Happy Mother's day

Happy Mother’s day

As a pastor, a relatively minor irritant with the continued secularization of the world is the way in which the majority of people, including the majority of Christians, continue to mark the passage of time with secular dates and occasions.  Now, this wouldn’t be a problem normally – heck, go ahead and celebrate arbor day as much as you’d like.  It’s very difficult to argue with the simple sentiment of ‘go plant a tree.’  But something that is a minor irritant is the presence of a secular celebration along the lines of mother’s day, even though the readings in our lectionary don’t have much to do with mother’s day.

Now, as I say, the average person expects some mention of Mother’s day on Sunday, as well they might.  This is how we mark time now, these are the seasons, but unfortunately, as with all secular celebrations, mother’s day comes with some baggage attached to it.  And these days, mother’s day has more baggage than it ever has.  Consider this image, if you will.

This image is something that I have seen circulated an awful lot, or images like it.  Images that speak to the difficulties in mother’s day, because, like it or not, mother’s day isn’t easy for an awful lot of people.  It’s not easy because of the immense pressure that exists within the framework of mothers’ day.  For Mother’s day has risen to a fever pitch, as all celebrations do which revolve around the perfection of any human class of people.  When mother’s day hits, I’m sure it’s nice and easy for all those people who have perfect mothers, and who have perfect relationships with those mothers, but for those who do not, things are significantly more complicated.  The commentary that I hear are from people who don’t have a perfect life with their mothers or with their children; they may not have access to them, they may have died, they may not get along, they may not be able to have children, any of these can and have come up, and normally, these things are perfectly easy to deal with from a Christian perspective – we live in a fallen world in which thing frequently don’t work out. But the trouble is, when you are running the secular next to the sacred, and the secular takes over, all of a sudden, the fallen world conversation fades into the background behind the immense pressure of the perfection of mother’s day.  And on mother’s day, you are impelled by and immense cultural narrative to say that you have a perfect relationship with your mother, or with your children, and that your mother is the best ever.

Well, I’m here to take the pressure off of you, to let you know that you don’t have to pretend.  And by me, I mean St. Paul.

I am so glad that we had the reading that we did from Acts on Sunday, where Paul talks about the fullness of the Gospel, and the issue of the fullness of the Gospel is that it deals with what humanity actually is.  And what that means is that we, as humans, are sinners.  We had a baptism on Sunday, which allowed me to remind everyone who was at church that they had all agreed with the reality of the statement that we are all conceived and born sinful.  It’s easy to say that about the people you work with, it’s easy to say that about fellow parishoners, it’s easy to say that about your boss or the people in traffic, but the fullness of the Gospel means that it applies to your mother as well.  Your mother certainly agreed with that sentiment when she brought you to be baptized, because she knew that you were conceived sinful.  She knew that you were going to be born with the propensity for deception, the desire to steal, the ability to lie as soon as you were able to do so.  Your mother understood that about you, which is why she brought you to be baptized.  And in that same sense, you understand that about your co-workers, the people who make your sandwiches, the people who fix your cars, whatever.  The people who seem to let you down an awful lot.  The people who can’t be trusted with an unlocked door or an unsecured bike. The people who must be watched lest they thieve and steal.  This illustration is getting a bit long in the tooth now, but do you remember the Vancouver riots, where the Canucks lost the Stanley cup?  There was mass rioting and looting, and regular people, once it became clear that nobody was going to stop them or arrest them, smashed everything they could.  The most alarming thing about it was not that there were a bunch of people smashing the place up, but rather that these people were smashing their own city. These weren’t rioters trucked in to destroy, these were just regular people, once restraints were removed. Okay, so if your mother understood your sinfulness, and you understand the sinfulness of other people, then you should really be able to understand that your mother is sinful as well.  She was conceived and born sinful just like the rest of us. 

Does that bother you?  It might, especially on mother’s day, but I would ask you an important question, which is that what is the alternative?  Is the alternative to pretend that you have a perfect relationship with your families?  Is it to pretend that everything went well the whole time?  Go ahead and try that out, but right now, we as a society are bringing that harvest home.  Even after this selection of flowers above, there were still people who said that these categories didn’t go far enough.  There should be acknowledgement of those who had abusive mothers, those whose children were taken from the by the courts, those who have been disowned, birth mothers and surrogate parents, and on and on and on.  And it’s true, that image above doesn’t include all of those, but you can’t possibly come up with a graphic big enough to include all the ways in which things are not ideal in your own particular circumstances.

For everyone is broken in their own way.  And if all that mother’s day does is to hold up an ideal to be celebrated, then all we will be able to do in response is to look at the ways in which we are not meeting up with that perfection. It will only hurt if you are looking for perfection where it is not.  And all the cultural weight of mother’s day is built up around celebrating mothers and how great they are.  This will automatically make you feel worse.

Paul understood something, a lesson from his whole life. Think about his life before his conversion.  He had been a Pharisee of Pharisee, a Hebrew of Hebrews, circumcised on the eighth day, as to the law, blameless, but he took all that and counted it as rubbish for the sake ofgaining Christ as his Lord. And this is why he is so keen to bring up the fullness of the Gospel, because the fullness of the Gospel is the one thing that lets you celebrate mothers, or indeed anyone, with anything even vaguely resembling realism. If you don’t have the fullness of the Gospel, then you have to do one of three things: check out of mother’s day altogether, pretend that your mother is perfect which isn’t true because none of them are, or become tortured with the reality of your experience next to the required perfection.

But if what perfection worked for you instead of against you? What if you actually believed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ?  What if you believed in the power of forgiveness of sins in the real world? What if the Gospel of Jesus Christ wasn’t just vague idealism, but was instead the only thing that lets us love one another.  We love, after all, because he first loved us.  And once you have realized how much you need to be forgiven, how much you have done, and your propensity for evil that you have, then it becomes much easier to smooth over relationships with your mother because the pressure for her perfection is not there. You can’t blame her for not being perfect any more than she can blame you for not being perfect, because you are both sinful, both broken people.  And you’re both forgiven people, too.

Christ’s words aren’t just there to take up space, they are the power of God in the world, and the more we ignore them, the worse we end up, because we expect perfection to exist where it does not.  It’s not found in our homes or families, it’s not found in our desire for everything to be just so, and it’s not found in the flowery pages of the Hallmarks and Carltons.  The perfection that we are looking for exists outside us, which means that we can’t blame anyone for not meeting up with it.  We aren’t perfect, we are forgiven. And that means that we can look at each other, mothers included, in the same way as God looks at us: Rejoicing where we do what is right, and forgiving where we have done wrong.  And whichever of these issues that you may be having, whether they be strained relationships with your mothers,  problematic home life, distant people, or even a death in the family, these are all things that the Gospel of Jesus Christ are there to overcome. 

And the best thing about the Gospel is that it doesn’t matter if it’s mother’s day, or any other day, the Gospel is there to address these real world issues that plague and bother us.  It’s not theory, it’s absolutely practical.

From a certain point of view

Statistically speaking, you've probably seen star wars.  If you haven't, I'm about to spoil it for you right now.  So buckle up.

Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father.  There, now you're all caught up.  But there is more than that, of course.  Many of us came late to the story, we came already know that fact, and so the big reveal wasn't much of a surprise.  In fact, it wasn't a surprise at all.  But it's still fun to think about the way the story gets there, and although you know how it turns out, our friend Luke doesn't.  As I say, it's fun to join him on the journey, isn't it?

Darth Vader himself reveals the fact to Luke during their duel at Bespin.  He asks Luke what Obi-Wan told him about his father.  Luke reveals that Obi-Wan told him that Vader killed his father. That's when Vader says 'I am your Father.'  The big reveal, the big moment.  Due to movie magic, Luke did get the chance to follow up with the now-deceased Obi-Wan later, and Obi-Wan gives the cop-out answer that the dark side of the force betrayed and murdered the person of Anakin Skywalker, and that after his conversion to the dark side of the force, Anakin ceased to exist.  This culminates with the line from Obi-Wan 'what I told you was true....from a certain point of view.'

In other words, you would have to have Obi-Wan's unique perspective to understand the position that he takes. Fair enough.  But perspective counts for an awful lot.  Any and all Police officers that I have spoken to have recounted similar tales, stories of pulling people over, and having them immediately ask for a break, talk about how they're not the real criminals, that sort of thing.  And they'll do so without fail, essentially believing that from the perspective of the speeder, they deserve a break.  But if you have children playing, if you have other motorists around whose lives may be put in danger from racecar Johnny, then you're going to be happy that Mr. Leadfoot was pulled over.  It's all about perspective.

Now the notion of things being 'from a certain point of view' becomes extremely important when you consider the reality of what the scriptures say, and how they speak to people.  I want you to think very carefully about St. Paul, who was, at the time that I'm referring to, Saul of Tarsus. And Saul of Tarsus was, as the reading from Sunday tells us, breathing out murderous threats against the followers of the way.  Why was he doing that? Well, we have to work backwards a little bit.  We know that Saul approved of the murder of Stephen, and he would have done so because of what Stephen was preaching.  What was it that Stephen was preaching?  Stephen's testimony bothered the Jews who were there to the point of wanting him dead, precisely because Stephen brought forward a Christological reading of the Old Testament. Stephen recounts all the things that the Hebrews of the time would have thought were extremely important, the stories that informed their culture, and largely determined their place in the world, and Stephen tells them in no uncertain terms what all those stories are all about.  All those stories are not about us, they are about Christ.  The promise that Stephen keeps on talking about, that promise is the promise that is realized in the death and resurrection of Christ.  And what the people didn't want to hear was that they were in no small part responsible for that death.  They killed all sorts of prophets before, and now they had killed the Lord of life, with seemingly no remorse whatsoever.  Stephen culminates by saying that he can see Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and at that, the crowd stones him to death.  Why is Saul of Tarsus happy about that?  Because he is comfortable with and in himself.

The testimony that Stephen gives is that of righteousness perpetually existing outside the human race, and working on it.  Over and over again in his speech, Stephen tells the people that God acts, and people respond.  He tells them that God decides, and his people react, whether for good or for ill.  God speaks to Abraham, Abraham follows his lead to the promised land. God speaks through the prophets, the people of Israel kill the prophets who announce the coming of the righteous one.  This happens because of the heavy implication from these passages, and from the entire scriptures that there is, in fact, a righteous one - and it isn't you.

Paul tells you why it bothered him, and why it bothered him enough to kill.  He tells you this in the book of Philippians, where he talks about those who have confidence in the flesh, which he had in spades.  "Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a persecutor of the church.  As to righteousness under the law, blameless...For [Christ's] sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ.'  In order to be blessed by faith in Christ Jesus, Saul had to leave his entire life behind because it was based on his own righteousness as concerns the law.  But the law condemns, it doesn't save.

What the law does, and does very well, though, is to convince you that it saves.  That is, the law will deceive you into believing that you are keeping it, and that you are able to keep it fully.  And this is where things get dicey.  Most people then, as well as most people now, believe that they are keeping the law, which is why the words of the scriptures, the words of Christ, are so offensive to them.  That is, they want to continue to believe that they are good.  And what Christ does, what Stephen was trying to get people to see, was that they weren't anywhere near as good as they had led themselves to believe that they were. This is relatively uncomfortable to hear, it's unpleasant, but it has the unfortunate side effect of being true.  And that's the real trouble with it.  The belief that Saul had, that he was righteous and blameless under the law, it was comforting, it lets you believe that you're a good person, but unfortunately, it is full of holes, and that's what Saul discovered on the road to Damascus.

Now here's where things get truly and genuinely fascinating.  Think of this, if you will - Saul, knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus, hearing a voice telling Saul that Jesus of Nazareth, the one whom Saul has been persecuting, is intimately interested in him.  And when Paul gets up, and gets to town, scales fall from his eyes.  This is great stuff, because we're not talking only about physical blindness, you know.  We're talking about spiritual blindness too.  Perhaps even more so.  The scales that fall from Paul's eyes are spiritual scales, where he all of a sudden understands, he realizes why Christ lived and died in the first place, and why he shed his blood.  Paul understood that, as Stephen had told him, that Jesus came to redeem sinners, and the scales that fell from Paul's eyes were those that obstructed him from seeing that he was one of those sinners.  Once you understand that you are a sinner, then you will understand why Christ's message is so important.  The law doesn't offer you salvation, it only offers condemnation.  Paul understood at that moment that the words he had resisted when Stephen had spoken them, were the only words that could offer salvation.

But the words themselves hadn't changed.  Only Paul's perspective had.  When Stephen spoke, those words were harsh on Paul's ears, telling him that Paul's people had spurned and killed the prophets.  But when the scales fell from Paul's eyes, he understood the forgiveness that Christ offered was through his blood.  Identical words, different reaction, perspective changed.  And this is what leads to the curious conundrum of our reading that we had from Revelation from Sunday.  This reading talks about the one who is worthy to open the scroll and break the seals, and this one, the righteous one, is either the Lion of Judah, or the Lamb of God.  Which is it?  Well, it's both.  It's both because they are the same person, truly and genuinely.  For Jesus is both the Lion and the Lamb, it just depends on your position next to him. He doesn't change, but we perceive him differently based on where we are in comparison to where he wants us to be.  He can bring Peter to tears when Peter is denying him, but will also embrace Peter and bring him back to the fellowship of the Apostles when Peter repents.  He can demolish the evil, and restore the repentant.  This is what the work of Christ is all about, and our reaction to him tells us a lot more about us than it does about him.  His words don't change, so when people hate him, as Saul did, it is because they fell as though they have to believe that they themselves, through their effort, are righteous.  But when people love him, preach about him and declare him, as Paul did, it is because they know that their sins are covered.

It truly depends on the point of view, because the words themselves don't change.