Two Mothers

Sixth Sunday of Easter (Mother’s Day)

I John 5:1-6

I’ve told you before that I’m no fan of birth scenes in movies or on TV.  I was present in the delivery room for the birth of my three children, and so I’ve reached capacity on the number of births I want to witness.  Some of you are accustomed to birth.  My wife can sit comfortably through a stressful birth scene on television as if it’s an entertaining car chase.  But I can’t.  Some of you run cows and calves.  Tracy’s husband delivers babies for a living.  If you’re a mother, you might remember giving birth to your children.  But none of us remembers being born ourselves.  That’s something that happens to you.  And then others tell you about it.

Lucky for me, our reading from I John dovetails nicely with Mother’s Day.  It’s a reading about being born, about having a mother.  While some of us are mothers, all of us have mothers.  You can’t get here unless you get here that way.  None of us emerged from a beaker in a science lab or got constructed by an engineer from parts.  We were knit together in the wombs of our mothers.  From her, you came squealing and purple and covered in white mucus. 

Though babies are born all the time, having a mother is no small thing.  It is full of mystery.  There in that tiny fertilized egg is the genetic map that will shape your life in the deepest way – the size of your nose, the hue of your skin, the color of your eyes, the bent of your mind and personality, and the texture of your hair.  The embryonic process itself is breathtaking.  Scientists just this week found a way to film the way an early embryonic cell inverts itself - like a basketball turning itself inside out.  From the very beginning there is an intense and interesting tension between what’s inner and what’s outer.

Your life planted itself in your mother’s womb, quietly attaching itself to her life.  And through the umbilical cord your budding life was sustained by the life of your mother.  You were so much a part of her that even the birth process did not fully sever your body from hers.  That does not happen until the umbilical cord that links your bodies together has been cut. 

And is it not wonderful beyond comprehension that we breathe like tadpoles in our mother’s wombs – receiving oxygen through fluid in our lungs?  Is it not a miracle that from one cell that divides we become host to all different manner of stem cells taking on certain roles in differing parts of the body, according to a genetic road map which is the combined genes of both parents?  The wonder is not that there are occasionally genetic glitches that endanger life, but rather that the whole thing ever comes off as a success, so that we pop out and scream and breathe and poop and eat like we’re supposed to.

Birth is a watery thing.  From conception, we grow and develop in fluid.  And when the mother’s water breaks, the birth is near.  It’s as if the birth itself is a kind of baptism – with each of us washed out into life in a rush of water. 

And then there is the danger of it all.  This process isn’t mechanical.  It’s delicately fleshy, vulnerable to accidents, genetic glitches, and chemical imbalances.  Through the pregnancy there is the very real possibility of a miscarriage.  And some of you have experienced that grief.  Or of a still birth.  Or of problems so complicated the young child cannot survive.  And there are a host of dangers to the mother’s health as well.  To be born at all, to come into the world intact, and to be given a chance to grow and develop, with a mother to boot, this is sheer grace and should knock the wind out of us that it happened at all.

Just having a mother who gave you birth marks you in deep and profound ways.  Our mothers aren’t perfect.  They do the best they know how.  They get us through life or, in the case of adoption, get us in the hands of someone who can.  This is no small feat, what our mothers do.  They rearrange their lives so they can tend to us night and day, cuddling, holding, singing, feeding, changing.  And they are expected to love us from utter vulnerability through exasperating adolescence into the strength of adulthood, releasing us out into the world to make it on our own.  If you and your mother didn’t walk this path in a way that was perfectly peaceful and gracious, are you surprised?  How would we?

Mother’s Day serves a kind of sentimental role in our culture.  Mother’s Day is a reminder to tend to our mothers if we still have them.  But if we listen to where this reading might take us, Mother’s Day can help us to arrive at a fuller vision of who we are.  To remember that you have a mother is not simply a reminder to buy a card.  It’s a reminder that your life began in utter need and dependence upon another’s love.  You arrived here neither fully-formed nor self-sufficient.  You are only here because you have been loved and cared for.  You are only here because you’ve been fed and held and taught.

But if you believe that Jesus is God’s Son and have been included in God’s new family, you have been born in another way as well.  God is your mother too.  We all have two mothers.  That’s the most basic way to hear our reading today.  We have experienced two kinds of birth from two kinds of mothers.  And for God, too, there was great pain in making it possible to give you life.  It is not altogether clear how we should hear the claim of verse 6 that Jesus “came by water and blood.”  But we might hear in it an allusion to the crucifixion scene in John’s gospel.  There Jesus’ body is pierced by a sword, and out flows blood and water.  In that way, Jesus’ death for us is being imagined as a mother’s messy and painful birth.

When we stay in touch with our beginnings in birth, it keeps us modest.  We remember that we didn’t spring into the world capable of caring for ourselves.  Rather, we began our lives in great need, and grew into the ability to care for ourselves only very slowly.  It’s impossible to brag or boast about your birth.  Because you didn’t do anything.  It happened to you.  When your mother described what it was like to give you birth, you don’t say, “Yeah, I think I did a pretty wonderful job of getting myself into position, pointing my head down the canal and then crawling out on my own.”  No.  You say, “Wow.”  And “thank you.”  Because when it was happening, you weren’t even aware of it.

But the main point of the reading is not humility.  It’s love.  If we love God, we are to love God’s child, Jesus the Son of God.  And if we love God, we are to love all of God’s children, born alongside us.  We are to imagine other people as those birthed from God as we are - developing, dependent, growing, and provided for by God. 

You cannot love God without loving God’s children.  God is a parent, and you cannot love the parent without loving the parent’s family.  If you’ve been born of God, you’re growing up in a household with rules.  And there is one rule or commandment more important than anything else: love your brothers and sisters.

Now this is an odd kind of command.  It’s the command of a gracious and attentive parent.  It’s the command of a parent who has gone to great lengths to love and care for us in ways that were enormously costly.  And so it is the command not of a dictator who needs something from us.  It is the command of a parent who has dreams for us and for our welfare and blessing.  So these commands are not “burdensome.”  They do not diminish us or waste our time.  They come to us from the outside as that which meets and calls to the best possibilities within us.  It is an invitation to learn your own name, and to grow into the fullest possible expression of who you are as God’s beloved child.

Part of growing in our faith and deepening our baptisms is learning to experience God’s commands as a new kind of freedom.  That’s what the Bible calls “obedience.”  And if we recoil at the mention of obedience, it’s because we’re imagining that God’s commands and rules are burdensome.  But consider for a moment the law of gravity.  Gravity is a law.  It’s inescapable.  It defines your life every second of every day.  It constrains what you can do and what you can be.  There is no escape.  Because you live in a world of gravity, you cannot fly like a bird by flapping your arms.  You weigh too much.  And at the end of your life your knees and back will be sore from carrying you all those years. 

But we don’t complain about how gravity is burdensome, because we have come to accept gravity as the open and generous field in which we live out our lives in freedom.  Gravity is a law that leaves us free to move in all the ways that are meaningful.  It opens up a space for us to be ourselves.  So too with God’s commandment to love others. 

Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila begins with a young girl, maybe 4 or 5, huddled and shivering on a porch at night.  She has nothing with which to cover herself.  And because she cried, or maybe mentioned she was hungry, the adults put her on the porch on a cold night.  So from the very beginning of the story we are invited to reflect on the role of parents, of care-givers, of mothers. 

A woman named Doll finds the abused and malnourished girl on the porch.  She steals her and carries her away in hopes of saving her life.  And that begins in the simplest of ways.  She bundles her in her scarf and carries her to safety.  She feeds her little bits of fried porridge until she can learn to eat.  And she uses her hands and body to provide warmth and affection for a child who has never experienced it before.  And it takes years of this kind of surrogate mothering for young Lila to come to trust Doll as a caregiver who is on her side.

The abusive and neglectful adults in that story remind us that the world can be a harsh and unloving place.  But Doll confronts that misery with a mother’s affection.  And in that way, she wins a great victory.  Her love proves stronger than the indifference of others.

Just so, our faith in Jesus Christ is the victory that overcomes the world.  To be born of God is to be birthed into a family where we’re learning to love and care for one another.  When we love others, something beautiful and wonderful is happening – to them, to us, and in between us.  When we choose costly ways of being with others for their own good, we foster an energy that vibrates with goodness.  We overcome selfishness, greed, indifference, hatred, lying, jealousy, and all that harms us.

Our hope is that God’s decisive project begun in Jesus Christ already means victory.  A victory that gives us confidence, freedom from fear, energy for the work ahead, and the capacity to love others.