2024-05-13
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
May 12, 2024, Mother’s Day Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
John 17:6-19 The Federated Church, UCC
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, was dying, he turned to his wife and his very last words were, “You are wonderful.” As football coach Vince Lombardi lay on his death bed, he turned to his wife and said, “Happy Anniversary. I love you.” Bo Diddley died giving a thumbs-up as he listened to the song, “Walk Around Heaven”; his last word was “Wow.” According to Steve Jobs’ sister Mona, the Apple founder’s last words were, “Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow.” And, appropriate to today, as Truman Capote—who was known to throw some pretty fierce insults—lay dying, he repeated, “Mama—Mama—Mama” (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/58534/64-people-and-their-famous-last-words).
It’s not exactly Jesus’ last words on Earth, but as he’s preparing to die, there are some things he wants his disciples to know and to remember. He shares a last meal with them. He tells them how crucial it is that they love each other. He reminds them that, even once he has died, he will always be with them. And then, as the very conclusion of this very last speech of his before the account of his death, he prays.
The prayer, as you may have noticed in hearing it a few moments ago, is something like a weaving. The language is poetic, forging ahead, doubling back on itself, repeating key words again and again. To be frank, it’s likely not the most gripping passage of scripture we ever heard. It’s both elegiac and hopeful, meandering and yet also focused.
And what I hear in these last words of Jesus is an anguished plea to remember a single overarching and vital truth: that we are one. “I came from you,” says Jesus to God. “You sent me.” “All mine are yours, and yours are mine.” “Protect them . . ., so that they may be one, as we are one.” The prayer is like a musical theme and variations. And unity is at the core—unity of God and Jesus, unity of Jesus and the church, unity of all of us together in Christ. We are all one.
And this may well sound fine in the abstract: “Yes, OK, everything is one,” we may well mutter, as we curse the dog, and belittle the child, and disparage the neighbor, and criticize the political opponent, and demonize the misguided young, and roll our eyes at the out-of-touch old. We may nod at this unity with lofty words and yet find it difficult to embody those words and to live as one.
And yet here we are on Mother’s Day, and I suspect that, from an entirely different angle, this day is a reminder of the same thing, that we are one, and that there’s a kind of maternal, self-giving generosity at the heart of everything. Now we know that, for some here, mention of our mothers is painful. Carelessness or selfishness or cruelty or substance abuse may mar the memory of the one who has given us life. We dare not sentimentalize motherhood as though it is an unambiguous smiley-faced good for every single person. It does us no favors to airbrush our mothers—nor anyone else, for that matter. They are, like all of us, flesh-and-blood, complex, flawed, colorful, unique creatures.
At the same time, though, it is also true that, for many of us, our mothers have offered us a uniquely revelatory glimpse into what the heart of God is like. There’s something entrancing about the line in this prayer of Jesus in which he says to God, “everything you have given me is from you” (John 17:7). Of course, in one sense, that’s a tautology—it’s not saying anything that isn’t obviously true. ‘Of course what you’ve given me is from you,’ we might well think. ‘If you gave it, who else would it have come from?!’
From another angle, though, there’s something oddly compelling about that line. “Everything you have given me is from you.” From you. It’s from your heart. It’s from deep within you. And when I hear those words, I hear that there’s a cost involved—this giving has come from your center. What you’ve given me isn’t peripheral. It isn’t irrelevant. It’s come from your core. You’ve given me, not just some thing—a prize plate, perhaps, or a special sweater—but you’ve given me your very self. You’ve given me your heart. You’ve given me everything you have and are. This, says Jesus, is who God is—the One who gives God’s very self.
I see this self-giving in my 97-year-old mother. When I talk to her, as I do almost every evening, we will often reminisce together about my childhood. Two scenes will come up again and again. The first is when I was a toddler, and she was giving me a bath. And she will say, as though to apologize, “The only time I ever spanked you was that day when you splashed water all over the bathroom and me. I spanked you on the bottom, and you wailed so loudly that I never did it again.” That’s one scene that she regularly recalls. The other one, in a not entirely dissimilar vein, is she will say, “When you were naughty, I used to send you to your room. And then I’d forget that I’d done it. And you’d come out of your room an hour or two later and say, ‘Mommy, can I come down now?’” And remembering the scene today, my mother will say, “How could I forget you?”
When I take in the sweep of my mother’s life with me, what I am struck by overwhelmingly is that she gave herself to me. Just as Jesus says to God, I would say to my mother, “everything you have given me is from you.” She wasn’t perfect. Nor am I. Nor are you. But what she has done is to give her full self to her two sons. Not her things, though she has done that as well, but herself.
My mother took me to the library all the time, and borrowed Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and Madeline. She came to all my baseball and basketball games. She listened to my endless stories when I came home from school. She sat with me at my bedside when I was sick, and brought me ginger ale and ice cream. When she would take my brother and me to my grandparents’ summer house in New Hampshire, there was a road that had one rise after another on it. We called it “the bumpy road.” When we reached that portion of the trip, every time we would get to a new bump, my mother would floor it, and it felt as though the car, and we, were airborne each time. And my brother and I loved it.
When I was totally lost as a young man living in Boston, my mother sent me a letter one day in which she hand-wrote some exquisite lines of the German poet Rilke, lines which made an immense impression on me then, and still do now: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . .. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” At the same point in my life that prompted her to send me that letter, when, as I say, I had no idea what I was doing, my mother and father went to a therapist together so they could learn how to be most helpful to me in my struggles, something they didn’t tell me until decades later.
When my mother was well into her 80s, she visited Mary and me one January week here in Chagrin Falls. It was at the time of my birthday. She remembered that, when I was a boy, she had made my brother and me, for every birthday, from scratch, a chocolate cake with a to-die-for fudge frosting. On this visit, while Mary and I were gone to work for the day, my mother went through our kitchen cabinets to find the necessary pans, and went to the store to get all the ingredients. And she baked the same cake. And when I came home from church and it was time for dessert, she pulled it out from where she had hidden it behind the couch. And it was still to-die-for.
My mother, a UCC minister, preached at my ordination in 1988, reminding us all that “we have this treasure in earthen vessels,” and that even with our fragility and frailty, we have been given a light that never dims. And she preached here in this very pulpit almost precisely fourteen years ago, on Mother’s Day in 2010 at the age of 83. And she gently mocked me. And she told the story of her license plate and why she could remember it so easily, because it had the number 1611 on it, the year the King James Bible was published. And that morning, many members of the church ribbed me mercilessly for taking the day off from preaching and getting my mother to do the work on Mother’s Day, of all unconscionable things! And people here still remember that day and remind me of it.
My mother gave herself to me. Everything she has given me is from her. And it fills me. And it sustains me. And what she has done is something like what God does for you and me and for all of us. When I am on my own deathbed, it’s this that I hope I most remember and, by grace, speak about: that the deepest truth of the matter is that the mothering God enfolds us all in arms of love, and whispers in our ear that we are never alone, and gives us God’s very self, and assures us that God and Jesus are one, that Jesus and we are one, and that you and I together are one in Christ. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Thanks be to God.