Scriptures: Acts 1:6-14; John 13:31-38
There are a couple of occasions that are associated with this day and that might suggest some directions to go with my preaching. To be honest, neither of them is a very comfortable direction to go, but I’ve decided to try to draw on both occasions, even though it isn’t too comfortable. Let’s begin with the occasion that most people will be aware of: Mothers’ Day.
I know that some of you are here today just because it’s Mothers’ Day. And I do, of course, wish everyone who will be celebrating today, in whatever way you will be celebrating, a good Mothers’ Day. Where there is gratitude and love to be expressed and memories summoned, I hope all that happens. And I have some special thoughts today for the newest mother in the Sojourners family, Meghan Wallace. And for Hilda Ward who has left to be with her mother, not because of Mothers’ Day but because of health issues. For those who are celebrating Mothers’ Day today in a sort of simple, straightforward way, I have good wishes offered in a simple, straightforward way.
But I have to say, so far as the church is concerned, so far as making Mothers’ Day the focal point of worship or the subject of a sermon, that is not such a simple thing for me—for a couple of reasons. Concretely, it is not so simple because Mothers’ Day has the effect on me of calling to mind so many different kinds of situations, different real life people I know or have known who do not fit in the Norman Rockwell or Hallmark Card version of Mothers’ Day. I think of children who have lost parents, and parents who have lost children. I think of mothers who are mothers but don’t want to be, and I think of women who are not mothers but do want to be. I think of people who are mothers and who do want to be but whose real desire is to be recognized for something other than their mothering. I think of relationships that were not loving, perhaps even abusive. I think of people who don’t know who their mothers are, or who never had a chance to get to know them. I think of single moms and single dads, and families parented by two dads and those parented by two moms. I think of people in all sorts of situations. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate Mothers’ Day. It doesn’t mean we have to acknowledge everybody all the time and take account of every situation. But for me it means, when you bring Mothers’ Day into church, where we recognize everyone as a child of God, that the way we celebrate Mothers’ Day needs to be complicated, as complicated as the people we are and the people we spiritually bring with us. It means that I am grateful for the hymn that is in our hymnal that recognizes, as much as a hymn can do in a few verses, the various textures of our family life. It means that my prayers for people on Mothers’ Day will be as varied as the people they are meant for.
More abstractly, I suppose, it is not such a simple thing for me to combine Mothers’ Day with worship because, of course, Mothers’ Day is not a religious holiday, and any time the church takes something from our culture and imports it wholesale into the church, I get nervous. Very nervous. Maybe the most obvious danger here is with patriotic occasions where it has so often seemed so easy to blend the patriotic message with the religious message and end up with very fuzzy boundaries or no boundaries at all between being a good American say and a good Christian. Mixing patriotism and religion may be the most obvious danger, but I get nervous any time the church takes its cues from the culture, even when the cues come from something as apparently benign as Mothers’ Day.
I do have some thoughts occasioned partly by Mothers’ Day, but they will take me quite far from what you might think of, or I might think of, as a Mothers’ Day sermon. I’ve been thinking about being children of God. I was thinking about it last week in connection with Forest and Amber’s baptisms. Amber read the passage from the first letter of John that said, “See what love God has for us that we should be called children of God, and that is not just what we are called but who we are.” Not a strange thing to say. Not something we haven’t heard before, but I’ve been thinking about it some over the last week, and of course it carries over into Mothers’ Day pretty nicely. Without getting too deeply into psychology or theories of child development or anything technical at all, I started just thinking about how the dynamics of human parent-child relations might carry over into our relationship to God, since we do refer to God as Father and Mother and ourselves as children…of God. In what ways is that a good and helpful way to think of our relationship with God, to imagine God as a parent and ourselves as God’s children?
One clear meaning of being a child of God is that we children of God are ourselves nothing less than God-like, not so much in any qualities we possess, certainly not in terms of having god-like powers, but in some very fundamental, profound way God-like. We are holy beings, you and I. Maybe you know the song. “If anybody asks you who I am, who I am, who I am…If anybody asks you who I am, tell them, “I’m a child of God.” There is nothing higher, better to be. We share in the very nature of God. And if anybody messes with a child of God, they are messing with God. That’s an important meaning of being a child of God. We sometimes throw the phrase around casually. But it’s not a casual phrase. The more I think about it the less casual it becomes and two weeks from today I may come back to this idea of how we share in the nature of God. That sermon is underway in my head but it’s not quite ready yet. I’ll have to come back to it.
For whatever reason, my thoughts took a different direction this morning. Maybe because today is also “Ascension Sunday”. You probably didn’t know that. I wouldn’t expect you to know that, or care very much when I tell you. But this is that other occasion I mentioned at the beginning of the sermon, a day in the church calendar when the story of Jesus ascending into heaven is read—the one we read this morning—and remembered and reflected on. The Bible describes Jesus, after the resurrection, moving around for a while on earth among his followers, appearing here and there and eating and talking and ministering to them in various ways, and then finally leaving the earth for good, rising—ascending—to be with God.
I think for the liturgical churches that are into celebrating these kinds of days, this day is meant to be a joyful one. It has to do with Christ’s exaltation. And if you don’t take the story literally, you can at least maybe appreciate the imagery of Christ being enthroned in the heavens and treat it as symbolic of Christ being enthroned in the hearts of believers. It is a story for many of Christ’s exaltation.
For me, it has always had a different meaning. For me this is a story about abandonment. I recognize that that may say something about me. And if someone were to tell me that the fact I read the story this way suggests that I have issues with abandonment, I’m not going to argue. It is certainly true that who we are and what our fears are have something to do with how we read the Bible. But I will say that whether I have issues with abandonment or not, the story speaks to a human experience that is not just mine. It speaks to those times and places in us where God is “not there”, not there anyway the way God is supposed to be there, not there the way we may need God to be there, not there the way faith usually says God will be there. We don’t talk about that so much because people of faith are supposed to believe that God is always there. That is part of what it means to be a person of faith, to trust in God’s presence. But the reality is that even for people of faith God is not always present, not always powerfully, truly, convincingly present. And for me those times are what is evoked by the story of Christ’s ascension.
Of course abandonment can go both ways, and when you’re talking about God being “not there”, it’s always an open question as to who has gone away from whom. In the story for this morning, it is Christ who is pictured as taking his leave from us, but it is every bit as likely that we may be prone from time to time to wander off from God. In fact, to return to Mothers’ Day for a moment and to the idea of being children of God, it occurred to me that if being children of God is similar to being children of earthly parents, then it is not only something we may do from time to time—to wander off, to leave home—it is something that it is necessary for us to do. If we never leave home, our earthly, familial homes, emotionally, and spiritually, we never grow up. If we don’t separate ourselves from the orbit of parental control and expectations, we never become our own person. A good parent knows that. I figure God knows that. And if we have never been to places spiritually where we wonder where God has gone, or where we have gone, if we have never gone to places where we ask where God is, or where God has been, if we have never been to places…Let me make this stronger: if we do not regularly go to places where we wonder where God is or who God is, then we have not done what we need to do to grow up spiritually. We remain a child of God in the worst, not the best, sense, and any love we have for God is something less than an adult kind of love.
And I want to be clear about something in this regard. I’m not talking about some temporary phase in our spiritual lives that we can expect to go through but get over. To use the analogy of our family relations and the process of human development, it is not like a kind of adolescent rebellion where we act out our needs for independence and try to demonstrate to ourselves and anyone else who will pay attention that we have minds and wills of our own. That’s a kind of phase we go through, and maybe something like that happens in our spiritual lives too. But I’m not talking about that. In fact at those times when we feel most deeply the “not thereness” of God it would be demeaning and condescending to think of it as nothing more than a phase. Be calm. Be patient. It’ll pass. You’ll feel better in the morning, or some morning soon. We all feel that way sometimes; it’s just a phase. But it’s not just a phase. Not some kind of delusion that we’ll get over when our sanity or our faith returns. The sense of God’s absence is no more a phase than the sure sense of God’s presence and both are part of the life of faith.
In fact I would dare to say that the more mature our faith the more vulnerable we may be to having that feeling of God being “not there”, either because life has led us to that place ourselves, or because that is a place we need to have the courage to be in order to be with someone we care about. I have come to believe very strongly that God can be very much present even in those times when we are keenly feeling her absence, perhaps especially in those times when we are feeling very much without God. We do not miss what we do not know. And so in a strange sort of way, and maybe not really so strange either, missing God, feeling God’s absence in our lives can be a way of knowing God at the same time. If I am feeling a sense of emptiness and know that I need to be filled, if I am feeling spiritually hungry even if I can’t quite put a name to what I am hungering for, if I am acutely aware of an ache in my soul, it may all be as much a sign that God is present as much as it is a sign that God is missing.
As so we gather on a Mothers’ Day Sunday, or an Ascension Sunday, or on any other Sunday, a little bit I think like the disciples in the story who stared off into the clouds as Jesus ascended. We stare not so much up into the clouds but into some holy beyond, sharing what we can of our earthly, human joys, and our heavenly ones too, and our ache for a God we may feel to be missing sometimes but who is real enough to miss. And, of course, there are other places to look for the spirit of God when we are feeling abandoned or empty. We don’t always need to raise our eyes to the clouds or to some beyond place. We may need only the strength it takes to raise our eyes just far enough to find the eyes of another. There we may find another soul who has also known the emptiness. There we will surely find a child of God, a soul who bears to us the image and heart of God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 8, 2005