Some Sundays, we talk about church holidays: Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, or Reign of Christ Sunday; days that most people don’t think about outside of church, and the biblical message we share that day. We continue to observe them because, as some people go deeper in their Christian journey, marking these moments in the story of Jesus gives a rhythm to his life, death and resurrection—a rhythm that can give shape to our lives too.
Then there are other holidays that don’t really have anything to do with Christianity but that always seem to come up in church. There’s the Fourth of July, and Memorial and Veterans Days…when we pray in gratitude for the gifts of freedom, and the sacrifices of brave soldiers and sailors, and preachers walk a line of reminding us to respect but not worship these things; God is the one we are here to worship. And among those days there’s Mother’s Day, when again, we may not worship our mothers, but preachers who know what’s good for us sure won’t forget to talk about them.
Mother’s Day in church is important because mothers are nothing short of incredible; and also because mothers come to us in so many different ways, so when we celebrate them together in church, we try to do so thoughtfully. There’s a traditional definition of motherhood, one still worth talking about, in which we give thanks for the selfless ways in which moms take on so many thankless tasks and responsibilities with grace and love: All of these things can of course be done by Dad, but at least in my house, Mom does them much better. So we take a day to be extra grateful for things we should appreciate all year long.
But then there are the fraught parts of celebrating Mother’s Day, for the day isn’t the same for everyone and isn’t always happy. Can you imagine what it is like to be a mother today in Gaza, desperate to find any kind of food and clean water for your children in the midst of a senseless and criminal blockade of basic emergency supplies. Can you imagine being a mother in Israel whose son or daughter is a hostage? Can you imagine the countless refugee and wartorn scenarios where these same things are true in other countries that rarely make our news? How do we faithfully celebrate mothers in places like these?
There are other circumstances that are less tragic, but still difficult, or just different: There are those among us who have lost a mom recently, or who have a hard or broken relationship with a mother; there are those who have struggled to conceive or find a partner or who have lost a child. There are mothers the world round today whose day will not be filled with handmade cards from school or bike rides or trips to the nail salon. And, not simply bad but different—there are many kinds of families: with single mothers or two moms or stepmoms and we thank God for every one of them for they are all worthy of celebration. It’s hard to do Mother’s Day just right for all of them—but we must try.
So in gratitude for all kinds of mothers and all kinds of struggles, I was grateful when in today’s selected readings I came upon a scripture from Revelation 7. Let’s start with this: don’t be scared of the Book of Revelation. It gets a bad rap, and it does have some scary language, but it’s beautiful in so many ways, and is worth our attention. In short, this book is not history, it’s poetry of a kind—and should be read that way. It is a vision or dream—and we all know how strange dreams can sometimes be—and in this case it is the vision of an early Christian man named John of Patmos. He finds himself captive in a Roman prison. He sends out a series of letters to his friends, describing a day he is dreaming about when the strife of the world and its various factions will come to an end, and we will all live as one human family. Just as the Bible begins with the beautiful variety of all creation living together in the Garden of Eden, so here at the end of the Bible there is a return to Eden, where our differences and sufferings will end, and as the last verse of today’s lesson says, God will “wipe every tear from their eyes.”
In the passage we read today, here is a key part of the vision: “[Then] I looked and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne.” It would have been a bit bizarre in ancient literature for the passage to speak explicitly about some of the differences that I noted before: non-traditional families, etc., but the idea is clear: at the glorious return to Eden, all different kinds of people will gather: people with varied political opinions, parents and children who are estranged, the rich and the poor, those born into comfortable as well as desperate circumstances, with the playing field leveled once and for all; parents who struggle with fertility or have lost a child to illness or in an accident. Also there you will find other people with all kinds of regular but less than perfect circumstances: all of us who are in therapy, everyone who knows what its like to be ashamed that you were overserved at a party, parents who yell at their children while running late for church, or forget to pack a lunch on the day of the fieldtrip, and even you—you, who may have pretty much all the people in this room fooled into thinking that you are the perfect parent, but you know what’s really going on…you’re a mess just like the rest of us. Yes friends, in the kingdom of heaven, we all get to gather together with people from every nation, from every race and tribe and language, in a great multitude of people, who finally carry no shame, no guilt, no secrets, and we all get to joyfully and tearfully say thank you to God, because even when we were divided by all of those things, God sent Jesus into the world to love every one of us anyway. What a great vision!
I love another thing that happens in this story from Revelation—this vision from John: As all these people from every life circumstance gather together, an angel comes to John, the visionary, the dreamer, and asks him, who are these people? And John says to the angel, “You know who they are. They have come from every time and place, they have come out of the great ordeal to gather in this place and be saved by the love of God.
They have come through the great ordeal. Now, there are biblical literalists, and many of them are good and faithful people, who believe the ordeal is about separating the good from the evil and sending just a few of us to the great gathering in Revelation.
I’m no better than any other Christian, but on this matter, I do have a different opinion. As I read the Book of Revelation, I think there are all kinds of ordeals in the world, they come in as great a variety as the multitude of people who are gathered at the throne. Some of you have stood in an interminable line at Target thought to yourself “well this is an ordeal;” and there are the real ordeals of the world—I’ve listed some of them already. The good news of John’s dream in revelation is that when we arrive at Eden we have received salvation—the ordeal, whatever it is, will have come to an end. And God will wipe every tear from our eyes.
You will say to me, “Yes, Adam, that sounds nice, but all of those ordeals, whether the most life-threatening ones, or just my inability to deal with my daily stress, they are ordeals, and they are still going on! God has not yet wiped the tears from our eyes!” And I will agree with you that yes, you are right. And this is where today’s sermon title finally starts to make sense and the real challenge of the scripture lesson comes home to roost. We have not yet arrived at the return to Eden. So far we are still “on the way.” We are on the way. A great preacher I know once said that in the Bible, there’s the Creation and then the Fall and the expulsion from Eden as early as Genesis, Chapter 3; and then everything else in the Bible, all the rest is…a recovery plan. The Bible is a story of human brokenness and wandering away from God, and God welcoming us back…and then straying again as we stumble on this often circular feeling journey, hopefully making some progress that is often so hard to see, but…we are on the way…to that gathering of the great and peaceful multitude…on the way, back home to Eden.
I’ll leave you with a couple of suggestions, in case you choose to think more about them:
None of us can bring about Eden ourselves, but if you have been troubled by any or all of the hard situations I have mentioned on this beautiful Mother’s Day, here’s a suggestion. One intention you might set for today, and for tomorrow and for the day after that, is simply a question: how are you participating in the recovery plan? How is your life helping God to advance us all “on the way” to peace? I promise that your contribution means something if brings even a single moment of joy to any one of the many circumstances I mentioned and countless others. Who is in your field of vision or within your reach to help? How can you cross a dividing line and extend a word of peace? Where can you start? Maybe…you need to start with giving a bit more grace and love to yourself. How are you bringing about the vision where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes? That is a worthy task and intention for this day and every day.
And one more suggestion to think about:
With thanks to God for the gift of all mothers, I’ll close with a simple reminder: that the God we worship is usually described with too much male imagery but in the Bible, God is also feminine: the Spirit of God was a thoroughly feminine idea in the Old Testament; the faithful disciples who did not desert Jesus were not the 12 men but the women who went to the tomb. Those women first brought news of the Resurrection; women are always the first ones to bear witness to new life. So I also invite you to remember and give thanks that most of us first experience the Christian idea of unconditional love not through the common image of a man, but through the image of a woman, a mother. And whether that means you honor motherhood a bit more, or think a bit differently about how you are called to show love as a man, let us all give thanks that God, our gracious giver of life, that She is trying to teach us to love one another, as we continue on our broken and blessed way to Eden. Amen.