For
us news junkies, there were plenty of headlines this week. Voters in France and Greece threw out their
governments. J.P. Morgan Chase lost a
couple of billion dollars. President
Obama changed his position on same sex marriage. Governor Romney was reminded of some bad
behavior in high school. As big as these stories were, however, they didn’t
come close to the one that touched Kathy and me the most. On Tuesday, Maurice Sendak, the celebrated
children’s author and illustrator, died.
Sendak’s genius—displayed in books like Where the Wild Things Are and In
the Night Kitchen-- was that he was able to tap into both the beautiful and
terrifying parts of the child’s imagined world.
He believed, as I have come to believe, that where children are
concerned, honesty is always the best policy. Both his parents were Holocaust
survivors, but they never talked about their experience. Sendak always regretted their reticence. He said: "Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I
don't know. I don't know. I've convinced myself — I hope I'm right — that
children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth."
This week,
NPR rebroadcast several interviews that Terry Gross did with Sendak over the
years on her program Fresh Air. Here
is my favorite anecdote—a story about growing up as a Jew in a multi-ethnic New
York neighborhood:
And we lived in a part of
Brooklyn which was teeming with immigrants, either other people from Eastern
Europe, Jews - or Sicilians, and I couldn't tell the difference. . . . We lived
next to the Sicilians . . . And I used
to run across the hall because they had un-Kosher food, which was much better,
much better than Kosher food because it was - it was pasta. It was great
Italian cooking. And they laughed, and they drank wine, and they grabbed me,
and I sat on their laps, and they had a hell of a good time. And then you come
back to my house and you have this sober cuisine and not so rambunctious family
life. And I really did have a confusion that Italians were happy Jews, that
they were a sect. And that I would have a choice - that I would have a choice
after my bar mitzvah to belong to either the sober sect or the happy sect. [Fresh Air 2003 Interview, published May
8, 2012]
Now
this may strike you as a curious way to begin a Mother’s Day sermon, but
Maurice Sendak’s announcement that “children
despair of you if you don't tell them the truth," along with his exuberant
childhood verdict that “Italians were happy Jews”—both these observations
strike me as profound insights about the pain and joy of being human, and they
remind us that the Gospel’s truth comes to us precisely within, and not in
spite of, the deep truths regarding the stuff of life. Samuel Johnson said, “Love is the wisdom of
fools and the folly of the wise.” If
that’s true, then we see love’s foolish wisdom enacted most obviously within
the sphere of the family. That does not mean that our earthly mothers and
fathers are perfect. But it does mean
that it is possible for us, even amid evidences of parental imperfection, to
discover the depth and breadth and height of what it means both to love and be
loved.
Today
is the Sixth Sunday of Easter, a day on which we continue to live into the
resurrection and its implications for our lives. Today is coincidentally Mother’s Day, a
holiday our culture sets aside to honor mothers and to thank all of those who,
of whatever gender, have nurtured us on our life’s path. As we gather on this Sunday, I invite you to
think about Mother’s Day from a new perspective, from Jesus’s angle of
vision. We often tend to use this day as
a time to think about our own mothers, to remember their strengths and
shortcomings, and to recall how we have either been cared for or neglected as
we grew into maturity. Today I would
like to ask us to reverse that process, and to think not so much about how we
have been mothered but rather about what kind of mothers we--both women and
men--can be ourselves. As Jesus says in
today’s Gospel, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should
love one another.” At the heart of God’s
call to follow Jesus is a call to be a giver, a doer of love. If Mother’s Day makes any sense to us at all
in 2012, it does so as a warrant for loving engagement with those we find in
our own households and beyond.
The
adult Jesus did not live in a nuclear family.
Instead, he gathered a community of companions—men and women who shared
his ministry and his table. It was a new kind of community: egalitarian, mutual, and compassionate. It
rejected the hierarchical social arrangements of both Rome and Palestinian Judaism.
In today’s Gospel reading we hear Jesus tell his companions what the most
important aspect of life in this new community must be. He tells them, “I give you a new commandment,
that you love one another. Just as I
have loved you, you also should love one another.” Jesus does not mean this in any sentimental
way. In saying that his companions
should love one another, Jesus is setting out the most important quality of any
household. A family, a Christian
community--these are fellowships held together not merely by common ancestry,
associations, values, or goals. What
makes a family or a household Christian is the presence of love. The kind of love Jesus talks about is the
kind of love witnessed in his love for his companions. “Just as I have loved you, you also should
love one another.” Love, in Jesus’s
terms, has little to do with warm, gooey feelings. Love, in Jesus’s terms, has everything to do
with acting--either in wise folly or foolish wisdom--on behalf of another, with
putting another’s welfare first, with seeing another’s happiness and well-being
as central to one’s own. “Love one
another as I have loved you” is at once the noblest and hardest commandment
there is. A family is a place where
people may disagree, may argue, may not even like each other at times. A family can be exuberant or sober. But a
family is a place where the highest and most authentic kind of human love can
bloom because it is a place where parents and children--as complicated as their
relationships may be--it’s a place where parents and children can enact their
deep and improbable love for one another.
So
as we think about Jesus and his companions and what they have to say to us on
Mother’s Day, the first point is this:
our job, as Jesus says, is to love each other the way he has loved
us. Speaking to each of us as adults,
Jesus suggests that our job is to love each other the way parents love their
children: selflessly, sacrificially,
sometimes foolishly. Speaking to each of
us as children, Jesus means that our job is to love each other the way children
love their parents: trustingly,
creatively, generously. On a day when
our culture asks us to be thankful of and respectful towards our mothers, our
Gospel goes us one better: it asks us
all to see ourselves as mothers, to realize that if we want to follow Jesus and
know God, the surest way to do that is to be agents of generous, selfless,
risky love. To some extent each of our
earthly parents lets us down: no human
being can ever live up to the expectations which we as children project on
them. But the way forward to a free and
joyous and abundant life does not involve trying to make up for all the nurture
we may not have gotten when we were small.
The way forward into hope and happiness lies precisely through the
hearts of those whom God has given us to love in the here and now. “Love one another as I have loved you” is not
just a commandment, it is a gift. We
repair our hearts not by revisiting the past but by reaching out in the
present. We are all of us called, this
Mother’s Day, both to thank those who have nurtured us, and to forgive those
who haven’t. But more than that: we’re
called to live out God’s love towards those we encounter in the here and now. In following that commandment, we will be
given a joy and peace which transcend whatever it is we may not have gotten in
the first place.
“Love is
the wisdom of fools and the folly of the wise.” We are gathered this morning
both as a human community and as a group of Christians who seek transformation
into the joyful risen image of Jesus Christ. The One in whose name we gather
has given us a new commandment: we are
to love one another, just as he has loved us.
The first thing that means, as I have said, is that we are all called to
be loving mothers of each other, just as our own mothers, and Jesus in his own
way have lovingly mothered us. And
here’s the second thing that means: that
along with Jesus and his companions, we are being asked by God--no, we’re being
commanded by God--to expand the circumference of the circles we would draw
around our families, our community, our world.
“Love one another” is not just a commandment for the household, the
church, or those with our values.
Jesus’s commandment is not a demand that we love those who are like us,
genetically, politically, or culturally.
Jesus’s commandment is a demand that we break open those circles, that
we seek to mother not only those near us but those who are far off: the people in our workplace, the people in
our city, the children in our schools, even those who look and act like our
enemies. Only a dose of the most
authentic love, the love which children and parents have for each other, will
redeem and transform our community, our nation, and our world.
Whether you
live in a family that hides or tells the truth, whether you inhabit a household
of somber or happy people, love will continue to be the wisdom of fools and the
folly of the wise. May each and all of
us, in the wisdom of our folly, and in the foolishness of our wisdom, love each
other as mothers love their children, as Jesus loves his companions, as his
companions have gone on to love and serve each other and the world. In so doing we will be acting as Jesus would
act in a broken world. In so doing we
will be following, finally, the only commandment we have that really
matters. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment