"Mother's Day" sermon

Easter 6-B

May 13, 2012

The Rev. Marguerite Alley

Today is of course Mothers’ day. It might interest you to know that in many churches it is now called “Church and Family day”.
  Although the form of Mothers’ Day is quite different across the nations, the current traditions in this country are largely our own with some British influences.
  The Anglican Church  was organized in such a way that there was a Cathedral in the city and there were satellite parishes throughout the countryside. Folks who lived too far from the city would travel on foot to the small parishes during the winter months when the distance was too far and the roads were likely to be impassable. The first Sunday in May generally coincided with a time at which the roads had become passable, the snow melted and the worst of the puddles dried. So this date was set aside as the day where the small congregations could make their way in to the town and join in celebratory worship in the cathedral.  This Mother Church Day (or Mothering Sunday) developed through the years, and eventually, since it was also a time when the spring flowers returned, it became customary to gather and give flowers and small gifts to the Mothers as they gathered with their families.
 Our own tradition here in the United States was started by Julia Ward Howe as a means of avoiding further war. She made a Mothers’ Day proclamation in 1870 as a means of encouraging women in her call for disarmament. In 1908, a woman by the name of Anna Jarvis suggested that we have an annual event to honor mothers and she was able to convince President  Wilson to declare it a national holiday in 1914. The idea was very popular and of course still is. An interesting footnote though is that Ms. Jarvis was quite dismayed at how quickly the holiday was commercialized and in her later years stated publicly that she regretted having pushed to make it a national holiday.

The original idea was for mothers to be able to spend the day (always a Sunday) enjoying their families by worshipping together, and then relaxing together. As our society has developed and our mind set about Sunday has changed, we have lost that simple celebration of family and the importance our mothers play in our lives. But not all the changes have been negative. When we consider the way women were treated in the early years of the church, we see that we have made great strides. In the early church the male role was considered much more important than that of the woman, and women were expected to play a much more subservient role. It was also an age when roles of family members were much more defined than they are today. Jesus showed much more respect for women than was required but we should remember that this would not have been the norm for his day. While there are still places in the world, and even within subsections of our own society where women are given subservient roles, relatively rapid changes have been occurring.
  Some of these changes are no doubt a consequence of advances in technology. For many homes, the drudgery of household tasks such as of cooking, washing and cleaning, once immensely time-consuming, are now largely a thing of the past, and there are many more roles now available in the workforce to women. In today’s society, which still far from perfect, women play a far more significant role and enjoy many more freedoms.

Our idea of family has changed as well. Where as once we thought of family as one mother, one father and children, we now see many single parent homes, 2 moms, 2 dads, and in some cases, 4 or more parents and grandparents. Jesus himself foreshadowed one aspect of this change by suggesting that the Church family rather than nuclear family should be a point of support. This has a contemporary feel to it. Loving people who find themselves in different kinds of families is a commonsense solution in a fractured and uncertain society. In practice we should be truthful with ourselves and admit while John records Jesus as making the ideal of love key to his message few if any of the saints were able to achieve this ideal in their lives.  So while clearly it is an ideal worth striving for, it is probably best understood as a goal rather than as a prerequisite for the Christian journey.

As far as I can tell the message Jesus emphasizes a call to relationship. Remember the great commandment: love the lord with all you heart and love each other. So we are called first  to embark on a life-long journey in search of that mysterious, creative and elusive “God” force which draws us  with a sense of  awe and wonder, and  second to find and use a human setting for the awakened sense of love and compassion..
   Jesus is very clear about the attitude required for this commitment and, according to the gospel accounts he himself was prepared to die for this principle. In our reading today from the Gospel of John, we discover Jesus telling his disciples that they are to love, but not just love in general, they are to love as he has loved them. Although that sounds straightforward, to find meaning in his statement we must first be sure we know how Jesus expressed his love.  The apostles were not the most lovable bunch of guys. They argued about who was more important, they told Jesus who they thought he should and should not associate with, and in the end, they hid themselves away, one betrayed him and one abandoned him.  For all their potential problems, Jesus did not appear to have gone out of his way to choose  followers  like himself. The implication then is that by talking of and showing this love for each other , Jesus was actually referring to something that was  a novel form of relationship.
 This radical kind of friendship is reflective of something I once heard Desmond Tutu refer to. He said “An enemy is a friend waiting to be made”.

“You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose family” or so the saying goes. If we can, as Jesus has taught us, love and care for those who may see things differently, or don’t look like we do, then it should be pretty easy to love and care for the people with whom we worship to whom we are actually related! And yet…..well..you know where I was going with that!

Jesus puts this ideal right out there when he says “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”  What should our response be? If we   take this message seriously then we need to make a serious effort to shift our first loyalty from ourselves, to those around us.  Because until we see those around us as valuable and worthy of sacrifice we have not begun to understand how to honor those we claim to love.