Sermon: Honouring the Mother-Wisdom of God's World
Never
under-estimate the power of mothers.
Can we say that
together? Never under-estimate the power of
mothers. We’ll return to that line a few times – it’ll be our Mothers’
Day mantra.
One of the shows I
still like watching is “Everybody Loves Raymond.” If you know the show, you know it really is
“all about Raymond,” isn’t it? Everything
and everyone in his life has to circle around his fragile ego. But why is that? Isn’t it because of Marie – his and Robert’s
mother Isn’t is she who really shapes
and defines the family’s life – and all the characters in it – including the
outsiders and newcomers who happen to marry into it – who marry into Marie’s
world?
Never
under-estimate the power of mothers.
On Friday the GO
Section of The Spectator had a two-page cover story titled, “Mothers’ Day
Wisdom: Successful kids share Mom’s most unforgettable advice.” And which of us does not have something like
that in our own hearts and minds -- some words, some direction, some constant
admonition from our mother that has helped shape our life and determine our
character, the way we see ourselves or the way we see the world?
Never
under-estimate the power of mothers.
Last week we saw
the Case for Kids video that features the self-told life-story of Navi, a
19-year-old young man who grew up in poverty in central Hamilton. In it he talks about Wesley’s children and
youth programs being the things that helped him grow up from the time he was a
toddler until now when he is in university.
But behind all that he says was his mother – who protected him and his
siblings from abuse, who took them away from households of gambling and
addiction, who kept them safe and put them into good environments as much as
she could. He calls her “his rock” and
it’s clear that he and his siblings know who they owe their life to. He knows very well …
Never
under-estimate the power of mothers.
And even when we
lament situations that are not so good – where mothers are too troubled to
provide the kind of care their children need, where mothers are absent or
abusive, what we feel – both the longing for surrogate mothers and
mother-figures, and sorrow or anger at the failure to mother – only reinforces
what we know deep down in our hearts, to …
Never
under-estimate the power of mothers.
The power of
mother, and the longing for mother is part of our biology. How can it not be, given the way we come to
life and into the world? But it’s even
more than that.
Our faith as well
as our experience tells us it’s hard-wired into the nature of the world, of
Earth, of the cosmos itself – that in addition to whatever other power there
may be that makes things go, and sometimes go apart and into chaos and out of
control beyond reasonable and helpful limits, there is also a power that at its
best – not always, but at its best, holds things together in good order, longs
for well-being for all, and understands the need for mutual respect,
compromise, and co-operation towards a harmonious way of being. Proverbs talks about it as the Wisdom of God,
and God’s Wisdom is described in feminine terms – as a Woman who calls to us from
the marketplace of the world to follow her sensible, life-giving ways, and who
says that she and her ways are what make the world go best.
Over the past few
weeks in the midst of the 100th and the 70th anniversary
memorials to different aspects of World Wars One and Two, there have been a few
programs looking back not just at the soldiers and the sacrifices they made,
but at the attempts of some women in those days to engage in some serious
peace-making. In May 1915, for instance,
1000 mothers gathered in The Hague, Netherlands to try to come up with ways to
stop the war, and to demand an end to the war that was taking the lives of so
many of their husbands and sons, and the husbands and sons of so many other
women on both sides of every border. They
did it not because they were necessarily pacifists, or anything else that might
be given an ideological label. They did
it because they were mothers, and they let motherly care for their own children
as well as the children of others become their politics.
Never
under-estimate the power of mothers.
In one of the
programs, I also heard of an American mother who in the midst of the Cuban
Missile Crisis, demanded to see and speak to President Kennedy to urge him to
stand down from his threat to begin nuclear war, because she feared for the
lives of all the world’s children. When
asked why she of all people should be allowed such an audience, her answer was
simple: “Because I’m a mother. Precisely
because I am a mother, I have a right to speak to the President.”
Never
under-estimate the power of mothers.
Since then, I’ve
heard about Mothers for Nuclear Disarmament, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the
mothers of the disappeared in Central and South America, the Catholic and
Protestant mothers in Northern Ireland who learned to stand united for peace,
Israeli and Palestinian mothers who for years have been meeting together in
small home-groups in the Middle East to learn about mediation and about one
another, mothers who volunteer to monitor schoolyards and lunchrooms in schools
where bullying is common, mothers who formed the Women’s Institute and
petitioned different governments for all sorts of things for the health and
well-being of all children in the community, mothers of young black men
unjustly who die in the custody of police in American inner cities who make
sure their sons do not die in vain. It
makes me wonder if anyone in our country ever listened to the voices of First
Nations’ mothers as their children were taken from them to residential
schools. Or what may happen when we
learn to really hear the voices of women like Navi’s mother in our own inner
cities. Or even, as happened a
generation ago here with the MOMS group, to the varied and often unheeded
voices of mothers right around us here in our own community?
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