Mothers

 Good morning, friends. It’s good to be back in the pulpit. I’ve missed y’all.

And, naturally, the day I picked to be back from post-Easter vacation is this day that’s odd, wondrous, and challenging: Mother’s Day.

This can be a hard day to preach, because the word “mother” is an emotional one that carries so much weight for us, both good and bad.

For some of us, this day is simplistically joyous. You were raised by an exemplary mother, an angel walking among us. Maybe y’all are so close, like besties. Maybe you brought her with you to church today, and after the service, as long as I don’t drag this sermon out too long and make you miss your reservations, you’ll go out to lunch together. I’ll do my best.

Some of us are blessed beyond measure to be mothers, and our little darlings drive us up the wall like a chair lift sometimes, but that’s just life and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Some of us started this day with flowers, or breakfast in bed, and y’all I promise I didn’t just say that to arouse guilt in the folks in this room who didn’t think to do that stuff. Some of us are still in the “handmade cards” stage–I have a few real pretty ones on my fridge. And we give thanks for the tremendous gift of a family…right before we go back to scrubbing Hawaiian Punch out of the floor. I think y’all know I’m not much of a poetic-waxer. Motherhood is a beautiful mess, with equal shares of both.

But the beautiful mess of motherhood is also largely about timing, providence, the mystery of human biology, and then just plain dumb luck. I have beloveds that I know are grieving today because being a biological mother just wasn’t in the cards–they didn’t have a partner who wanted to parent with them when they were in that age range, or they struggled with infertility, or other health problems, or the work and responsibility of raising children was more than they could take on.

Some of us have bittersweet feelings today, about mothers, or aunts, or grandmothers, or other women caregivers who loved so hard while they were here, but have passed on. Some of us have harder memories of mothers who struggled, of mothers who left, of mothers who were abusive. And some of us don’t know how to wrap our heads around Mother’s Day because our relationships with our kids are strained, or because we lost a child. And then, of course, we live in a world that lifts up one image of a nuclear family with a mom and a dad and 2.5 kids and a house in the suburbs with a picket fence and a really cute dog but that, in reality, has many different kinds of families, and our family doesn’t fit the mold because we have adoptive moms and stepmoms and foster moms and surrogate moms and two moms or a single dad or two dads…if Hallmark doesn’t make a card for us, do our journeys matter? Please be assured, the answer is very much yes.

Psalm 23, by providence, and love, came up in the lectionary today, and it’s a beautiful story about what tender caregiving looks like, no matter who provides the care, and no matter who receives it.  Your caregiver helps you rest, like a baby scrunched up on mom’s shoulder. Your caregiver provides food and drink when you need them, and challenges you to slow down and grab a drink of water even when you would rather keep working. Your caregiver selflessly wants good, moral, and righteous things for you, and turns you around to get you facing the right direction every time you find the pointy table corners of life. Your caregiver makes you fearless. You can scamper off and go exploring because you’re safe. You can find the best, strongest, healthiest version of yourself because that safety gives you the room to do so. And when you get scared, your caregiver teaches you coping skills, and self regulation, and you get through it. And you do great things.

Naturally, God delights in being that perfect caregiver for all of us, no matter what. And if this is a harder day for you, and you’d rather not summon memories of a person today, then please go ahead and focus on the fluffy security blanket that is the Creator. 

But also–the Holy loves us too much to keep us all to the Divine self. Divine love doesn’t limit its expression to a closed circuit between you and God. Divine love always connects us with a whole community of people who understand love because of God and want to share it. 

We see a glimpse of the enormity of this love in our New Testament reading, from the book of Revelation. So much to be said about everything in Revelation, this portion is only a sliver of it. But, in this sliver, our protagonist and author, John, shares a vision of heaven, of what could be there. And in that vision, Jesus is there, on a throne, and he’s surrounded by bazillions of people in white robes. At first it looks like such a giant crowd of people that it would be impossible to make out even one face in that crowd. And John gets confused. So does the guy next to him, who turns to John and asks who all these people are. And John figures it out, and responds, you don’t need me to tell you, you already know. And the guy next to John realizes, oh, right. They’re all the people we ever knew in this life. In Revelation-level parlance, they’re “the ones who went through the great ordeal”, who now are washed in white because they’re cleansed of wrongdoing, and they’ll never feel hurt again. But in our own words, in our point of view, they’re all the people we ever knew.

If this day makes you feel adrift, or sad, or mad, or joyous, or nostalgic, or overwhelmed, or exhausted, or just plain busy because of all the small, plastic toys that await to be picked up, the missing link that makes it all feel at peace is Jesus. He holds all kinds of different people together. He puts us in the context of all kinds of people. He reminds us when we’re overwhelmed that we can ask for help, when we’re lonely that we’re not alone, when we’re grieving that people grieve with us, when we’re sad that people hold us. And because he pulls us all together, even if we don’t get to see that as literally as John did, then he gives us the best bit of Good News that I can leave you with today: whatever Mother’s Day makes you feel, it’s real, and your journey is worthy and beautiful, and you are very loved.

Amen.