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| Mother's Love (Exodus 20:12) |
| Written by Pastor Fausel | |
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“Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother…” Ex. 20:12 Grace, mercy and peace be to you … I have to be honest with you. This is officially the 6th Sunday of Easter. You’ve heard the Scripture readings appointed for this day in the Church Year … and in my computer, there is about three-quarters of a sermon based on those readings that I decided not to preach on this occasion. It’s not a bad sermon. It’s about understanding God’s will for us, especially when it comes to expanding His kingdom. But … we’ll keep it for another occasion. The theme of that sermon is what led to the creation of what you are now hearing instead. And that’s this. The truth that our Christian life IS more about our being… than our doing. The problem we have is that so often when we think about our lives as Christians we think about them in terms of what we do. We go to Church. We read our Bibles. We participate in Bible Study and Worship. We do service projects of all sorts and varieties. In fact there are many who do not draw a paycheck here… who seem to live in this building. Honestly, it’s hard not to think about our Christian life in terms of action verbs. Doing activities. Caring for responsibilities. Participating in events. Even carrying out routines. And so … what we want to do today is to use something on all our hearts this morning as a way to get out of that “doing rut”… and think about something that’s not officially on the church’s liturgical calendar … that something called Mother’s Day. How many of us over the last couple of weeks have not gone card shopping? Cards today are wild. Some play songs when you open them. Some will even record your own voice singing a song or whatever. Then you have all those scripty-printed cards with birds and flowers and butterflies … all the way to those cards with cartoon art and tongue-in-cheek humor. Which, seems somewhat toned down cleaned up from the birthday cards … in honor of Mother’s Day. But here’s the thing to check out. Do this next year. It’s too late now, most of the cards have been sold. But check out what the cards say about Mom. How many of those cards talk about Mom’s… doing … and how many of those cards talk about Mom’s… being? You see, by definition … Mother’s Day is about someone BEING your mother. You don’t see many cards celebrating the fact that she went through 9 months of fun called pregnancy to have you. Not many cards which celebrate her for putting up with all your infancy issues, your terrible two’s … your potty training. You get the picture. Most cards… in spite of all the “Duties and Responsibilities” of Motherhood they often cite … do not hail Mom for all that she did, as much as they hold her up for who she is: Mom, Mother, Mommy … your choice. So. How does all this connect with our Christian life? One word. “Relationship.” Today, our nation has set aside this day to honor the Relationship we call Motherhood. And our point this morning is that the relationship we have with our mothers, and our mothers have with us, can help us better understand our relationship with God that we put under the umbrella of “The Christian Life.” And as we started out today … our relationship with God is more about who we are and Who HE is … than about what any of us have done for Him lately. Now, for some of us … our mothers have gone on to be with Our Lord. But that doesn’t mean we love them any less than we did when we last saw them here on earth. For others of us … our Mothers are still here, but they’ve done their jobs. So, you might say in some sense that they’ve retired. They taught us what we needed to know so that we could survive outside of the nest. And when they felt we were ready to do so … they graciously encouraged us to go it on our own. And now when we see them, we may see a smile of pride on their face as they see what we’ve become. For others of us, though … Mom still rules our roost. She beats the drum and marks the time. And as much as we may feel that she’s overbearing, there’s an unspoken quality of peace and security that comes from knowing in the back of our minds that she’s in charge. Now, how much of that had to do with you? Not much. What we learn from Mom is that she loves us no matter what we do … she loves us unconditionally. That even when our doing ends up making the worst messes … out of our room … or even out of our lives … what happens? She still loves us … because of WHOSE we are. Namely Hers. Never forget this: You are God’s gift to her. By His grace, you came into this world, thought her. By His grace … you share more of her than you know. And she knows that better than you do. The same way, God loves you unconditionally. By His grace, and through the instruments of usually your mother and father, He has given you the new birth of water and the Spirit through Holy Baptism. You are now His in a way similar to the way you are your mother’s. Only Better. Because of what God did in Jesus Christ … all your sins have been forgiven. Even the sins you try not to do, but keep on doing … have been forgiven … Wish that could always be said about Mom. Moms often get elevated to sainthood on this day, but Mom’s are human. Their children are human. And human relationships under the best of circumstances can only approximate that of the divine. And so there will be on this day outstanding, unforgiven hurts and grudges… spoken and unspoken hurts between children and their mothers … and mothers and their children. But back to what we said earlier. Under all that turmoil that may exist in a human relationship … the love bond will remain. Just as much as King David’s Son Absalom tried to wrest the kingdom away from his father, even taking him to war to do so … David fought, but he never stopped loving that rebellious son of his. And when Absalom was killed in battle, David was so grieved, that he wished he could have died in his son’s place. And that was the love of a father … for a son. Dare we compare that with a mother’s love? I love the little passage when Abraham objects to the possibility of his having a child in his old age … or Mary’s question of how she will bear the savior without a husband… and the answer is … “Is the arm of the Lord too short?” “Nothing is impossible with the Lord.” So it is with those unforgiven hurts and grudges that may be on our hearts this day. I don’t need to tell you … you know where to take them. The Holy Spirit has the power to mend wounds … no matter how old they are … or how deep. How? The same way we renew that relationship we have with God each Sunday. We acknowledge our part of the hurt. Jesus called that getting the log out of our own eye. That’s called confession. We lay our own sin, our part of the hurt, before the other person, and before God, and ask for forgiveness. This is where unconditional love really comes in. That kind of love, the Love which the Holy Spirit enables us to have … forgives … unconditionally. And then … forgiver becomes the confessor … confessing their part of the hurt, their own sin … and in turn … asking for forgiveness … Can one who has been forgiven unconditionally… not likewise do the same? And when that happens … forgiveness both ways … there is peace The hurt that may have festered for years is now excised and buried … never to be dug up again. And the Relationship is restored, there is a sense of purity about it. Now. Was that Doing? Or was that Being? Our argument would be that the Being made it all possible. Being in the Spirit. The doing? Well, who did it? You or the Spirit? We’ll let you be the judge. But it works. Even when a human relationship seems anything but loving. Sin is an ugly thing. And it can ugly-up even the most beautiful things on this earth … even things like you and me, made after the image of God. But the Cross that stands before us today shows us where the weight of human sin has gone. Onto the shoulders of the One who died on it to set us free. The one who Put His blessing on Motherhood and Fatherhood … and endowed all parents the representation of His being… in the family. His being … is love. His doing… is also love. Love that’s patient and kind … Love that also will be found in His rod and His staff. But it’s God’s love, and it never fails. That’s the real message for today … the 6th Sunday of Easter … Mother’s Day. The Love of a mother for her child and a child for his or her mother… reminds us of an even greater love … that’s ours … forever. Love you, Mom! In Him, Amen. |