7 EASTER (MOTHER’S DAY)                                  GLORIA DEI ANCHORAGE

MAY 8, 2005                                                              PASTOR SCOTT FULER

ACTS 1:6-14;   PS 68:1-10, 33-6;   I PET 4:12-4, 5:6-11;   JOHN 17:1-11

A Mother’s Love

I offer a prayer of blessing to you who are mothers, as well as one for those whose mothers are still living.  And, let’s not forget a prayer of blessing for all of us who were…birthed by a mother!?!?  In other words, Mother’s Day is for everyone.

That’s especially true for the two families who are celebrating the gift of baptism at worship today: Madigan Ruth Ashe (8:30) and Parker Preston Lawton (11:00).  Their names alone sound like these children are destined for greatness.  It has been a blessing to talk with both families about the precious little gift that God has placed in their lives.

Maybe we ought to pause for a short brain-storming session to help these new parents figure out how to face the challenges ahead.  What would you tell them is the main job of being a parent?  Turn their little wonders into professional athletes and movie stars?  No, but to love and protect them.

Love, because all the toys, trips and treats in the world cannot replace this one gift: an accepting, devoted, tough, sacrificial, all-empowering love.

And protection, because a child is just not equipped to survive in life on its own.  Babies of moose, bear, whales, etc., almost immediately have some skills to help them survive in a hostile environment.  And many, even by the end of their first year of life, are able on their own to thrive.

So what’s so different about us?  Recently I read an article about the amazingly slow development of the human brain.  A monkey’s, for example, is completely grown after about one year.  Does anyone know how long it takes the human brain to finish growing?  About twenty years! 

So for human beings, the need for a parent’s presence is extended even that much further.  In a sense, those nine months of pregnancy are really just a microcosm of the entire span of motherhood: all the joy, pain, anxiety, pride, irritation, love, anticipation – whatever happens emotionally to our moms during pregnancy, does not come to an end with our births. 

Then add in the blood, sweat and tears of delivery and it’s no wonder that they have an interest in how we turn out, an expectation that at the very least we will somehow prove to be worth the pain.  Actually, I think most mothers would say that we are worth it simply by being who we are – their children.

And yet, there are a few exceptions.  I love that scene from the movie The Elephant Man in which John Merrick wistfully entertains memories of his mother.  A man afflicted with a disease that leaves him horribly disfigured, he is rescued by a doctor from his fate as a freak in a circus side show. 

Given care and treated like a human being for the first time in his life, he shows the doctor and his wife a picture of his mother.  Then he tells them, She was an angel.  She was so kind to me… I’m sure I must have been a great disappointment to her.  But the doctor’s wife reacts.  Oh no, Mr. Merrick, she says.  No son as loving as you could ever be a disappointment.  Then this man, who has known such pain, muses, If only I could find her.  If only she could see me now…then maybe she would love me…as I am.

Most of us, I think, were blessed with parents who did just that, loved us for who we were…loved us by setting limits and goals for us, by saying Yes and No to us.  And then with our big choices in life, of colleges, careers, families and finances, I’m guessing that your parents said the same thing as mine, We just want you…to be happy.

What did they mean by that?

-NOT: happy in a self-centered, greedy, selfish way.

-BUT: happy in the sense of shalom = to be content, healthy, whole, fulfilled, able to make a difference, have a positive impact on life.

See how this fits God’s relationship to us?  For it is also a reality that God has given us new life through pain and suffering, with the blood, sweat and tears…of Jesus.  And like our parents, God has set a goal for us…In fact,  God seems to be saying the very same thing, I just want you to be…happy.  Again, not in a self-ish sense but a self-less sense; not in a self-centered way but in an other-centered way.

In Jesus, God shows us a perfect example of that motherly love: an accepting, devoted, tough, sacrificial, all-empowering love.  It is what God gives to us; it is what God asks us to show our neighbors throughout the world, especially to those who have yet to know such a life-blessing love.

The movie, The Spitfire Grill, features a wonderful setting in which all these elements of mother and child, love and loss, sacrifice and suspicion, life-and-death-and-new-life are woven together in wonderful gospel story.

Hannah, the feisty elderly owner of the Spitfire Grill, is estranged from her son.  He returned home from Vietnam healthy in body but mortally wounded in spirit.  She tells of working hard to help this child to whom she gave life, hoping with love to break through his painful memories, his fear.  Yet she quickly discovered that the harder she tried to reach out, the further he withdrew both emotionally and spatially.  Ultimately he left the comfort of her home to live as a hermit in the hills behind the Grill. 

There they settle into an uneasy arrangement of communication and care.  Every evening, Hannah fills a canvas bag with canned goods and leaves it out by the woodpile, sticking an ax in the chopping block as a sign that she loves him and is honoring his need to be alone. 

The next morning the ax and empty sack are carefully laid next to the stump as a return sign of that affection.  So they travel through life on these parallel roads, together…but alone.

It’s only through an outside influence that their paths finally meet.  A young female ex-con named Percy comes to their community for a new start in life.  She is treated as an intruder in their carefully ordered lives.  It’s true even of her boss, Hannah, and her hermit son, whom Percy nicknames Johnny B.  In her effort to meet this stranger in the woods, she breaks the rules about his sacred space and that tenuous thread of life between mother and son.

As her story unfolds, we see why she identifies with those who hurt, who go through life without that precious gift of love.  Yet her “meddling” is exactly what is needed.  It is, in fact, the very same type of meddling that Jesus does with all who hurt, who are pushed aside by the selfish and strong. 

Percy’s sacrificial offering of love and life is able to break through the pain of Hannah and Johnny B., of the entire town.  It reunites mother and son; it reenergizes a community; it resurrects the presence of God’s love. 

Such is the influence of Jesus on us all.  The Spirit of Christ is always meddling, always intervening, always at work in our lives showing us that magnificent motherly love: that accepting, devoted, tough, sacrificial, all-empowering love.

That is God’s goal for the relationship between the children of this planet and our Creator, our holy motherly God of life and love and shalom.  Amen.