Acts 1:1-12; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53
May 13, 2018
I think it’s a bit awkward preaching
Mother’s Day sermons because, very quickly, high praise for mothers can slip
into implicit and unintended contrasts with fathers. I have to tell you – and this is something of
an article of faith for me – I believe both men and women are capable of equal
depths of love, and I don’t believe it’s true that a mother is necessarily a
better parent than a father. But that
being said, we do often find truth in popular expressions; and when you’re
looking for a way to describe someone who loves with fierce loyalty and
protection, what do you call that person?
Is it “papa bear”? Nope, it’s “mama bear.” So, I’ll have to grant you that, generally
speaking, moms deserve that reputation of being the unswerving, undying
champions of their children. And if you
want to test that hypothesis, just insult a kid in her mother’s presence … but wait
until I’m out of the room.
Being a parent, and especially being a
mother – how does that change you? I
remember a moment of parental transition for Ann and me, one of those times
from which you can never quite go back.
Ann was in relatively early labor with Kathryn. And coming from the next delivery suite, we
heard screaming – not the mom but the newborn baby. The fact that we could hear that tiny
person’s voice so clearly through the wall made me wonder just how loud it must
have been inside their room. I looked at Ann and said something intended
to be romantic and reassuring about how we’d
have one of those little voices with us before too long. But the look on her face made me think she
was imagining the sleepless nights to come.
Like many of you, we soon found out out just how much our lives would
change with a baby and just how much
the experience of parenting would change us.
For parents, everyone’s path is different as we stumble blindly into the
unknown, but this much every parent learns: The practice of love is the
practice of sacrifice. And if you take
parenthood seriously, that sacrifice changes you. You don’t just make sacrifices for your
children. Your life becomes
sacrifice. Parenthood changes your
direction. Parenthood makes you live
outward.
So today, as we celebrate the love of
those who’ve been mothers to us, the liturgical calendar deals the preacher a
wild card among the flush of hearts.
Today, we’re also celebrating the feast of the Ascension, which was last
Thursday, 40 days after Easter.
Ascension reminds us of what we would politely call a mystery but what
people in other faith traditions would call a scandal: We claim that the God
who became human in Jesus of Nazareth also returned, as the human Jesus, back
into the divine relationship of the Trinity.
Having returned into the fullness of heavenly glory, God the Son now rules
all creation, what we call heaven and
what we call earth, awaiting the day when Jesus returns at last, and heaven and
earth are reunited into God’s new creation.
Like I said, this claim is pretty scandalous, compared with other
religions: We don’t say that a spiritual God inhabited a human body and left it
behind. We say that the God we call
Trinity, who exists as relationship, came to dwell as a human and took that
humanity back into divinity.
And though it may sound radical – even
crazy – to say it, I believe that action changed God, in the same way learning
changes us. God chose to embrace the
love of sacrifice – taking on a lesser form, living as an inferior being,
experiencing our brokenness, and dying our death, all in order to heal that
brokenness, and overcome sin and death, and bring the experience of being human
into God’s own life. That crazy choice
to shed divine perfection helped God know even better the creatures God created
and redeemed and still sustains.
And in the meantime, as we await Jesus’
return, God’s love for us humans only grows.
Why? Because the Trinity itself
now knows what it’s really like to be a person.
It’s like being a parent, in a sense.
If you’re a parent, it’s one thing to be aware that you love your child
as you watch him playing at a distance, across the room. It’s something else to get down on the floor
and wrestle with him. And it’s something
even more to hold him close when he cries.
And it’s something even more
to give up things that you want, to give parts of your life away, so you can give
your child loving presence he wouldn’t have had otherwise. That’s life that becomes a sacrifice. That’s parenthood – life lived outward.
There’s a theological catch phrase that
might help make sense of this. Centuries
ago, Gregory of Nazianzus was writing about the Incarnation, the doctrine that Christ
brought the fullness of humanity and divinity into one. Gregory wrote, “What is not assumed is not
healed.” What that means is that any
part of human experience Jesus didn’t
take on, by definition, wasn’t redeemed – so he must have taken it all on in
order to heal us completely. Well, by
the same token, I think it’s true that what is
assumed – what is taken on – also changes
the one who enters into someone else’s experience. Sacrifice molds the heart and grows its
capacity for love – even God’s heart.
Mothering is like that, I think. We enter into the experience of another who has
literally nothing to offer in return.
There is no payoff for the exhausted mom who gets up to nurse a
screaming baby in the middle of the night.
We can romanticize it all we want, but at 3 a.m., it just stinks. It’s just sacrifice. So is cleaning up the bed after another bout
of stomach flu. So is holding the little
boy who’s crying because the kids at school pick on him. So is holding the daughter who’s crying
because her boyfriend treats her like dirt.
So is lying in bed and crying to yourself because you fear the grown
kid’s depression will get the better of him.
It’s all sacrifice – and that is love, in the flesh.
That sacrifice changes us forever, growing
the capacity of our hearts. If you’ve
mothered someone, you probably get that.
But what we may forget, and what the Ascension might help us remember,
is that God experienced something similar – and that God’s love is even deeper,
even fuller, even more all-encompassing because of that human experience. Oddly enough, this combination of Ascension
and Mother’s Day is not just a time to remember that Jesus rules in heavenly glory,
nor just a time to remember your mother’s love.
It’s a time to remember something fundamental about yourself – your first and foremost identity,
regardless of whatever you may have become.
And here it is: You are God’s beloved child.
Now, you may have heard people say that so
often that it’s lost its meaning. Or
maybe you hear it only as a metaphor, a poetic turn of phrase. But I want to push on this just a little
bit. I want you to try on the idea that
this isn’t just a nice sentiment but
an objective reality – in fact, that it’s the
fundamental reality of your life, the starting point for everything else that
matters. You are God’s beloved
child. You matter as much to the creator
of the universe as a baby matters to the mother who brought it into the
world. And that’s true not despite the sacrifice God made for us,
becoming human and dying on the Cross, but because of it – because the creator of the world experienced the brokenness of life
as we live it, letting that direct experience of humanity grow God’s
heart.
There may be times when you fear that no
one understands you. There may be times
when you fear that you have no one to help carry your burdens. There may be times when you fear that, at the
end of the day, you’re on your own. I
think that’s our deepest fear. And you
know what? That’s precisely why God came to experience life as we
know it: So that what we have been through, God has been through. Every time you hurt, every time you grieve,
the sovereign Lord who shared your life also hurts and grieves. Just as a mother feels her child’s pain, so
does God. Just as a mother’s heart grows
watching her child’s suffering steps, so does God’s. So, the promise of the Ascension is this: Like
the best mother you could ever imagine, God will never forget you. And you need never walk alone.
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