"Chosen by Love"

Joshua J Sander
5/13/12
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Mother’s Day
“Chosen by Love”

Psalm 98
John 15:9-17

God is bigger than you. I hope you don’t find it shocking or insulting for me to say it, but it’s true. God is bigger than all of you and me put together. When it comes to figuring out who God is, we’re like blind people arguing over what an elephant is like. One of us has the trunk and exclaims that an elephant is like a snake. Another of us wraps their arms around a leg and says, “You’re wrong! An elephant is very much like a tree!” Yet a third lays their hands on the tail and says “You’re both wrong, and elephant is clearly like a broom!” Each is accurately describing their experience of an elephant, but none of them has the whole picture. And that’s what it is always going to be like when we try to talk about God.

Have you ever noticed that we tend to use the same words when we talk about God every week? Father, Lord, King, He, He, He… I mean, there are reasons for all of those words for God. Those words accurately describe many people’s experience of God. But it’s just one experience of something so much bigger than those words. And let’s face it, some of us have had difficult relationships with men. Some of us have had worse relationships with their fathers. I imagine that for those people, the idea of a Father God isn’t the best idea, you know?

Now, I’m not talking about Jesus at the moment—he really did have a Y-chromosome. But the God of Jesus’ ancestors? The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob? The God who made the heavens and the earth and brought the Israelites out of Egypt? The God that referred to God’s self simply as “I Am?” That God is so much bigger than any “he.”

On the other hand, we speak English. And in English there’s no neutral pronoun that we use to refer to people. We have he, she, and it. And “it” just doesn’t quite do it, does it now? So what will I do? Well. It seems to me that we ought to use as many different words for God as we can as we go along together. Yes, I will sometimes use the “traditional” male words—Father, or as Jesus said, “Daddy.” Sometimes Lord and King is the appropriate thing to say. Frequently I will simply use the word “God.” Sometimes I’m more specific, like when I referred to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or when I referred to the Creator God.

But… today is Mother’s Day. And while it’s not something you hear every day, I think that Mother is just as good a term for God as Father is. I’m sure that it works better for those of us who have had those difficult relationships with men, or with their fathers… So yeah… God the Mother. She’s bigger than you. She’s bigger than all of you and me put together. And trying to describe her is like a bunch of blind people trying to describe an elephant.

So, speaking of Mother’s Day, I’ve been doing a little historical digging. As near as I can tell, the first person to coin the term “Mother’s Day” was Julia Ward Howe. How many of you have heard of Julia Ward Howe? Well, Julia Ward was born in New York City in 1819 and married Samuel Gridley How—a physician and the founder of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts—in 1843.

Now on April 12th, 1861, Confederate forces attacked a U.S. military outpost at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, kicking off the American Civil War. Julia Ward Howe and her husband visited Washington, D. C. and met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in November 1861. It was after this meeting that she was inspired to write "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." If you turn in your hymnal to #416 you can find her name under the Words credit at the very bottom of the page. Those words were first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862 and it quickly became one of the most popular songs of the Union during the war.

Well, that was before Gettysburg and Shiloh and Vicksburg in 1863; before the battles of attrition between Grant and Lee as the Union fought its way to Richmond. Before Sherman captured Atlanta and made his famous way to the sea. That was, in other words, before untold hundreds of thousands of people died—more than in any other American war in history—more people dead than both World Wars put together… Well, I guess you could say that Julia Ward Howe changed her tune. In

1870 she wrote The Mother’s Day Proclamation. It was a call to all mothers—especially those who’d lost children in the war—to rise up against violence and war. I think that the strongest line from that proclamation is this: “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.”

Charity. Mercy. Patience. Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last… I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
Julia Ward Howe loved her children, so she had a basis for understanding how all the hundreds of thousands of grieving mothers of the dead from the war must feel. In solidarity and love for those mothers she invited them to stand up so that other mothers might not have to go through the same thing. You don’t have to be a pacifist to see her living out Jesus’ commandment as we celebrate Mother’s Day today.

By the way, Mother’s Day didn’t become a national holiday until Woodrow Wilson signed it into existence in 1914. The woman who campaigned for the second Sunday in May to be Mother’s Day was Anna Jarvis. Anna wanted to honor her own mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, who worked throughout what is now West Virginia to promote worker health and safety. During the American Civil War Ann organized women to tend to the needs of the wounded of both the Confederate and the Union soldiers. Charity. Mercy. Patience. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last…

You know, I think that today’s gospel lesson is both fantastic and difficult. It’s fantastic because in it you really can find the core of what it means to be a Christian community—God loves you, be good to each other—but it’s also difficult because it’s so, so easy to get completely derailed by all this “love” talk. It’s kind of like how if you say the same word over and over again it starts to sound really funny. And when that word is “love” it starts to sound like the almost marriage scene from The Princess Bride, “Love… Love is what brings us together today. And love… True love…”

But this scripture is not about the simplistic, rhyming, Hallmark Card version of love. This scripture is not about the happily ever after Hollywood version of love. And this scripture is not about the fleeting, romantic pop music version of love. No, this scripture is about the shepherd laying their life down for the sheep version of love. This scripture is about the love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you version of love. This scripture is about the transforming a world that hates you when all you want to do is hide version of love.

Just think about it—Jesus is saying to his disciples, look: you’re my friends. I trust you. And if you trust me, too, then do this one thing for me. Love one another. Love others the way God loves me and the way I’ve loved you. And Jesus is saying this to the disciples knowing full well that the people he’s asking them to love will turn him over to be tortured to death. In fact, the very next verses are, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you.”

The world hates you. But this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. And then, only a couple of generations after, the Christian community that the gospel writer, John, belonged to was facing all sorts of persecution and ostracism because of their faith. It must have been so tempting to interpret that commandment in ways that allowed them to turn inward—to judge the world as it moved on without them as beyond redemption—to simply hide on a mountaintop somewhere and pretend the rest of the world didn’t exist. But they didn’t. They saw that Jesus’ commandment was about loving and transforming the world.

It’s hard, I know, to go out and love the world. Kathryn Matthews Huey puts it this way:

...in our culture, with mobility, career pressure, distractions, and overloaded calendars, it's difficult even to make room for friendship. We don't stay long enough to get to know one another, let alone to care about one another. And yet this Gospel keeps talking about staying, about abiding, about making our home in God, in the Body of Christ.

You don’t have to be a parent, although it might give you some insight into what I’ve been talking about. You don’t have to be a pacifist, although I’m pretty convinced that what violence does best is create more violence. You don’t have to organize folk to take care of the needs of the wounded, although that is a good and true calling.

But I do want to leave us with a challenge and an example. The challenge is simple. When you go out from here into your day to day lives, always ask yourself if what you’re currently doing is done out of love and what kind of fruit it will bear. And when people thank you for what you’re doing, don’t be afraid tell them where you learned to love.  So in closing, here’s a good example:



I don't think I could say it any better than that.

Amen.