| 5th Sunday of Easter | Church of the Covenant |
| May 14, 2006 Mother's Day | The Rev. Dr. Robert J. Campbell, D. Min., D. D. |
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Luke 2:41-51
Acts 1:12-17,21-26 selected
"In Our Father's House," a strange title for a Mother's Day sermon, especially in a church so committed to inclusive language and from a minister who has never much worried about political correctness, but tries always to be sensitive to the many conditions we humans find ourselves in when it comes to families.
It's also the Sunday we install new leadership in the life of this church, something so richly portrayed when those who have served come forward and lay hands upon those newly ordained. It is not the "passing of a torch," rather the blessing of support from all who have served and will continue to do so in other capacities. It is one of those teaching moments that sets us apart and shows us how we can be different from the world.
It's an interesting Sunday, Mother's Day, that blessed day ministers love to hate. The single most sentimental Sunday in the calendar and for that exact reason congregations love it.
Effusive Victorian emotions overwhelming our modern sensibilities, moving us toward a longing to take pleasure in an older "Hallmark" time when we remember red and white chrysanthemums passed out at the church doors, children and fathers doing their best to get dressed for church without Mom's help, all in anticipation of gathering around the family table at grandmother's afterward. Those are my memories, but not everyone's, and lest you think me to be throwing cold water on your day, Moms, let us not forget the old saying that, "God couldn't be everywhere, so God created mothers."
Yet, having said that, let me add that I don't like to preach about Mother's Day or Father's Day. If it were not for my father I wouldn't be here, but that was about all he contributed to my development. I hold nothing against him. He helped me recognize that all fathers aren't the same and that we all fall short of our God's love, who was cast as masculine in more male dominated times.
I don't preach about Mother's Day because even though none of us would be here without our mothers, not all mothers are as loving or caring as our God. Still, it was God who gave birth to all creation and holds us in our pain and rejoices with us in our happiness as only a birthing parent can do. So let us affirm with the French the need to see God as feminine and masculine, yet never confined by our human attributes.
Mother's Day, it's a tradition started in a little town in West Virginia following an un-civil war in an effort to recognize that perhaps only mothers, who lose their young to the vultures of war, only mothers can bring peace to the world. But that needs to be everyone's job. So, along with many in the faith community, let us stand against Madison Avenue's modern pressures and choose to look to this as "Family Sunday."
Family, by however you wish to define it, husband, wife, and 2 and a half kids, (I've always felt sorry for that half-pint) single mothers, single fathers, and grandparents raising grand kids, same sex couples providing loving relationships for children. So here's to families in all their shapes and sizes, colors and hues.
Yet, having said even all of that, this Sunday is about more, for in God's house, we need to be a family of people as H. Richard Niebuhr once described, standing with Christ "against culture," seeking to rise "above culture."
Something the leadership of every church needs to wrestle with in every age, which was the case with Luke's story of Jesus. Luke tells his congregation about two parents who were being faithful to their time honored religious heritage, but their pubescent 12-year-old's curiosity got the best of him and he wandered off. His folks later found him in the midst of their religious teachers debating their understanding of God. The youngster, as only bright un-tethered minds can do, was questioning what was being taught and his parents were amazed or maybe a little embarrassed.
Yet, what is most interesting is that when confronted by his worried mother, the young Jesus simply says, "Didn't you know I had to be in my Father's house?" And what is even more interesting in a male dominated society (as my resident theologian Laury pointed out to me), what is even more interesting is that it is Mary, not Joseph, who speaks. Mary, who according to all modern research was anything but the medieval "queen of heaven" people came to venerate. Mary, who was representative of the poorest, most oppressed, exploited, and certainly excluded people in Palestine, which makes you have to ask the obvious, “What was the boy questioning?” And given the fact that it is Mary speaking in the temple, given the teachings and actions of Jesus in later life when he seems to be always in confrontation with his religious traditions, which, by the time of his ministry, were deeply influenced by culture, given the report that at the most critical moment of our faith, the first account of his resurrection, he appeared to women and the men thought it all to be a bunch of nonsense. Given all of that, one might easily surmise the young Jesus was probing the depths of religion in respect to how God's love and acceptance were exhibited in a world of exclusion. How is faith manifested in love when law denies it to those most in need? How are institutions, who claim to represent God, reflective of God's grace in a world filled with judgment and fear?
Now that's a long way of getting around to the focus for this morning prompted by the fact that a few weeks ago the Christian faith and the world lost a great voice. as many of you know. William Sloane Coffin, nephew to Henry Sloane Coffin, who challenged this congregation generations ago to be that "Church with a Conscience out in front of her peers," died. He was a friend who had a profound influence on my life and ministry as he taught so many of us to be prophetically committed.
One of the significant challenges of faith he stepped up to as minister of Riverside Church in New York was, and is, a family issue. It is about our culture and the un-civil ways we interact with one another within God's family. Eight years into Coffin's ministry, Channing Phillips, one of his associates, preached a sermon in which he insisted that, "As far as biblical understanding of human sexuality is concerned, any and all deviation from the parable of Genesis referenced by Jesus, is sin and contrary to God's will. And no theological or exegetical slight of hand can erase 'The Word of the Lord.'" (1)
To many in Riverside who thought the church had gone too far toward being open and affirming, it was a comforting word. To others it sounded like "thundering fundamentalism" and at the end of worship about a third of the congregation protested around the Communion table. Some saw that reaction as racist saying, "We don't always agree with everything (Coffin) says, but we would never pull a demonstration on him. Here's a young white (seminarian) demonstrating against an older black (minister), that's racist." It was an issue of faith and culture in conflict come home to the table of the Lord.
After a long week of debate, Mother's Day arrived and Coffin chose the passage I have chosen for this Sunday. Then he said, "Dearly beloved in the Lord, America's churches are more divided over this issue than any since slavery. What are we going to do?"
The real issue at stake was not sexual preference, not even personal interpretations of Holy Scripture, but rather, the very nature of Christianity and the meaning of God's love, which is the struggle this Sunday. We are an affirming congregation, of that there is no question. This very day we see spread before us the stoles of men and women who were born into the church, baptized in their churches, yet told they are second class Christians, not because of promiscuous behavior, but because of how God has fashioned their genetic DNA. That is why we need to affirm and re-affirm that every child is a child of God and that is not always easy for everyone to do.
Which means we need to acknowledge that we are sometimes of two minds on issues of faith, yet always ready to agree that real faith is that which can not be proved nor disproved, and for our Bibles to be true guides to our faith, they must be a "living word" ever growing with new insights that God offers in every age. It's tough, this faith of ours. "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting It has been tried and found to be hard work." And therein is the struggle for any culture, any church that wants easy answers.
Therefore, on this "Family Sunday" we look to our faith, and as our Lord did, let us ask the tough questions like, why do we have to say in each bulletin, “You are welcomed regardless of affectional orientation”? Well, we say that for the same reason we say, "You are welcomed regardless of race or physical ability, age or gender, or marital status" because every child of God is a child of this church.
The issue of one's sexuality should be a non-issue just as the color of a persons skin should be a non-issue, but culture has made it a lightning rod and this congregation has risen to address each and every such injustice throughout its long history.
When working conditions were deplorable this "management congregation" stood behind the fledgling fight for workers' rights. It lost members, but stood strong. When the world was wrapped in the ravages of war, this church stood behind its pacifist minister. When segregation was challenged in Cleveland's schools, this church marched, but first it integrated its own ranks. It lost members and at the same time it gained members who bless us with their wisdom and leadership to this day. Now a new group of persons are being excluded by society, conveniently targeted by culture, used by politicians who pull out the marriage card, the family values card, the fear card every time they want to marshal votes among the ranks of the unthinking, which means this church is again summoned to claim the high ground.
Standing against racism has given white people freedom they never knew they were missing. So standing for any person, being excluded gives us new understanding about who we are as we seek to become the people God intends us to be.
So, whether the trump card is ordination, which should be about qualification and God's call, not orthodox bias, or whether the trump card is about marriage, where in a heterosexual world 4 out of 5 relationships don't make it, and the focus ought to be on relationships of any kind that have integrity, the work of the Lord ought to center on love and commitment to one another, not on body parts. The work of the Lord ought to be on how we lift one another up, not put one another down, all the while affirming that we are not giving in to culture, rather, we are standing with God's gospel of grace above culture.
Most church boats don't like to be rocked. They would rather lie at anchor than go places on stormy seas. So, let us remember that our primary task as people of faith is to try and think straight, mindful that seeing clearly is far more important than weather conditions. True freedom is born of vision, which means hope-filled people are always critical of culture, but only because they hold a brighter view of what the world should be like, and let us remember that on issues of faith there are no easy answers; that's why it's called faith.
On this Hallmark Sunday when tenderness plays so heavily in our lives, let us remember our role as leaders and members, all part of a royal priesthood, who are ever aware of our own failings and God's acceptance; and let us affirm again our place as a people who rise above the times and our own uncertainties and "having done with lesser things" let us ask the tough questions, yet like Jesus' mother, let us hold the answers, along with all of God's children, close to our hearts.
1) Warren Goldstein, William Sloane Coffin Jr., A Holy Impatience
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