A sermon on Mothers' Day
May 10, 2009
Let me begin by wishing you all a happy Mothers' Day; you're not all mothers, but you all have (or had) mothers, and it's a day to celebrate and give thanks for that relationship. I'm not quite sure how it came to be the second Sunday of May; it used to be the fourth Sunday of Lent, and it was fixed by the Book of Common Prayer epistle for the day: the passage from Galatians about ‘Jerusalem, which is the mother of us all.'
But by happy coincidence, the epistle which you just heard for today is also very appropriate: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.... God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.'
And for most of us, our first experience of love is the love that our mothers give to us. It's totally unearned, and given without thought of return. As helpless babies, we're dependent on that love for our lives.
It enables us to grow and develop, physically, mentally, and spiritually, into mature human beings.
And for those of us who are mothers, motherhood links us to mothers everywhere, and through the ages. We share the same experiences, the changes to our bodies, the pain of birth, the joy in the new child. Or sometimes there is instead the joy of the chosen child, forming a bond with the new mother. One of the most moving experiences of my life was watching the birth of my little granddaughter - not so little now, she's 18. She emerged as a lump of flesh, and then began to unfold like a flower; she began to breathe, and before our eyes she became a person.
Throughout our lives, our love for our children creates an instant bond, a link, between mothers. One summer many years ago, I went up to the western Arctic, taking our youngest son, then eleven, with me. We stayed for a few days in the little town of Tuktoyaktuk, on the Beaufort Sea, and on the Sunday we went to the Anglican church there. The priest, a young man from the east end of London, was very welcoming, and invited us to go parish visiting with him. In the summer he traveled by small boat, visiting the Inuit families in their fishing camps along the shore. In the winter he used a dog team: a wonderfully adaptable man. I hesitated; I knew no Inuktituk, and worried about embarrassment on both sides. But he was encouraging, so we went. And as we went from family to family, there was an immediate link - my son. They saw us not as strangers, but as a mother and child, as many of them were. The Inuit all love children, and there was an immediate rapport. Through the priest, who along with his many other new skills had learned some Inuktituk, we talked about our children, while they played together. It was a wonderful experience, an unexpected blessing of motherhood. Our common love for our children overcame all our differences.
The word ‘love' has a lot of different meanings, and the English language has only the one word to cover them all. The Hebrew scriptures are full of narratives of human loves in all their rich variety; love at first sight - Jacob and Rachel; sexual obsession - Amnon and Tamar; family affection - many many examples, including the poignant mother and daughter-in-law affection of Naomi and Ruth; long-married love- Elkanah and Hannah; intense same-sex friendship - David and Jonathan; we could go on and on. And these loves echo in our own lives; we've all experienced at least some of them - it's part of our human nature. How do these loves relate to the message of today's epistle: ‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God.'?
The loves of the great Old Testament stories are mostly initiated, sparked, by a human instinct: a reaction to another person which is not deliberate, not an act of will. The spark is sometimes sexual attraction, or parenthood, or common interests, values, character traits. It's usually directed toward one, or sometimes a few, people - we don't feel the same way about everybody. It's not considered; we don't usually ask ourselves ‘Am I going to love this person or not?'. Sometimes it's instant, and sometimes love grows slowly. And - and here we get closer to the love that is from God - it's unearned. We don't earn the love of our mothers, of family, friends, partners - we're loved for who we are, not for what we do.
But these loves of our lives, once initiated, have to be maintained by acts of will, by ongoing loving actions toward the other. This is the love Paul writes about: ‘Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things'. Love withers and dies if it isn't nourished by care and consideration, by deliberate effort directed toward the well-being of the other. And this is the love we are truly blessed to receive from our mothers. Not the initial spark, not the surge of love and joy toward the new child, but the years of selfless love and care, the ongoing loving actions that enable us to develop into fully mature human beings. This is the love that stirs in us a response of love and gratitude, a response that we express today - or at least I hope you're all going to.
There used to be a bishop of Ontario who, on Mother's Day, went to the church equipped with baskets of flowers; at the door he gave a flower to each mother, as a token of the church's honour for them. As our epistle writer said, ‘Everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God', and perhaps the love between mother and child is one of the purest human loves, totally unselfish. It perhaps gives a glimpse of God's love, self-sacrificing to the end.
And so, on this Mother's Day, let us give thanks for God's love, for all the blessings of this life, and especially for the love and care given us by our mothers.
