WHERE WE LOVE IS HOME

May 13, 1990
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church

Scripture
Romans 8:12-17
Luke 3:21-22

“Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”
-Luke 3:22b (RSV)

Before he was a best-selling author, Robert Fulghum was a minister
and so some of his funniest and best reflections are about religion and the

church.
He writes:

"For twenty-five years of my Life, the second Sunday
in May was trouble. Being the minister of a church, I was
obliged in some way to address the subject of Mother's Day.
It could not be avoided. I tried that. Mind you, the
congregation was quite open-minded actually, and gave me
free rein in the pulpit. But when it came to the second
Sunday in May, the expectations were summarized in these
words of one of the more outspoken women in the church:

‘I'm bringing my MOTHER to church on MOTHER'S DAY,
Reverend, and you can talk about anything you want. But it
had better include MOTHER, and it had better be GOOD!' She
was joking... She also meant it." [It Was On Fire When

I Lay Down On It, p. 100]

In theological seminary the professors tell you that Mother's Day is
not a religious holiday; in fact it is a reflection of the sociological/
anthropological/cultural and embarrassingly sentimental phenomenon of
MOMISM which has been created and sustained essentially by the greeting
card people, clothing retailers and florists. The professors who tell you
these things do not preach to a congregation on the second Sunday of May
obviously. The young clergyperson takes this very seriously and then
faithfully tells his or her congregation this wonderful new information on
Mother's Day and shortly thereafter encounters the first major career
crisis. In my case it was over a hymn. For years the congregation, on
Mother's Day, had sung the old favorite, “Faith of our fathers! living
still" and changed it to "Faith of our mothers!" Well, I put a stop to
that practice, and very nearly my ministry as well.

it is the third biggest holiday in terms of commercial activity,
after Christmas and Easter. One hundred and forty million greeting cards
are sold, very few humorous ones, Fulghum points out. This is serious:
Mother's Day is not neted for comedy. Seven billion dollars is spent for
presents and meals. Sixty million roses. jsee Fulghum, p. 101]

Somewhere in the middle of all that, we are, I think, trying to find
a way to say something that is very important to us. There is, in addition
to the second Sunday in May, a Mother's Day that happens for all of us
annually. It's your birthday. I always thought that ought to be Mother's
Day. After all, all you did that day was show up. Your mother did all the
work. So call her on your birthday: thank her for what she did for you on
that day. That's Mother's Day. On the secand Sunday of May, we are
expressing something of our love, our nostalgia perhaps: sometimes some of
us are expressing something of our pain; sometimes something of our concern
about the family and the values it imparted to us. We are expressing
something of our feelings about those relationships that continue to be the
most powerful in our lives: our relationships with our parents, our
children, our families.

We observe Mother's Day this year in the midst of an emerging
consensus that the American family has changed radically and that it is in
a lot of trouble. It is true at every level of our culture. The
wealthiest, a New York Times editorial observed, are often guilty of child
neglect by their consistent absence. Those in the middle are so busy,
working so hard to get ahead, they have no time nor energy for family. And
for the poor, not always, but often minorities, the notion of family is
under severe assault and for many simply disappeared sometime in the last
generation. There is no scandal in American history that approaches this.
We have assumed that at the heart of our culture there is an unshakeable,
unmoveable structure called family - based on marriage and home. But we
know that slavery intentionally destroyed African families. After slavery,
segregation was aimed precisely at the integrity and dignity of black
males: sexual stereotypes - "boy" instead of man. All of it very
specifically denied generations of African-Americans the nurturing strength
of stable marriage and family. And it worked. We did it. Sixty per cent
of the black babies born next year will be born to unmarried mothers and
grow up in homes essentially without men as permanent participants, and for
them, life is not hopeful at all.

Suddenly we know about crimes committed by children: about the nine-
year-old who shot his playmate after an argument about a game; about a rash
of murders for sports jackets. The cover article in sports Illustrated
this week is "Your Sneakers or Your Life," about the epidemic of muggings
and murders for basketball shoes. Suddenly we seem to have understood that
if a society does not find a way to nurture its own nurturing institutions,
the human results are going to be very tragic. “We are failing in the most
elementary job of any society," Says columnist Mona Charen, in an editorial
this week.

We are, it would seem, newly aware that the family is a very
important structure. Motion pictures and television are returning to the
topic in a major way, including a number of situation comedies that seem,

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at first, to belittle and demean the family. People are watching "The
Simpsons," a cartoon sit-com about family life with almost religious zeal,
second, the family somehow manages to stay together even though its members
can hardly stand each other.

Many families find "The Simpsons" closer to reality than "Father
Knows Best." Garrison Keilor's most recent book, We Are Still Married,
contains several funny and wise essays on family. In one he writes about
taking four teen-agers along on a second marriage honeymoon; a five-week,
eleven-state tour in a van. It was awful. The kids haven't spoken,
haven't left their Walkmans long enough to see scenery for days. When one
of them finally does, she says, “I'm tired of family. Why do we have to do
so many things together? Why can't we split up?" [p. 190]

In another essay which pokes gentie fun at a whole array of modern,
urban truisms, Rob and Nancy are an upwardly mobile couple with two
children. They live in a loft in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood with
upscale shops all around.

"One evening at dinner the fourteen-year-—old daughter
announces, ‘I hate you. I absolutely hate both of you,
you're the most boring, odious, disgusting peopie I ever
saw. You think you're cooi but you're not, you're just
ridiculous.'

“Their fifteen-year-old son looks up from his plate
and says, ‘She's right.'

“Nancy smiled at both of them and set down her fork.
‘Rob and I have something we want to share with you' she
said softly.

"It's taken us a long time to face up to this, but you
two are just net the right children for us. It's not your
fault, any more than it is ours. Please try to understand.
You're a constant source of aggravation - the mess, the
endless clutter and noise and confusion and hostility. It
makes for a stifling atmosphere for mine and Rob's
relationship... We don't have time to grow. I choose not
to accept that.

“Rob took Nancy's hand. ‘I don't know if our
marriage can survive your adolescence,’ he said. 'We've
come to a decision. We have to do what's best for us.
We're going to sell you.'” ([Lifestyle, p. 56ff]

As a matter of fact, one of the problems with family is that it has
to bear up under the weight of an idealized, romanticized model that never
existed anywhere except perhaps in Victorian imaginations, and the old TV
situation comedies, and perhaps in our heart of hearts where we want our
families and children and ail our relationships to be perfect. And when
people begin to measure their instutitions, their relationships, by
standards that are unreal, they aren't going to measure up and then they

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are going to feel guilty or angry or both, which is what a jot of people
feel abut their families.

The Bible is actually very realistic about the family. The Christian
faith uses the family as a metaphor for its most important assertion - in
Jesus Christ we become children of God. But first, the Bible is very
realistic about the human family.

The first family, as you know, is a disaster. Husband and wife lead
one another into sin; each tries to avoid personal responsibility. He
blames her; she blames the snake. They are thrown out of their home.

Their two sons are jealous: one murders the other. That's how family
starts in the Bible. Noah curses one of his sons for discovering him naked
and drunk. Abraham lies and deserts his wife to save his neck. Jacob
deceives his blind father, cheats his brother and steals from his father-
in-law. His sons leave one of their brothers to die in the desert and then
actually do sell him. There is only one family incident in the Gospels and
that's the time Mary and Joseph take Jesus to Jerusalem when he's twelve
and he gets lost for several days and they finally find him in the temple.
That story is usually told to show how mature and smart Jesus was. What it
really is about is a family: an adolescent who is pushing at the limits of
parental authority. Mary says, in essence, "Where in the world have you
been? We've been worried sick. We don't understand this at all," which is
what every mother of every teen-ager has said at least a thousand times.

So families are not perfect. Nobody's is. Even Jesus'. But they are
the place and the network of relationships in which we learn who we are,
and how to be. And that is so important that we will be aware of it, and
grateful for it, or guilty or angry about, all the rest of our lives.

So important is family that the Judeo-Christian religion uses it as a
metaphor for its central assertion.

Early on, the nation of Israel knows itself as the family of God.
That is unique in the history of religious ideas.

From the beginning, Jesus's own spirituality, what we can glean about
his own relationship with God, is cast in specifically, familial, and
parental terms.

His baptism, the event that solidifies his sense of self, and in
turn, points him in the direction of his vocation, is a very moving and
intimately personal encounter with a God — who is parental. It is a
personal religious experience, not a public display. The voice comes to
Jesus: he alone hears it.

“You are my beloved son. With you I am well pieased."
Later, when he is talking about God, Jesus uses a stunning term, so
important that it remains in the Aramaic language he spoke. “Abba." It is

the intimate word for father. It is the word children would use in the
intimacy and safety of the family circle.

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Some have suggested that the only English equivalent is "Daddy," and
while that sounds too sentimental and trivial to some ears, the sense of it
is that the loving, affirming acceptance extended to children by pareirts,
at their best. is the most descriptive way to talk about God's encounter
wilh us in Jesus Christ.

When St. Paul, later, tries to explain what has happened to the
divine-human relationship in Jesus Christ, the best he can do is return to
this powerfully human metaphor. In Christ, we have been adopted by God.
We who were orphans now have a parent: a family. We who know God as
creator, as judge, as mysterious force behind the universe, as prime mover
and first cause - in Jesus Christ now know God as parent, as mother, as
father.

The Sacrament of Baptism is the sacrament of our acceptance and
affirmation by God. We bring these dear children into our midst to affirm
a magnificent truth about them: namely that they are loved and cared for
absolutely by God. We Prebyterians insist that that happen publicly
because it is a truth about all of us. It is a regular reminder of our
adoption: that we are children of God, each and every one of us.

The idea is powerful, if we were blessed by loving parents who cared
for us and affirmed us and nurtured us with patient and strong love. But
it is also powerful even if we know about that love because it was not there
for us.

We are able to accept others as we know ourselves to be accepted. We
are capable of loving others as we know ourselves to be loved. The title
of this sermon comes from a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. It intrigues
me.

“Where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave,
but not our hearts."

A Chicago attorney wrote an editorial in the Tribune Monday about
children whose adoptions do not work out. She referred to eleven-year-old
Tony whose adoptive parents returned him to an orphanage after six years.
The author recalled how at the age of three, her parents had decided they
could not go on.

“My earliest memory," she wrote, "is of standing at the doorway of my
adoptive parents' home, knowing that I had committed some horrible crime,
so horrible that my parents no longer wanted me."

That experience, even for one so young, makes it difficult to love
and trust others or to feel good about oneself ever again. She wrote:
"IT hope Tony will understand that his rejections are not his fault. Sadly
I think the odds are against Tony."

Unless, I wanted to say to her, unless Tony knows love and acceptance

and affirmation. Unless he is found by someone capable of loving him with
God's accepting love.

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Unless - he - we - you and I are found by Jesus Christ. and in the
finding experience the blessing of adoption by God, who is mother and
father of us all,

As culture, as nation, it is time to put muscle and money into our
sentimentality about family.

We know some things that work. And it is time to stop playing
conservative/liberal political games and start providing them if, that is
to say, we wish the family to survive.

We know that Operation Headstart works.

We know that a welfare system that penalizes people for being married
doesn't work.

We know that when people do not have access to or cannot afford
primary health care; when schools are substandard and underfunded: when
there is nothing but single mothers, trying desperately to keep little ones
alive... we should know that we are, failing as a society... and that our
children and their children will still be paying the penalty for our
failure.

We know that for this system to work single mothers must work for a
meaningful wage. And for that to happen, we must find a way to provide
accessible day care, or pay the consequences.

We do know some answers and it seems to me that an appropriate way to
celebrate Mother's Day is to go home and write a letter to the President at
the White House and urge him to support the Child Care Bills now proceeding
through Congress.

And while you're at it, call your parents - or somebody's parents -
or whoever is parent to you. Tell them you love them. Let them know that
you no longer hold it against them that they were not perfect. Don't
forget your Mother on your birthday.

And remember Tony — whose adoptive parents unadopted him. And how
twenty centuries ago St. Paul used that very image of adoption to describe
what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.

And remember him — Jesus — who taught us something almost unspeakably
beautiful - "Abba" - the one who created us, affirms us, wants us to be,
accepts us, loves us - as much as a mother affirms and wants and accepts
and loves her newborn baby.

Amen,

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