothering to find out why. To further complicate things, this same friend had a brother who died a few years ago. Instead of a day to be celebrated, for women whose children have died, or are estranged, it is a painful reminder of what has gone missing from their lives. I’ve had women tell me that they avoid going to their church on Mother’s Day because such a big deal is made about it and they end up feeling like failures. Which brings us back to the question of why we are here, and who it is that church is for? If the mission of the church, as our tradition has stated, is to be a sign of what God intends for the world, then it certainly cannot be God’s intention that we further alienation by creating an environment that makes anyone feel like that.
Then there is simply the danger of elevating anything that is not God to a place of worship and adulation. Because as important, and loved, and cherished as so many mothers are. Some are not. All mothers are human. Bearing children does not exalt one’s status to a form of sainthood that is without sin. And because the wounds that are caused by those closest to us are often the most difficult to bear, they can also be the ones that are most difficult to share. Without a doubt there are people here this morning for whom their relationship with their own mother is rightfully fraught with pain and heartbreak. We do no one any favors by exalting motherhood under the pretense that such hurts do not exist. Mother’s Day is indeed complicated.
But since we’re talking about it. Let’s talk about the history of how this day came to be a part of our cultural and commercial lives. As I said, the designation of the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day was made by Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson did this at the behest of Anna Jarvis who waged a relentless nine-year letter writing campaign to create the observance on the Sunday closest to the date of her own mother’s death. Ann Reese Jarvis, along with Julia Ward Howe began promoting something called Mother’s Peace Day as far back as 1872. The day was originally an anti-war observance that sprang up in response to the massive loss of life mothers had experienced during the U.S. Civil War and Europe’s Franco-Prussian war. These women felt that the best way to honor mothers was to promote peace in the world. Ann’s daughter, Anna, wanted to honor her own mother’s work for peace, by founding a nationalized observance. And she spent the rest of her life, and what money she had, as the founder of the day trying to protect it against every commercial interests that sought to capitalize on it. Which is its own cautionary tale about how something as well-meant as Mother’s Day can grow far beyond what it is meant to honor.
Given the complications of this day, how might our faith lead us to approach it differently? Certainly, we are filled with the swell of love and gratitude that we feel not just for the women who carried us and fed us from their bodies and brought us into the world, but we recognize as many women who may not have carried us bodily but who raised us nonetheless, nurtured us nonetheless, taught us and mended our wounds, comforted and consoled us, corrected and encouraged us- and still do. As people who walk in the way of Jesus, we know our savior’s own family was somewhat complicated, and at times estranged. Like the time they came asking for him and he said, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’ For Jesus, the bonds of kinship weren’t so much about biology, DNA, nationality or ethnicity. For Jesus, the bonds of kinship- father, mother, sister, brother- were the result of what John is getting at in his letter when he says that our trust in Jesus as God’s anointed- God’s own son chosen for the work of saving and reconciling the world- to trust in all that is to be born of God into a much larger family than we might have otherwise imagined. Or as John puts it at the opening of his Gospel, “born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.” Which raises an interesting question. As the son of God, Jesus is often quoted as referring to God as his “Father.” That shouldn’t come as a surprise as that would have been common religious nomenclature for God from a first-century Galilean Jewish man: God as father. But way back in the first chapter of Genesis, as culmination of six days’ worth of naming, creating, and calling things good, God creates humankind in God’s image. Verse 27, “So God created humankind in [God’s] image, in the image of God he created them; male and female [God] created them.” So, the question is, given the image of being born of God, how might we also be called to think of God the mother who bears us in this way.
Because those names for God aren’t really about sex, the physical biology of God. God is no more a man (as we commonly use that word) than God is a woman. But if male and female we are created in God’s own image, then it naturally follows that our masculine and feminine qualities both reflect something true about God, something that better helps us understand who God is to us. Perhaps the best thing we can do as people of faith on a day in which the culture around us seeks to honor mothers, is to speak about how God is not only our Father, but also our Mother. This done beautifully in the novel The Shack, in which the God character named ‘Papa,’ is seen as a warm and welcoming woman of color who is particularly fond of all her children. Just this past October, a podcast titled The Liturgists recorded a live event titled, “God our Mother.” Included in the program was this poem by Allison Woodard.
To be a Mother is to suffer;
To travail in the dark,
stretched and torn,
exposed in half-naked humiliation,
subjected to indignities
for the sake of new life.
To be a Mother is to say,
"This is my body, broken for you,"
And, in the next instant, in response to the created's primal hunger,
"This is my body, take and eat."
To be a Mother is to self-empty,
To neither slumber nor sleep,
so attuned You are to cries in the night-
Offering the comfort of Yourself,
and assurances of "I'm here."
To be a Mother is to weep
over the fighting and exclusions and wounds
your children inflict on one another;
To long for reconciliation and brotherly love
and-when all is said and done-
To gather all parties, the offender and the offended,
into the folds of your embrace
and to whisper in their ears
that they are Beloved.
To be a mother is to be vulnerable-
To be misunderstood,
Railed against,
Blamed
For the heartaches of the bewildered children
who don't know where else to cast
the angst they feel
over their own existence
in this perplexing universe
To be a mother is to hoist onto your hips those on whom your image is imprinted,
bearing the burden of their weight,
rejoicing in their returned affection,
delighting in their wonder,
bleeding in the presence of their pain.
To be a mother is to be accused of sentimentality one moment,
And injustice the next.
To be the Receiver of endless demands,
Absorber of perpetual complaints,
Reckoner of bottomless needs.
To be a mother is to be an artist;
A keeper of memories past,
Weaver of stories untold,
Visionary of lives looming ahead.
To be a mother is to be the first voice listened to,
And the first disregarded;
To be a Mender of broken creations,
And Comforter of the distraught children
whose hands wrought them.
To be a mother is to be a Touchstone
and the Source,
Bestower of names,
Influencer of identities;
Life giver,
Life shaper,
Empath,
Healer,
and
Original Love.