Spiritual truths of Mothers' Day

• Acts 16:16-34
• Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21
• John 17:20-26
• Psalm 97

There’s a calendar on the wall in the parish office that is illustrated with cartoons that make light of the vagaries of congregational life.   And the cartoon for this month has two panels side by side.  The first has a caption over it that says “Preaching on Mothers’ Day 2016…” and it shows a priest in his alb after the service, and a woman in a red coat with matching hat and a pearl necklace sticking a finger in his face and saying “How dare you fail to preach about Mothers’ Day!  How could you be so heartless!”  The caption on the second panel says “A year later…” and it shows a balding gentleman in a suit with a red bowtie and glasses shaking his finger in the priest’s face and saying “What were you thinking, preaching about Mothers’ Day?  Since when does Hallmark guide the lectionary?”

I’m feeling lucky because I see the opportunity today to talk about both Mothers’ Day and the lectionary.  Because, while Mother’s Day does have that aspect of being just another holiday for the advertising industry to sell flowers, and greeting cards, and chocolates, there’s also a deep religious meaning to the love and devotion we have for our mothers, and if this day gets us thinking about that a little bit, it’s a good thing.   Whether they are living or dead, whether the relationship we have with them is harmonious and loving, or not so much, to honor our mothers is to show respect for our most precious and irreplaceable gift, the one without which no other good can come to us—the gift of life.

The fact that our mothers bore us in their wombs, and gave birth to us in pain and travail, and nursed us and cared for us when we were too small and weak to care for ourselves, reminds us that we do not make ourselves on our own.  And this is true even when we no longer feel that we need our mothers.  No matter how strong and successful and accomplished we become, our lives continually depend on the generosity of other beings, and on the whole nurturing matrix of the universe.  This spiritual truth is recognized by cultures around the world who speak of the Earth, and even of God, as our mother.  And the fact that Mothers’ Day is also observed in countries all over the world might lead us to see that, though we have our billions of separate mothers, we are all children, and all have a mother, and in a sense all our mothers are one.

  

This week on the way to work one morning I was listening to the car radio and I heard part of an interview with a man named Guy McPherson, a professor emeritus from the University of Arizona.  The conversation was about climate change, and Dr. McPherson claimed to have a unique perspective on the problem because he studies it, not as a chemist or physicist or geologist or astronomer, but as a conservation biologist.  That is to say, he looks at it from the point of view of species and their habitat, what ensures their survival, and threatens it, and what causes them to go extinct.  And what Dr. McPherson states in a matter-of-fact way is that it is already too late for us.  The threshold has already been crossed, and the self-reinforcing feedback loops already set in motion, for a runaway climate-change scenario that is already taking human lives.  And it is picking up speed, like a snowball rolling downhill, so that a few years from now, the multiple impacts of rapidly rising global temperatures will cause the human race to be extinct.

As a student of the Bible and the teachings of Jesus I have to say that Guy McPherson may be correct, at least in this limited sense—it is too late for a way of thinking that believes that life must be torn, bleeding, from the body of the earth, that it must be clear cut and strip mined and drenched in poison, and taken under armed guard and hoarded in secret off-shore vaults.  It is too late for human cunning to engineer a way out of catastrophe, just as it has always been.   And it is too late for the belief that the disaster will fall only on others, people who don’t deserve any better, while wealth and privilege entitle some to continue undisturbed to pursue our happiness.  There is no gated community secure enough, or border wall high enough, to preserve some small minority in ease and comfort, while billions perish in misery.

But I also have to say that I believe it’s not too late for life to be received as a gift, in the knowledge that all life is one.  As Christians we are in a good position to be voices for hope, because these spiritual truths of Mothers’ Day are our truths.  The biblical tradition as a whole is very much concerned with the ultimate fate of the earth, and it doesn’t pull punches about the dire consequences for all life of human greed, hubris, and violence.   Yet for all that, it keeps coming back to the deep wisdom and benevolent purpose of God in creating the world in the first place, and giving us our unique place in it.  Jesus stands squarely in this tradition of warning and hope, and the good news about him speaks directly to it.  It tells us of his confrontation with the forces that corrupt human nature, and how by making peace he disarmed them.  In Christ God has shown the way of maternal love that leads to victory for the human race and through us for the whole creation.   

The Revelation to John is a vision of that ultimate victory, so it is strange that so many people, even some Christians, believe it is a vision of the destruction of the world.  Of course, the book does contain a lot of imagery of death on a horrifying scale.  That’s because it was written out of the experience of murderous persecution, and the seer of Revelation saw the violence inflicted by the Empire on the church as a symptom of a larger culture subservience to death, that was sowing a harvest of destruction.   But his vision doesn’t end with the destruction of the earth but with its renewal, with the city of God descending upon it like a bride adorned for her husband, and the tree of life, with its healing leaves and its many kinds of fruit, growing in the city beside the river of life that flows from the throne of God and the lamb and waters the world.  And the invitation goes out, “Come!”  And all who hear say “Come!” “And let everyone who is thirsty come.  Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”

So to Guy McPherson our answer is that call, the call to come and drink the water of life that is given to all.  Even if it is too late for us to save ourselves, maybe there’s still time to heed that call.  It may be that Mother Earth has deep springs of resilience and regeneration that our best science doesn’t know about.   Maybe she has learned a thing or two in 4-and-a-half billion years than can help us now, if we turn our human powers from domination and violence to communion and cooperation with life.  And perhaps that wisdom is already in us, as an instinct more powerful than that of flight or fight—a deep capacity for maternal love, for tender care and self-sacrificing protectiveness in service to life not our own. 

This capacity was manifested for us in Jesus, who gave birth on the cross to a new humanity.  The Gospel of John tells how, on the night before he died, he commanded his disciples to love as he loved.  And on the same night he prayed for them, and for all who would come to believe in him through their word, asking the one he called Father to make them all one.  Jesus prayed that this unity will itself be a testimony to the whole world about the purpose for which he was sent, to bring to the earth the gifts he received from his Father.   It is our faith that he, who ascended and abides in the Father’s glory, still prays this prayer.  And this is our further cause for hope, in the face of climate change and nuclear arms and all the other threats of self-destructive human folly—that Christ still calls us to receive the gift of the Father’s glory, the glory that is synonymous with love.  From his divine human heart, broken with sorrowing compassion for us, the joy, health, and peace of victory over death stream continually to earth, watering the seeds of new creation.     

  

Don't give up yet

• Exodus 3:1-15
• 1 Corinthians 10:1-13
• Luke 13:1-9
• Psalm 63:1-8

On Tuesday, February 16 the small Pacific island nation of Fiji became the first country in the world to ratify the United Nations climate deal agreed on last December in Paris.  Four days later, Tropical Cyclone Winston, making landfall with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, slammed into Fiji, leaving tens of thousands homeless and 44 dead, by last count.   It was the strongest storm ever recorded in the southern hemisphere, and on Thursday Joanne Woodland, one of our parishioners who is vacationing in Hawaii, sent me a cell phone video of the massive ocean swell kicked up by the cyclone, pounding the north shore of Oahu.  That swell will get here later in the week, with waves up to thirty feet high forecast to hit the Sonoma Coast on Thursday night.

Unless we have relatives in Fiji, like the folks in the Fijian congregation that meets every Sunday at the Methodist Church over on the next corner do, we might imagine that big waves are the only impact that Cyclone Winston will have in California.  But maybe we feel differently about the eight people shot in Kalamazoo, Michigan on the same day that Winston tore through Fiji.  After all, that incident was in our own country, in a town like this one.  The victims were like us, a young woman watching children play outside the townhome where she lived, a father and son shopping for a car, a teen-aged girl and her grandma, and three other older ladies leaving dinner at the Cracker Barrel restaurant, when a stranger opened fire.

Whatever the case, I think we have a natural tendency to create a mental distance between ourselves and the victims we read about in the news.  It would be hard for us to live if we went around all day waiting for the bullets to start flying, or the wind to knock our houses down.  It is when people are forced to endure conditions like these that they become refugees, and leave behind everything they know and everything they own, to try to find a place to live a semblance of a normal life.  We human beings need to believe that on balance life is good, and the odds are in our favor of living in relative safety and health to a ripe old age. 

So when we hear about terrible events that call these odds into question, we look for explanations, so we can feel like they have causes we can understand, and maybe even control.  Cyclone Winston was so devastating, we say, because climate change is heating up the oceans, creating more powerful storms.  Or Uber drivers in Michigan go on shooting rampages because they are mentally ill, and gun laws are too lax, and media coverage of all these mass shooters is spawning copycats.  In the days before we had sophisticated scientific, historical, and psychological theories of causation, we explained such things in theological terms.  In today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus responds to the news of terrible recent events in Jerusalem.  And he asks his listeners if they really believe the popular explanation that the victims of these disasters were being punished by God for their sins. 

What Jesus seems to be saying here is that the distance our explanations create between us and the victims we hear about in the news obscures the truth that they are no different from us.  We may need that distance to insulate us from the fact that our lives are a gift that can be taken away, any day, any moment.  But the disasters that happen to others, says Jesus, are not only an opportunity to give thanks that we have been spared for another day, but to recognize our common predicament.  It’s a chance to really come to terms with how little control we have over what happens in the world, and how little power to keep ourselves safe from harm.  Not so that we will sink into helplessness and fear, but so that we will turn to our only secure refuge, which is the goodness, and forgiveness, and eternal loving-kindness of God.    

To underscore this message, the Gospel of Luke links this saying about disasters in the news with a story about a fig tree that doesn’t bear fruit.  It’s a story that shows up in a slightly different way in Matthew and Mark.  Mark’s version is likely the original, and it begins at Mark 11, verse 12, which, in case you want to look it up.  It comes right after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem that we’ll remember in a few weeks on Palm Sunday, at the conclusion of which Jesus goes into the temple and looks around a bit, before returning to his base in Bethany.  On the way back into the city the next day, he’s hungry and looks for fruit on a fig tree.  Finding none, he curses the tree, and says “may no one ever find fruit on you again.”  Jesus then goes to the temple, where he stages a protest, turning over the tables of the money changers, and shouting that they have turned the house of prayer into a robber’s den—you know the story.  The next day he and his disciples pass by the fig tree again, and find it withered to the roots.

By bracketing the story of the so-called cleansing of the temple with the parable of the fig tree, Mark makes a connection between Jesus’ physical hunger for figs and his hunger for God’s righteousness, which is the only hope for his people.  Jesus goes to Jerusalem, not in a bid for political power, but because he is on fire with a prophetic desire.  He longs for the people of Jerusalem, and especially the elite in the temple, to repent--to turn from their cynical, self-satisfied, self-interested ways and return to the ways of God.  But on coming there, Jesus finds no fruit to satisfy this hunger.  There is nothing to work with here, no openness to his message or willingness to act on it.  And this can only mean one thing for Jerusalem—inevitable destruction.

We can go further in understanding the story of the fig tree, if we consider the historical circumstances in which the gospels were written.  The author of Mark was likely writing just about the time of the doomed Jewish revolt against Rome in the year 66.  It was a period of extreme religious and psychological distress for all Jews (and the author of Mark was almost certainly a Jew), as Jerusalem became the focal point, first, of armed insurrection, then of savage civil war, and finally of a brutal Roman campaign of re-conquest.  So it’s not too surprising that the author of Mark wrote in an apocalyptic mood.  He sees Jerusalem’s inevitable fall, and connects it with the things that Jesus said thirty years before: his condemnation of the hypocrisy and corruption of the temple, and his warnings about the final judgment of the world.

But the author of Luke has a different perspective.  For one thing he or she is probably writing a full generation later.  For Luke the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans is a done deal, a past event as distant as the fall of Saigon or the Berlin Wall is for us.  And Luke is interested in what happens next.  For Luke, the death and resurrection of Jesus is not the last faint glimmer of light piercing the darkness at the end of history.  It is the light of dawn, at the beginning of an amazing new story that is already under way.  And Jerusalem’s part in that story does not end with Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.  The city and the temple will stand for another thirty years, and in that time it will be the birthplace of a new community, even a new humanity.  The power of the Holy Spirit will come upon the pioneers of this community in Jerusalem, and from there they will spread news of forgiveness and reconciliation in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus, to Ethiopia and Syria, to Libya, and Asia, and Macedonia, even to Athens and Rome.

So Luke reworks the story of the fig tree, to say that God is not ready to give up on the world just yet, so let’s not give up on each other.  It’s as timely a message now as it ever was, in these days when people seem so ready to harden their hearts against the most desperate and vulnerable people in the world, so ready to blame them for the disaster that has fallen upon them.  When the church is true to Jesus, we are like the gardener he spoke about in Luke’s story of the fig tree, like the gardener he was.  He tells us to roll up our sleeves and go to work.   He tells us not to be afraid to dig around, to loosen the hardened of sin and injustice, and the tangled roots of deceit and delusion and denial.  He tells to be unashamed to scatter the manure of kindness and encouragement, compassion, and helpfulness, and prayer.  He tells us to be patient and watchful and not to lose faith in the power of God, because the old tree in the garden might still bear fruit.