“Mom’s Pride and Joy”

13 May 2012

The Rev. Bryn Smallwood-Garcia
Congregational Church of Brookfield (UCC)

Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 13, 2012

John 15:9-17

“Mom’s Pride and Joy”

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

As I think I told you last week, John 15 is one of my favorite chapters in the Bible.  My husband John read it at my ordination, but it was also the first text on which I preached in a church, outside of seminary.  The sermon was awful, when I looked at it later, but the title I especially liked.  The newspaper even took a picture of it, on the sign.  Remember the old ad campaign, “55 miles an hour; it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law”?  So my title was, “Love one another: it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.”  Here’s the thing: We like to think of Jesus as meek and mild, and so we forget he was firm on this point.  But back then I didn’t understand why yet, because I was not yet a mom.

Don’t we moms know the feeling when the kids get to fighting?  “Stop that!  Love one another right now or I’lll….”  It’s easy to understand God’s wrath once you become a parent, but fighting violence with threats of violence is kind of ridiculous.  So I developed a new form of punishment that only a “cruel and unusual” preacher-mom like me would dare inflict upon helpless children – I’d quote scripture at them!  My kids would start bickering and I’d quote something, usually the 133rd Psalm, “How beautiful and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in harmony!” If that didn’t work, which was most of the time, I’d have to lay hands on them, but not to pray.  [Pressing down on an imaginary head, squeezing the cheeks, then choking the neck like Homer Simpson.] “It is like precious oil upon the head, running down upon the chin, running down upon the collar!  [Drumming on the top of the imaginary head, first gently, then much harder.]  It is like the sparkling dew that falls upon the mountains of Zion!”

Meeting violence with violence has never been the optimal path to peace, as Peter finds out a couple chapters along the way in John 18, when he tries to protect Jesus from the soldiers who came to arrest him in the garden.  It’s a great Bible scene – Peter draws a sword and cuts off the right ear of the high priest’s slave, right?  But this is so wrong, on so many levels.  First of all, do we think he was aiming for an ear?  No.  I’m thinking the neck would be a better kill target.  And the high priest was the one who condemned Jesus, so do we really think he was aiming for that man’s slave?  No!  Poor slave just had the bad luck of standing next to the bad guy!  This is why law enforcement is best left to “officers of the peace” and not to civilian fishermen.  But I digress...

My point is, by the time they all got to Gethsemane that night, they had seen Jesus break the bread and wash their feet, and they had just heard a sermon all about love from Jesus that goes on for several chapters in John’s Gospel.  Don’t you just feel for Jesus here?  He’s going off to die on a Roman cross the very next day, and all through that night he has to hold on to his faith that God would do a great work of word and witness for the power of love through fools like these disciples – through fools like us!  How can we ever remember to “love one another” in the middle of a real conflict?

We know we don’t have to use a sword to attack someone – violence can come with a sharp word or a harsh glance – so the next time you are tempted to return evil for evil, remember these last words of Jesus, “This is my commandment that you love one another.”  And remember it is not a suggestion.  It is the “prime directive” of the Christian faith.  Today’s Psalm 98 in the call to worship gives thanks to God who is coming to judge the world with fairness. Well, that’s good news in a way.  “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” right?  God knows and sees all the wrong done against us and we can trust God to take care of it.  But on the other hand are these words, “We tremble in your presence, O Lord, for we know you are coming to judge the earth.”  No kidding, we should tremble, because who among us is perfectly kind and loving all the time? 

But the beef Jesus has with this world of sin is mostly with religious hypocrites who are so wrapped up in the details of all kinds of obscure laws of faith that they forget to show any love for the weak, for people who need help.   The world is full of self-appointed hall monitors for the rest of us – and they often come with very impressive religious credentials.  To that, God says, and here I’m quoting not scripture but a favorite billboard and refrigerator magnet: “Don’t make me come down there again!” ~ God.  Have you seen it?  Mom gets as frustrated with the prissy tattle-tales as with the bullies.

This is the frightening truth embedded in our Creation story: if God is mother and father of all humanity – as children of God, we must be an endless disappointment.  Let’s face it, we human beings don’t have the greatest track record for treating our brothers and sisters around with tolerance, much less love. This is why we need God, and a regular practice of worship – a strong faith takes some heavy lifting to develop.  It takes practice, and it has to be done in community. And if you think that’s easy, I have some people I’d like you to meet! 

Yesterday, at our CT Conference meeting in West Suffield, we had the privilege of getting to hear from the Rev. Lillian Daniel, who set the blogosphere on fire last fall with a now much forwarded on-line rant called “Why Spiritual but Not Religious is Not Enough.”  It’s still out there, if you want to read it, but it was originally published on UCC.org, just for us in our UCC churches. But it really touched a nerve with many people, especially progressive Christians and atheists, who saw it as just another sign of Christian intolerance for those who don’t believe exactly as we do.  But really, the point of her essay was her attempt to ignite our mostly tepid mainline denomination and get us to speak out about all that makes the church great – things that makes our weekly practice of faith something worth getting up early on a Sunday morning to do, instead of going out for brunch with friends, or taking a bike ride and enjoying the sunshine.  This was the line that I loved best:  “Any idiot can find God on a sunlit mountaintop; it’s a real miracle to find God together, with people in the pews who are just as annoying as we are.”

“Annoying” doesn’t begin to tell the real story, though, does it?  People are not just mean or annoying.  Sometimes they are cruel. Just pick up your morning paper or turn on the TV if you want to take a good long look at this world’s rubble piles of evil.

The “prayer for peace” at the top of your bulletin today is from Rev. Dale Clem, who was a youth ministry friend of my seminary friend Penny, who many of you heard preach here this past February.  But you don’t know the peace Dale was praying for.  In March 1994, his wife Kelly (a Methodist pastor in North Alabama) was leading Palm Sunday worship in a church much like ours, and their children’s choir was singing. Their 4-year-old daughter Hannah was up there doing her thing when the church was hit with a huge F4 tornado that brought the roof down.  It killed 20 people and injured 90, and Hannah was one of the children who died.  So it was a huge national news story.

But what hadn’t been covered by the media until that point was how relentlessly Kelly Clem had been bullied by the other clergy in her rural county ever since she started her ministry there among them.  They had been speaking out and calling down God’s wrath upon the entire United Methodist Church for the sin of ordaining a woman and allowing her to preach and lead a congregation. But when the media got wind of this conflict, it made for great TV.  Those other local pastors were eager to grab the microphone and (like Pat Robertson after 9/11) start proclaiming God’s justice raining down on Goshen, AL, like so much fire and brimstone.  And so the TV people gave Kelly equal time.  But as a mom I don’t know how she found it in herself to say anything.  But the miracle was, the Holy Spirit was with her, and she was never angry on camera.

When they asked her, “What do you think?  Was this God’s punishment, that even your own daughter died in this disaster?”  And she said, “No.  My little daughter died because a wall of bricks fell on her and her little body just wasn’t strong enough to keep breathing after that.”  But they wouldn’t let go, “You mean you didn’t see God’s hand in this at all?”  “Oh no, she said, “I saw God’s hand in this. I saw God’s hand in the bloody and broken hands of my fellow Christians who wouldn’t leave that church as long as there was a friend who needed help from under a pew.  I saw God’s hand in every hand that rang my doorbell this week and handed me a casserole for the rest of my family to eat.  I saw God’s hand in every word of every sympathy note that was written to me. “ And the Clem family ended up with something like 7 bags of mail from the outpouring of sympathy from people from all across the country – from all churches and all faiths. 

There’s a lot of heavy evil that I have to try to bench press off my heart when I live my own life, much less look at the news.  But the Good News is this:  Jesus offers to help us, to lift the burden of this world’s enormous pain and evil when it threatens to crush the life out of us.  Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.


 

 John 15:9-17

9As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. 11I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. 12“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

 

This page was last updated on 02/08/2014 09:04 AM.
Please send any feedback, updates, corrections, or new content to .