Honor the Mothers of our Faith and our Lives with Love

+Our readings this Easter are clear: Love is the point. Loving God, Loving one another, Loving our Neighbor, Loving the stranger, Loving the outcast, Loving ourselves. Love is the key.  And as one commentator puts it:  Love isn’t easy. And clearly God knows this, why else would we get these messages of Love over and over and over again?
Our readings from the Gospel of John, all Easter, have been excerpted from Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the final teaching series before his death. Clearly, at least from John’s perspective, these teachings of Jesus are the most important the fabric of our faith.
And the message? The message is clear: Love.
But, as I said, love can be very difficult. Nothing hurts as much as when something bad happens to one we love.
No loss is as painful as the loss of Love.
Once we start loving, we begin building up a huge amount of potential hurt. It’s the price of love.
Jesus knew this. He knew that the Love of His creator, of God was leading him to the cross. Jesus knew that it was love that would carry his followers through the dark days ahead. But he also knew that that same love, the same love God had for Jesus , that Jesus has for us, that those who love Jesus have for him,  is the same love that can cause the lover tremendous, unspeakable and intense pain.
Yes, Love hurts, love is hard, yet Love is the source of everything. Without Love we are NOTHING.
 To quote St Paul:
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. (1 Corinthians 13)
So our readings this Eastertide focus on this love. And then we come upon Mother’s Day. Now how can, how do our readings these great fifty days connect to an observance originally designed as a radical day of protest against the horrors of war, but has morphed into a Hallmark guided day of “on demand” expressions of love attached to an almost impossible icon of motherhood designed by, I dare say, men.
But despite the modern consumerism and fantasy attached to the 21st century version of mother’s day, I think having this day fall within Eastertide and our incessant messages of Love as found in the scripture readings these 7 weeks makes sense. For that initial focus of the first mother’s day established by Julia Ward Howe  in the 19th century jives nicely with this idea of Love being hard, but  in the end so very worth it.
For the initial Mother’s Day was all about bringing women together –together  to stop the madness of war. Mother’s Day was about alternative conflict resolution, it was about Peace.
But over the years it has changed, evolved into what it is today: a day to honor our mothers with cards, candy flowers and brunch.
But, to coin an old phrase, just who are our mothers? For many people the woman who gave birth to them is not their mother, for others of us, not only is the woman who birthed us our mother, but so are older sisters, aunts, neighbors, friends. But, I think for all of us, one thing is certain: there have been women in our lives who have nurtured us, protected us, encouraged us, loved us. It is those women we honor today….for any woman who has taught us, any woman who has loved us, any woman who has PUT UP WITH US, is due honor.
If you look at some of writings about the history of Mother’s Day you’ll find great debate on the use of the apostrophe---should it be Mother’s Day, (apostrophe s)  or Mothers’ Day (s apostrophe). Is this a day about one woman who is viewed as a mother in one particular family unit, that would be the singular possessive, the apostrophe s,  or is it about all the mothers of our lives, of our world, the s apostrophe, the plural possessive?
And it is in this somewhat obscure debate that, I think, we get the connection between Mother’s Day and what Jesus is trying to get through to us.
You see, Love is  what allows us to do the unthinkable. Love is what keeps us going. Love for others, as most brilliantly exemplified in a mother’s love for her child is what spreads the Gospel, it’s what makes the Body of Christ tick. And being Loved, having those people in our own lives, those people who will stand behind us, no matter what, is what fuels us, strengthens us, inspires us to risk loving others. It’s the ultimate circle of life: We are given the very gift of our life out of the love of others and then, whether we are raised by a loving mother or whether we find that motherly love in others, we grow and mature through the nurturing of others. And then through this love and care of others we are then able to nurture and love still others. Whether it be our own children or children of other parents, we, by virtue of allowing love to seep into our hearts, become Loving People, and loving people when gathered together like us here become the flesh and blood representatives of the source of all Love, GOD in the world.
Jesus commands us to love one another, not because Jesus thinks without this commandment we won’t fall in love with our children, our spouse, our siblings, our friends. No Jesus commands us to love one another so that we’ll stay in love, so that we’ll allow Love to be the singular focus of our life---for when we let Love slip from the number one focus of our life then we as a civilization, as a people, as a church, as a family devolve into fear, bitterness, hate and loss. The original Mothers’ Day was designed to point out the absurdity of most war, the original mothers’ day was created to remind each and every one of us that nothing, nothing matters in this world if we do not have love.
So on this day to honor mothers I encourage us all to do what Jesus has commanded us to do: honor Love. +

We Abide in One Another

God is love and those who abide in Love, abide in God. Amen.

Several years ago, when I was in seminary, I made an amazing discovery: I had become my mother.
I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences of realizing you’ve become your mother, your father, an older sibling etc. I know I have. But in this particular instance I had become my mother.
You see, when I was a teenager my mother was in graduate school. Every Saturday she sat in the living room, on the couch, with the dogs at her feet. Classical music was playing on the Hi Fi (as it was known in those days). Books surrounded her as she read, highlighted, wrote and re-wrote. Periodically one of us would wander in with an “onlymomcananswer” question and she would look up, gazing over the top of her glasses, setting us straight. Back on that day of my: “I have become my mother revelation” I was in an easy chair, classical music playing on the iPod, a dog at my feet, books, paper and the computer surrounding me. A questioning housemate approached, I looked up, gazing over the top of my glasses and it was done: I was my mother.
It’s not just Mom, at times I find myself becoming my father, my sister, my grandmother. I act like them because I learned from them. They’ve guided me.
The Ethiopian Eunuch, in today’s reading from Acts, says to Philip, regarding his understanding of scripture: “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Exactly. We learn by watching others, listening to others, working with others. Our families, friends, mentors---they all GUIDE US. TEACH US. CORRECT US. HELP US.
Because they love us. Because they abide in us and we abide in them.
Abide.
It’s a big word in today’s readings. Abide:
To wait for
To endure without yielding
To bear patiently
Jesus says: Abide in me as I abide in you. In other words bear me patiently as I bear you patiently.
In today’s Epistle,  John says: “Beloved, since God loved us so much we ought to love one another…if we love one another God lives in us and [God’s] love is perfected in us.” (1John 4:11,13)
This is how it works:
By loving Jesus Christ within community, as we do here, we give God’s love a place to take root and grow. God’s love abides in us when we love one another. As new members join our community they learn about God’s love by witnessing our love for one another.
Abiding must have love as its foundation, that’s clear. To abide, to endure, one must have Love.
Back to mothers for a moment. Think how much mothers endure. First childbirth. Then colic. Then teething. Then the terrible two’s. Then those teenage years! Then the leaving home. Then the coming back home and not leaving fast enough…and on and on.
Abiding can be hard.  You mothers here---how often have you bit your tongue? Enduring in silence, offering a shoulder to cry on without saying: “I told you so.” Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, friends all do this enduring, this abiding, because they love us and want us to grow, to flourish, to be fabulous.
So does God.


Abiding takes endurance. God endures a lot with us: We deny, we forget, we ignore God.
But this abiding thing is a two way street. God endures us but we must endure God. C’mon, admit it, there are times when we really wonder what God is doing.  Disaster, famine, war. The death of a child, the tragic loss of love. Where’s God in that?
Theologian Walter Wink addressed this in an article he wrote almost 20 years ago for the Christian Century magazine entitled: “Abiding—Even Under the Knife.”  Using today’s Gospel as his text he takes the reader through years of his evolving interpretation of this story of God as the vine tender, Jesus as the vine, and us as the branches.  Wink chronicles his long history with this story, from the somewhat narcissistic “it’s all about me” interpretation of his youth to a more universal interpretation of his older years. In this latter interpretation Wink confronts the issue of pruning—you know, that part of the text that says if you don’t bear fruit you get pruned. Pruning is, in effect, clipping off dead or dying wood to promote new, vibrant growth. We do it to our plants. Our hair. We prune growing things so the growth will be fuller, richer: more lush. Walter Wink reminds us: we are growing things as well. As Christians we strive to grow more fully into the Body of Christ. For some of us (dare I say, most of us) that growth becomes stunted, stagnant and stale. And then, before we know it—before we know what is happening—here comes God, pruning shears in hand. Objectively (that is when it isn’t me God’s aiming at) we know this is a good thing. It’s good for the prunee. Healthy. You know, like lima beans and castor oil. Who knew that good could feel so bad? Growth experiences are like that. To abide with God requires an occasional pruning….
As Wink says, “How has the intrepid vine-dresser pruned you lately?” Are you grateful for it? If you are it probably happened a while ago. Because when the pruning is fresh we rarely feel gratitude. Fear, anger, bitterness and pain, yes, Gratitude? Not so much. Take a moment to think of those times you’ve been pruned. The times when it hurt a lot and you were scared.  Somehow you held on, somehow you endured. You stayed the course. Because you weren’t alone. You had company. You had parents and grandparents, mentors and guides, supervisors and co-workers, fellow parishioners, priests and deacons---you had guides, you had companions along the way and, above all else you had God, you had Jesus. For, as Jesus said, “as the Father loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love.”
The turnaround time---the pain of pruning evolving into gratitude-- varies. The disciples needed to feel betrayal and bitterness and doubt before they could embrace the miracle of the Resurrection. It took some time. It took patience on the part of God, it takes endurance on the part of us, but if we wait long enough, if we allow ourselves to be guided by those who have gone before, if we settle into and abide in God’s love, we’ll find our path paved with gratitude, our future infused with hope, pruning shears and all.