Sermon 1 Jn 4-15-21
I begin my reflection on this Mother’s day by saying Happy mother’s day to all you moms out there. I am also conscious that I should not get too sentimental about motherhood because perhaps some of our memories about moms and motherhood are not very happy ones. Because motherhood under the very best of circumstances
is a commitment to love that is not a bed of roses for mothers or the ones they tried to love.
So, I found some writings of a panel of experts- who were asked to complete some sentences about their experiences with their mothers. Here are a very few considered opinions of five and six year olds:
Q. What is your mommy good at?
A. My mom is best at: "feeding the dog," "making my bed," "driving," "cleaning," "running," watering the garden.
Q. Who's the boss at your house?
A. Mom. You can tell by room inspection. She sees the stuff under the bed.
Q. What's the difference between moms and dads?
A. Moms- they know how to talk to teachers without scaring them.
Q. What does your Mom do in her spare time?
A. Mothers don't do spare time.
Q. How does your mommy make you feel good,
A. It makes me feel good inside when Mom says: "I love you," "good job," "dinnertime!" "You look handsome," "I'll buy you something."
What might we deduce from this wisdom of discerning experts? Well for one thing, they describe the reality of the breadth and depth of a mother’s love. A mother’s love is expected to stretch in many ways.
A mother’s love is expected to be limitless, tireless, patient, encouraging, protective, ever watchful, and yes, stern when it needs be.
The reality of a mother’s love is that it smiles at the tiny fingerprints that messed up a newly cleaned window.
The reality of a mothers love crawls with us as babies, walks with us as toddlers, runs with us as children, endures our cruel or comic rebellion as teenagers, and then stands aside to let us go as young adults, as we walk away into our own lives.
That is the realness of a mother’s love.
In a Newsweek article of a couple of weeks ago, an adult writer by the name of Clinton Killian was reflecting on the life of his mother’s selfless love for him. He said he remembered how she had worked multiple jobs to raise six kids in the 60s- logging over 90 hours a week, sometimes three jobs at a time, to make ends meet. As an adult Mr. Killian wrote that he did not appreciate her sacrifice until he was a grown man.
I have to say that I did not appreciate the love of my mother for me until I was nearly 50. I probably even resisted its grace far longer then adolescence- a time when all parents- mothers and fathers are likely to suffer through some measure of ingratitude from teenagers who are testing the bounds of independence in their parent’s household. I must say, I did not appreciate the suffering love my mother went through when her 55 year old other son, my step-brother died of kidney failure. There are many things about my own mother’s love that I am just beginning to appreciate now. It seems that love never stops revealing its own glory.
So perhaps more then with any other role, we do need to cherish the role of motherhood because at its best, it teaches us about the really real- the authenticity of love. It reveals something of the real nature of God. Maybe one day, when we are all grown up and someone asks us- who does Jesus remind you of, we might answer without hesitation- mother. I think that would be a good answer.
If you were given only one word to describe the reality of God what would it be? In our first reading today, someone has asked John the question, “what is God like”? John answers in the simplest most direct sentence structure we have in English. “God” “is” “love.” Subject, verb, and noun, period.
Everything else he could of said about the reality of God—you know that God is about law, or God is about commandments, that God is about judgement. All that is true. And all that is true but it is subsumed by a greater reality-
God is love.
The really real reality, the greater truth that the gospels want to make sure we understand for anyone who believes anything at all about God in our Judeao-Christian context is this one sentence- ‘God is love’.
But we human beings begin to rebel or doubt the power of this greater reality to change our lives or the world from the day we begin to reason because it lives side-by-side as it were with other lesser realities that cause us to doubt it. Huston Smith a professor of religion and philosophy in Syracuse University, has written many, many books on the world’s religions, tells a story about a conversation that a son and his father had about the world, reality and God in his book “Why Religion Matters”
A son of one of his colleagues was watching television one day. The boy was overcome by the violence that he saw on TV. With great anxiety, he rushed to his father and with some anxiety asked, “Dad is this violence real?” Well, I would answer violence is real. But I have to ask myself, is it the reality, I am going to honour, to birth, to nourish in my own life. Is it going to be my basis of response to the people and situations I encounter around me?
In John’s community, there seems to be some disagreement about what is ‘really real’. The leader says look, what Jesus has taught us, what has been revealed through his death and resurrection is some new understanding about what and who God is.
God is love, says John to his followers. And how do we know- well this love is perfectly revealed in Jesus. And if this is true says John you cannot say God is love and hate your brothers and sisters. You cannot confess that you believe in Jesus and not live the reality that God is love. If you think you can, you’ve you settled living for a lesser reality, a lie really. The truth is that we often live lesser realities but we long for God’s reality because that is how we were created to be.
John does not start with the 10 commandments as the bases of the that God gave Moses on Sinai as the first way of understanding who God is. John starts with the command that Jesus gave his community- the only one, ‘love one another as I have loved you. Look to his life in its entirety and see the love of God.
As I have loved you? What does this look like. Stories are the best way to experience the really real. A group slightly older children were asked the question what does love mean? One of them said,
"When my grandmother got arthritis," she couldn''t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too.
In the wider more violent world-the world that we see and shrink from discerning the really realness of God is more difficult but not impossible. Victor Frankl has written much about discerning the reality of love in an evil world. He was imprisoned in Auswitch.
Stumbling to work one morning in the grey icing wind of dawn in that hell, his wife entered his mind.
He said, “real or not, her look in my mind was more real then anything else around me. “A thought came into my mind that showed me in an instant what was really real. I understood how a man who has nothing left in the world may still know bliss”.
Think of the context, he is a slave in the house of death and into this reality breaks the ultimate truth. The reality of cruelty, the reality of evil, the reality of suffering is quashed, is consumed, is purified in the realness of love.
What reality do you want for your life, for your kids, for your families, for our country, for our world? The answer depends in part on what we choose to say about God real nature.
God is love. Will we let this realness, transform our hearts and lives, will we cause this inner transformation to spill outward into the soul of our nation
or will we settle for some second rate, second best reality that only perpetuates the myth that violence and vengeance and retribution and those with the biggest gun, the most money get the most security, the most health care, the most food, the most shelter, the most fresh water.
God is love. How do we make it our own reality?
We recognize that we are not perfect, yet we strive to allow the love of God to be perfected in us and through us. The struggle to love is not about becoming divine like Jesus, but more fully human like him.
John says start the effort of living into the reality of love in small circles. Start with the community in which you live. Start living the reality small and you will notice that the love we give away comes back to us.
God is love. then begin to stretch out beyond our tight little circle. Identify the voices of those on the margins or edge of our own community who have little opportunity to hear that this reality of love is for them. I was at a group that was practicing meditation as a way of stilling oneself. I was there for my own rest and I did not want to be disturbed by anyone else. The facilitator asked each of us to introduce ourselves and say a little about why we were there. A young lady all of about twenty, tearfully began, I am at the end of my rope, you all can see that, I am hoping this will help me.
God is love- and the reality she needs is to experience this unconditional love of God in herself partly through the community around her. And sometimes when it is inconvenient, the spirit may call us to stretch and become the glory of this love for someone.
God is love.
Our own reality is that we are always becoming more or less human be choosing the reality in which we live.
God is love. And the love of God is always calling us to fearlessly enter the lions den of other lesser realities in order to tame the lion.
All kinds of people have lots to say about Christianity, about the church that is negative, about why they stop coming or don’t come. Much of it is true and Christianity like every big religion has much of its past that is not loving. But it is also a copout of love. If Christianity and the church fails, when people study why,they will find a failure to love at its root cause. If it thrives, it thrives because every member of the body of Christ struggled to become the embodiement of the words of John in their own particular way. God is love.
Perhaps the most famous passage of all about God’s love is not the simple sentence that John writes but the poetry of Paul in 1 Corinthians 13. It starts out- “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. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Mothers probably know better then many of us- that to love like this is a lifetime of work. It is always the unfinished task of every human being. There are many realities we can teach our children but the greatest of all is love- that’s the gospel truth. Thanks be to God.