A Sermon by Pastor Tom Lacey . . .

Mom and God—what a team!

1 John 4:16b-21, Preached at Congregational Church of Boca Raton, May 13, 2007

A mother tells this story. I was out walking with my 4 year old daughter. She picked up something off the ground and started to put it in her mouth. I took the item away from her and I asked her not to do that. "Why?" my daughter asked. "Because it's been lying outside, you don't know where it's been. It's dirty and probably has germs," At this point, my daughter looked at me with total admiration and asked, "Wow! How do you know all this stuff?" "Uh," I was thinking quickly. “All moms know this stuff. It's on the Mommy Test. You have to know it, or they don't let you be a Mommy." We walked along in silence for 2 or 3 minutes, but she was evidently pondering this new information. "OH...I get it!" she beamed, "So if you don't pass the test, you have to be the daddy." "Exactly" I replied back with a big smile on my face and joy in my heart. “From the mouth of babes…” Moms are that important.

Our text for the day simplifies our Christian religion down to one four letter word: Love, and this is because “God is love.”

So if God is love, and moms quite often are the ones who love us the most, the purest, the best, then mom is the one who is most like God in the flesh, other than Christ, that is. Isn’t this why moms are so important? We understand their importance now, especially after you become a mom or we grow up enough to give her credit where credit is due.

Still, children have their own reasons why mom is so important. Someone asked these essential, probing questions to children:

Why did God make mothers? “To help us out of there when we were getting born.”
What ingredients are mothers made of? “God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair and everything nice in the world and one dab of mean.”
Why did God give you your mother and not some other Mom? “God knew she likes me a lot more than other people's moms like me.”
What kind of little girl was your Mom?
     1. “My Mom has always been my Mom and none of that other stuff.”
     2. “I don't know because I wasn't there, but my guess would be pretty bossy.”
Why did your Mom marry your dad?
     1. “She got too old to do anything else with him.”
     2. “My grandma says that Mom didn't have her thinking cap on.”
What's the difference between moms and dads? “Moms have magic; they make you feel better without medicine.”
What does your Mom do in her spare time? “To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.”
If you could change one thing about your Mom, what would it be? “I'd make my Mom smarter. Then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me.”

Perhaps not an A+, but at least an A- to an A grade. When it comes down to it, it’s the little boy who said it best when his mother told him that it was God who made people good and he responded, "Yes, I know it’s God, but mothers help a lot."

What we want to see this morning is that in order to walk the walk and talk the talk of our faith, we need to act and speak as God would.

This is what John says in our scripture when we read, “because as he is, so are we in this world.” The “he” in this text refers to Jesus, the one we are to imitate. Now to live as God is to love as God, as God did in the flesh. It’s not good enough to like other people. It’s necessary to love them. Like has nothing to do with it. Find the strength to look beyond like. If God only cared for those he liked, we’d be in trouble. But, as scripture says, “he first loved us,” for no apparent reason, other than God is love. If we were only to go so far as liking someone, then we would not be stretched at all. The commandment to love requires us to go beyond our natural capacities toward others. With some people, we simply have to get spiritual. Look past certain habits that annoy. Nobody is free of one or more of these him or herself. Be bold and big enough to talk it out. Be honest but gracious. Perhaps it’s your turn to rescue and not to be rescued. Love has a habit of finding lost sheep when others see only losers. 

One woman thinks about what it means to love someone who can not return that love as she should: Grandma will be 95 years old on Mother's Day. It shouldn't surprise me that she didn't know who I was when I saw her last weekend—but it did. She knew me at Christmas. Was the marked decline because they had moved her from assisted living to nursing care or had they moved her because of the decline? I guess it really doesn't matter—she still didn't remember me. As we sat talking about the insignificant stuff you talk about with people you don't really know, I laid my hand on her back. She immediately leaned forward and as I started rubbing her back she began smiling and purring. When it was time to go, she asked me to come again soon. The next day when I arrived at her door, she looked up and smiled. “Good morning, Grandma,” I said. “Do you remember me today?” “Of course I do,” she replied indignantly. “You are the girl who rubs my back.” I guess sometimes what I do is more important than who I am. (Teri Thomas)

Now I am not that much of a rebel. I’m a middle child for gosh sakes. I went to seminary and I am an ordained minister. I have no tattoos but rather, am married with five kids. I guess however I must have had a bit of a streak in me at one time. I studied in Spain when I was a junior in college, 21 years old. (That is a great deal. It costs the same as tuition in America, so you only have to get a plane ticket over to your destination.) Anyway, a couple of nights after the Spring semester was finished, my friends and I were sitting around one Friday night at a place we often went to for dinner and talking. About ten o’clock at night, I thought to myself, “This is crazy. I am sitting in the same place, with the same bunch of people, doing the same thing, and all of Europe is only a train trip away.” I turned to my friends and told them I was leaving to travel through Europe. They asked me when and I told them, “Right now.” Now they thought I was crazy, but I got up and a couple of them followed me to my “home” there. I packed my big student-going-through-Europe-on-$15-a-day-backpack, said goodbye to my Spanish “parents” and walked with my friends to the train station to catch the midnight train to Barcelona. I traveled for six weeks by myself, biked up an Austrian Alps mountain, stayed at a family’s home as their guest for three nights after meeting them in Sigmund Freud’s house, went to the top of the Eiffel tower, was robbed of my passport, money, and camera, and made it back to my Spanish parents home, penniless, worn out, and satisfied. I guess I do have a bit of a streak in me, but perhaps we all do.

I also have a theological streak in me. Being born in Hawaii, I especially enjoyed coming across this little bit. A Hawaiian guy came back from a near death experience. “Did you meet God?” someone asked him. “Yes, I met God,” said the Hawaiian guy. “What did he say to you?” asked the other guy. “To begin with,” the Hawaiian replied, “SHE said ‘Aloha.’”

It’s funny, but I think it is also a bit true. After all, Isaiah 66, verse 13a says, "As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.” You see, not only do God and mom work together well here, but they go together well there. I know Scripture talks about God the Father, and that’s great. I mean heck, I am a man and a father, so what’s not to love about having my gender identified with God. But of course God doesn’t have a gender. Right? We all agree that God does not have a gender. So it must be that when we say God the Father this doesn’t describe something physical or sexual about God. Saying God the Father points toward characteristics that God has that we liken to what our earthly fathers have. But remember: it’s not the other way around. God is the Father from whom all other fathers come. In God’s fatherhood, we see true fatherhood. But isn’t the same of mothers and motherhood? I mean really. Where does motherhood come from other than from God? If fatherhood comes from him, why wouldn’t motherhood come from her? Not that I mean there are two different Gods but it just made more sense to say “her” this time than “him” again.

Look at Jesus and his concern for Jerusalem. You may know the setting. Jesus is weeping over Jerusalem because they have not accepted the Messiah who has come to save them. You can feel the anguish and pain in his voice as he says, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem...how often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!" Luke 13:34  It’s not like roosters do a lot of gathering and brooding of chicks under their wings. Yes, human fathers do—and so do mothers. Fathers and mothers, moms and dads both love their children, perhaps in slightly different ways. Often they love them in ways that are not stereotypically true. In today’s world, it is not unusual to see dads who are more sensitive and responsive to their children and the moms who are more distant and disengaged. But no matter what, to say that God only has one set of characteristics which we see in fathers, and we don’t see anything of God in mothers or mothers in God, seems ways out of touch both theologically and experientially.

Our scripture says that perfect love casts out fear. This type of love is not based on gender; both males and females can love this way, and God is the one who inspires such love. This is what we want to be aiming for in our own spiritual life.

Listen: A first-grade teacher seated her students in a circle. She asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. One by one, each child got up and announced, I'd like to be a nurse like my mother, or I want to be a banker like my father, or I want to be a teacher like you, Miss Smith. The last child to speak was the most shy and timid little boy in the class. He said, “When I get big, I'm going to be a lion tamer in the circus. I'm going to face those animals with my whip and chair and make them leap through hoops of fire and obey all of my commands.” Seeing the disbelieving looks on the faces of his classmates that he could ever act so boldly or bravely, he was quick to reassure them, “Well, of course, I'll have my mother with me.” I am sure you noticed he said, mother and not father. It is mom who often inspires children to be brave because it is often women who are the bravest and most faithful among us. After all, it was the women who followed Jesus who followed him right to the cross, and to the tomb. And all four gospel accounts name the women as the first ones either to see Jesus resurrected or receive the news that he was raised from the dead. So be brave like a woman. And caring like a man. Or courageous like a father and compassionate like a mother. If this confuses you, let me make it very simple: Love each other as Christ loves you.

A young woman entered Oxford University with little focus for her life. She just did not know what she wanted to be or do. But she soon came under the influence of a colorful professor of English, a writer with a gift, named C. S. Lewis. She became a Christian through much of his influence. She left Oxford, against the advice of friends and family, and began to study nursing. After five more years of rigorous training, she was certified as a nurse. But her story doesn't end there, for her questing, Christian spirit would not let her rest with the way things were. You see, she ended up working on a cancer ward in a London hospital. Gradually, she came to realize that most of the doctors ignored the patients who were deemed terminally ill. Because of this, she watched many of them die virtually alone. This troubled her greatly. She approached the hospital administration with an idea she had for surrounding those dying of cancer with friends and loved ones during their last days, rather than isolating them in sterile rooms with strangers. Her radical ideas were quickly rejected. Undaunted, she decided to enroll in medical school to try to make a difference even though she was already 33 years old and would not graduate until she was 39. And she did make a difference, for she founded a movement that makes it possible for dying patients to live their days in a setting of love and support. Cicely Saunders, out of Christian compassion, began a movement in England in the 1950s that later moved to America and that many of you know only too well. It is called the Hospice Movement, and it drew its inspiration from Jesus' own compassion for his “children”—"as a hen gathers her brood under her wings."

On this wonderful Sunday, when we lift up our mothers and the mother of our children, we should also lift up God, who in his, or if I may be so bold on this day, her nature has taught and inspired them so beautifully and powerfully and unforgettably. God bless our moms and our wives, and women all, whose lives our rooted in the very nature of God’s being—Love. And let us bless God, giving thanks to God our Father, our Mother, our Parent, the heavenly one who loved us first and loves us still. Blessed be our God. 

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