Why Your Mother Loves You

Hosea 11:1-9; I Thessalonians 2:9-13

A Sermon Preached by Catherine Foote

May 8, 2005

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

“I was gentle among you, like a tender mother nursing her child.” I Thess. 2:12

I was 27 years old, and had been a college professor for less than a year. Right on that fragile edge of adulthood, still amazed that others around me listened to me when I spoke, and most especially that my students, only a few years younger than me, actually took notes on what I said. Never mind that the students’ attention had to do with the exams at the end of the semester, it was a heady experience. And then my sister called and told me she was getting married. She gave me a choice: I could be a bridesmaid, or I could (since I had been to seminary) help the minister there in Oregon perform the wedding. Well, it was no choice for me. I wanted to be the performer.

So the evening of the rehearsal we all were gathered at the church: my sister and future brother-in-law, the minister with whom I was co-officiating (and whose signature on the license would be the one that carried the weight), my three older brothers, my sister’s closest friends who were the bridesmaids. And I was one of the people in charge. Once again, I was having that odd experience still so new to me, of other people actually listening to me. This was very grown-up stuff, and I was (at least a little bit in charge.)

You know, now I have done many weddings. I know how to be in charge of a rehearsal, keep it running smoothly, get us all finished and on to the dinner in less than an hour. But then, well it was my first wedding. It was my first rehearsal. And it took more, much more than an hour. At some point well into the rehearsal I was ready to practice my lines. I stood to read from Song of Solomon, the passage my sister and brother-in-law had chosen. “Two are better than one,” I began, “for they shall have good reward for their labor.” I was using my most serious, newly forming “professor” voice. I was feeling important and adult and enjoying it. Then from the back of the church, my mother, in her own highly developed mother’s voice, in front of everyone there, my family, my friends, the other minister, said “Smile, honey. You look so much prettier when you smile.” All of a sudden I was ten years old again.

There you have it- mothers. They just love you: love you enough to stay up nights when you’re sick, love you enough to worry when your late coming home, love you enough to “improve” you in public, no matter how grown up you are. And now that I am far on the other side of the adulthood border, I get it. I understand my mother in ways I wish I could tell her. I know now that when you become a parent, all of a sudden there is a piece of your heart, a huge piece, walking around in the world, out there where you cannot control it.

So when writers of Scripture, when Paul, when Jesus reached for images of relationship to describe the connection of God to God’s people and to describe the new connections of God’s people in the church, they turn to images of mothering. “How can I give you up?” God says, when the prophet has been scolding God’s people for their unfaithfulness. “Jerusalem,” says Jesus, “How often I would wish to gather you to me just like a mother hen gathers her young chicks, right up under her wings.” “I was gentle with you,” says Paul to his beloved congregation, “just like a mother nursing a child.” At the heart of every statement is the acknowledgment that it is in relationship that we come to know something of the essential nature of God, and something of the essence of what it means to be human as well.

An old proverb pronounces, “An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.” The children of our church understand this proverb instinctively. They know that it is relationship that is at the heart of how we connect with each other in living our lives, and without relationship, words, even the wisest words, loose their impact. When I met with those children during our sermon breakout two weeks ago I asked them to help me write this sermon. “What is a sermon, by the way?” I asked. And they stared at me a little blankly. It is hard to put into words, I will acknowledge. “It’s somebody talking and you have to sit and listen,” was the gist of their ultimate response. So much for the pound of clergy.

But when I asked, “So, why does your mother love you?” we were on common ground. I don’t mean common in that every one of us can say wonderful things about why our mother specifically loved us. I know there are difficult relationships out there. I know not everyone speaks of “mother’s love” from personal experience of how a mother can love a child. When I was in San Jose I had a parishioner with severe cerebral palsy, whose father had left when he was born, and whose mother had abandoned him in a facility for severely mentally retarded children. He struggled all of his life to connect with the concept of any parent’s love and nurturing. I know that there are difficult relationships, and difficult times in almost any relationship. Still, the image of a mother’s love is compelling and meaningful and the children gathered with me in the chapel were quite articulate in discussing it.

“Why does your mother love you?” I asked. One child took the rational approach. “My mother loves me because I made her a mother.” It is wonderful to hear a child who knows his value in the family. Another child spoke as a realist. “My mother loves me because we’ve been through a lot together.” And then there was the voice of the romanticist. “My mother loves me because I’m a gift to her.” And then the child-theologian spoke up, remembering that mother’s love reaches far: “My mother loves me even when I do something wrong.”

Then I invited the children of our church to make the same jump that I am inviting in you today. When the writers of Scripture wanted to describe our relationship to God, or our relationships with one another that include guidance and nurturing and encouragement, it was to images of Mother that they went. “How much I live you,” God says to Israel through the words of Hosea. And the image of a mother, holding the hands of a young child learning to walk, springs to Hosea’s mind. “So now, how can I give you up? How can I give up on you? I will not.” Jesus describes his desire to call the people of Israel to a renewed faithfulness as the protective instincts of a mother hen, gathering her chicks under her wing. And Paul, describing his relationship to this fledging faith community in Thessalonica, calls to mind the image of a nursing mother.

The children had no trouble making the connection. God loves us because of the intense relationship between creator and created. There is something of God that finds its completion in relationship, in us. And God’s love carries us through all of life, whatever life holds. As the child might say, “Me and God, we’ve been through a lot together.” God’s love is a gift to us, and our lives are invited to become a gift back to God. And finally, of course, God’s love never lets us go. Even in our straying from the path of faithfulness. Even in the ways we really blow it. There is nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God.

In God we find that relationship that longs for something in us, longs for us to become all that we were created to be. It is as if, while we are so earnestly living our lives, head down, determined to be as grown up as possible, God is standing in the back, watching with love, and reminding us with tender love: “Smile.”