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.
