NO GREATER LOVE

May 12, 1991
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
1 John 4:13-21
John 15:8-17

"No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's
friends." -John 15:13 (NRSV}

In a recent edition of Context, Martin Marty excerpts a new book by
Ursula LeGuin in which she poses the old question: a spaceship lands, the
captain wants one human being to talk to, to learn the nature of the human
race. Who shall we send? A fine, bright, brave young man, highly

educated, at his physical peak, a young woman? LeGuin suggested a
wonderful alternative.

"I would... go down to the local Woolworth's, or the
local village marketplace, and pick an old woman, over
sixty, from behind the costume jewelry counter or betel
nut booth. She has worked hard at small, unimportant
jobs all her life - jobs like cooking, cleaning,
bringing up kids, selling little objects of adornment
or pleasure to people. She was a virgin once, a long
time ago, and then a sexually potent fertile female,
and then went through menopause. She has fiven birth
several times and faced death several times - the same
times. She is facing the final birth/death a little
more nearly and clearly every day now. Sometimes her
feet hurt something terrible. She never was educated
to anything like her capacity, and that is a shameful
waste and a crime against humanity, but... she has a

stock of sense, wit, patience and experiential
shrewdness.

“It will be hard to explain to her why she should be
the one. 'Me,' she'll say, just a trifle slyly, ‘But
I never did anything.' We know better, She knows,
though she won't admit. it, that Dr. Kissinger has not
gone and will never go where she has gone, that the
scientists and shamans have not done what she has
done." [{Context: Martin E. Marty, 2/15/91]

a And so, Mother's Day. There are only two holidays, Christmas -and
. Easter, which stimulate Americans to spend more money than Mother's Day.

Greeting cards, gifts, flowers, only at Christmas do we use the telephone
more.

Robert Fulghum observes that “around the second Sunday in May are
focused powerful forces - concentrated in memory and forever stored in

hearts and minds and psyches. Serious stuff, too. Mother's Day is not
noted for comedy."

Fulghum, the former clergyman who has written two delightful best
selling books of essays, writes ~ in the second one ~ about the problems
ministers, particularly men, have with Mother's Day.

"Year after year I tried~to get it right," he says. "Samehow having -
had a mother and having known quite a few firsthand didn't seem to count
for much. I had never been a mother, so what did I know? I did give it my
best, I swear. Tried to deliver .on~the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other—hand
sorts of balanced, evasive sermons. Quoted a lot of big name authorities,

read sensitive poetry, avoided chancy jokes and gratuitous advice." But it
never quite came off.

One memorable Mother's Day, Fulighum decided to raise serious issues.
He acknowledged that many, if not most people, have blessed memories of

their mothers,. But then he gave a “moot quiz" and asked a series of
questions.

“How many. are involved in hypocrisy of the most
uncomfortable kind on Mother's Day?

How many really don't like your, mother ~ or hate
the mother you are?

, How many don't like your own children?
How many do not know your own mother?
How many find Mother's Day painful?

"It was not a good idea - the congregation became very
quiet, pensive, morose.

"A 'sainted mother! in the congregation accosted hin,
'Young man, better men than you have gone straight to
hell for suggesting what you said this morning. Shame -
shame - shame - for spoiling this day..." {It Was

On Fire When I Lay Down On It, p. 99-104]

You could ignore it, I suppose. “Mother's Day, after all, is not a
religious holiday per se. It does not appear in the Christian year as a
festival. But my sense is that most of us will do more celebrating of
‘Mother's Day than we will about Pentecost or All Saints which are Christian
festival occasions. Ignore it, we should not, I conclude, precisely
because the issues which cluster around issues of children, birth,
families, parenting and, in particular, the role of -women who often become

5/12/91

mothers, in the workplace, and the society at large, are as important and
potentially difficult and painful as any issue before us.

There was an article about Mother's Day in The Christian Century this
week. That would not have happened in the recent past, or if it did; the
Century would be inclined to conclude that Mother's Day is an exercise in
sentimentality and nostalgia, the creation of commercial interests which
know a good thing when they see it. This article was different. I learned
things I didn't know. For instance, Mother's Day was the invention of Anna
Jarvis, an earnest, hardworking Methodist who was not a mother herself but
wanted to do something nice to honor her own mother's memory. Around the
turn of the century the Sunday School movement Was very big, and she
convinced Methodist Sunday School officials ta observe Mother's Day, along
With Rally Day, Children's Day, Temperance Day, Anti-Cigarette Day. She
ultimately received the support of the most powerful- politicians of the
day, including Woodrow Wilson who made it a national holiday in 1914. 1
‘aiso discovered that innocent and sentimental as its origins were, from the
beginning they contained a basic protest about the role assigned women
by the culture. From the beginning there is a gentle but firm "protest" in
the rhetoric of Mother's Day. Anna Jarvis, anyting but a feminist,
nevertheless, as she promoted her idea, used to recite a playful, but
ultimately very serious litany about the "patriarchy of the American
Calendar." Said she:

"Washington's birthday is for the 'Father of our
Country';. Memorial Day for our 'Heroic Fathers'; Fourth
of July for ‘Patriot Fathers'; Labor Day for "Laboring.
Fathers'; -and even New Year's Day is for 'Old Father

Time.'" [The Christian Century, “Piety, Commercialisn,
Activism: The Uses of Mother's Day," Leigh E. Schmidt,
5/8/91]

We have come a long way culturally since 1914 and Anna Jarvis' issue
today is expressed in the struggle for the rights of women and mothers in
education, the professions, and the marketplace. It is an issue that has
to do with maternity leave and paternity leave, health care, - pre and post
natal ~ day care, work place conditions and whether or not pregnancy is an
added health and therefore legal risk. And beneath thase questions there
is an important issue being debated within the women's movement itself by
feminist thinkers. Should our goal be to establish a society which treats
men and women absolutely equally, without regard to gender, or do we want a
society which acknowledges and accommodates to the uniqueness of women and
men? Serious feminists line up on both sides of the question. Professor
‘Bonnie Miller-McLemore at Chicago Theological Seminary wrote recently:

"Between the warring ideological fronts stand the
women in the trenches who must combine work and love
amid a vacuum of models. The battle reached a climax
for me when my role as mother in a public world not.
structured for and even hostile to children, collided
head on with my feminist hopes for equality."

{The Christian Century, “Returning to the Mother's.
House: A Feminist Look at Orpah," Bonnie J. Miller-
McLemore, 5/17/91]

5/12/91 ~- . _ 8

That issue can be and often is painful, I sometimes think that the
people involved, young people struggling with the demands of parenting and
career in the competitive marketplace, are the new pioneers, pushing into
an unexplored land and that they, who are. brave enough to try and strong

enough to bear the pain, .are leading the rest of us into a new and
important place.

Professor Miller-McLemore asks poignantly:

“How can one be a mother and still retain one's
effective intellectual and professional personality?
How does the idea of equality fare next to the reality
of the delight mothers can take in relationships with
their children?"

Is there a Christian word for those difficult issues?

In some corners of the Christian community the word seems to be that
we must return to. traditional roles and to a neatly structured world in
which male and female roles were clear and different. But we know better -
we can't go back. We must find ways to honor and respect human beings
regardless of gender, and at the same time stand with and help those in’

whose experience these issues become very sticky - women who are trying to
combine having babies and career.-

And the distinctive word Christian faith may have to offer is a way

of discussing the issues: not simple solutions, but a methodology for
dialogue. ,

In a new book reviewed by the New York Times last Sunday, Elizabeth
' Fox Genovese argues that the problem is the current attitude of
individualism. it is not possible, she claims, for these difficult issues
to be reconciled, or even resolved satisfactorily, so long as everybody is
arguing only on the basis of the rights of the individual.

I couldn't help but remember a few years ago, in the middie of a
rampant individualism named the New Narcissism, when we suddenly discovered
that a century and a half before an astute observer recognized the glory
but also. the Achilles heel of American culture. Alex de Tocqueville noted
our penchant for individualism, our “habit of the heart". he called it, the
inclination to act solely in self-interest which ultimately could erode the

experiment in republican democracy and undermine the conditions of freedon.

And it is precisely here that the faith has something to say - -
something about the primacy, not only of the rights of the individual, but
love - something about the actual willingness of individuals to
sacrifice themselves for a greater good.

We have been looking in recent weeks at a portion of the Gospel of
John called the farewell discourses, the table conversation of Jesus at the
Last Supper. And the issues of Mother's Day, the role of women, the
difficulty of discussing these issues at all - all came into focus for me
this week as I read the words:

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"This is my commandment, that you love one
another as I have loved you. No one has greater love
than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends."

That's a revolutionary statement. That's the moral foundation for a
counter-culture, a way of thinking totally different from the individualism
which starts and ends with me and mine, and which suggests that fullness of

life, completeness, being a whole individual has more to do with giving,
sacrificing, living for others, than getting, buying, accumulating.

"You live in my love as you obey my commandments
- the first and primary one of which is to love one
another," he said. ;

“Phere is no greater love than this - to lay down
one's life for someone else."

Sometimes: that happens. Sometimes people actually do it, actually
endanger their own safety on behalf of someone else and whenever it happens
it takes our breath away. Do you remember Cory Elliot, the twenty—-nine-
year-old Gary, Indiana bricklayer who broke down the door and ran into a
burning house to rescue a father and three children, all of whom were
unconscious; pulled one of them out, got badly burned, and walked back in a

second time to get the others. Cory Elliot survived, barely, and he will
never be the same.

——— “Why did he do such a thing?" the reporter asked. "What would drive
a human being to such lengths?"

The reporter reviewed the classic historic and psychological studies
of unusual heroism, what Emile Durkheim called "altruistic suicide.” One
psychiatrist said-something intriguing: “When children are involved there
is often a different sense of responsibility and care-taking," Ultimately,

however, he said, psychiatry remains baffled by such examples of one person
laying down life for another.

The reporter concludes, -“fhere is another explanation, older and more
profound than those offered by psychology, biology or sociology, an insight
common to all great religions: we are all one."

I would call that the image of God in us, the capacity to love
without regard for safety or security, the unexplainable beauty that within
every human being there is the capacity to love and lay down one's life.
God made us that way. God gave us the capacity to discover our own most
powerful seif-hood - in loving others - in living for others. Ged, I
believe, created us with the capacity to be parents of creation, whether or
not we are biological mothers or fathers, to love and live for generations
yet to come, the children we see in front of us and their children and
their children after them.

Jesus wanted them to remember that more than anything else after he
was gone, wanted them to remember that they had that capacity within then,

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that they were loved like that by their Creator, their God who cared for
them like a mother cares for a nursing child and like a father welcomes the
prodigal home. He put it simply and powerfully and intensely personally:
"There is no greater love than to lay down life for friends." And he
walked out of the room and did it, went out and died and wanted them to
know that it was not for a noble principle, it was: for them that he laid
down life - and us. The Christian faith is about a God who loves like

that, a God whose very being is self-giving, and who gives life away for
others.

At the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Canberra,
a Presbyterian Professor of Theology from Korea stunned the opening session
by using native Korean customs, Aborginal dancers and jiberation theology
ina lecture. In an interview afterward she explained that her image of
God was no longer an elderly Western male, but an old, bent, wrinkled
Korean woman — her own mother in fact - who gave her life, lived for her,
joved her and always accepted her. If you know about that - if you were
and are the recipient of the selfless love of a mother or father - you are
blessed indeed and this is a day of eratitude and celebration. But even if
you are not, the word is that you are loved like that, by God

It is at the heart of the universe, this love which creates us,
nurtures us, lives for us and dies for us. And it is at the heart of
Christ's blessed words to would-be disciples:

"This is my commandent, that you love one another
as I have loved you. No one has greater love than

this, to lay down one's life for one's friends."

Amen.

5/12/91