THE STRAIGHTFORWARD PULPIT

Text: John 15:9-17

Theme: “Back to the Future with Love”
The 6th Sunday of Easter
Mother’s Day
May 13, 2012
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau



IN THE NAME OF JESUS


9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit —fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.

Recorded in a book entitled Leaves of Gold -- a volume passed down from my grandmother, to my mother, and then to me -- are these words first penned by Kate Douglas Wiggin:

Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.

Once again, Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers among us this morning! May God continue to bless you in your motherhood and in all that it means.

There’s no mention of Mom in today’s Gospel lesson. There is much talk of love, and we’ll get to that. The entire text from John chapter fifteen is a direct quote from Jesus Christ. He’s speaking to His disciples who would become part of the first church. The church, down through the years, has been referred to in feminine terms. One of our classic hymns illustrates the point: “Yet she (referring to the church) has union with God the Three-In-One and mystic, sweet communion with those whose rest is won.” Someone once said that “If you want God as your Father, you must have the church as your mother.” For it is in the context of mother church that one is given that new birth by water and the Spirit.

Speaking to that fledgling mother church, Jesus said: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus, because He is Jesus, took it one step further – as only Jesus can do and what it takes Jesus, the sinless Son of God, to do. He not only suffered and died on that cross for His friends. He did so for His enemies as well. The Scriptures declare that He “…suffered once, the just for the unjust, to bring us to God.” The majesty – indeed, the grace – of this message is what the church is all about, and the church is called to live such love even to the point of death.

At 41 years of age, Stacie Crimm was shocked to discover that she was about to become a mother. Doctors had told her that she would never be able to conceive, so she surprised them all. But just a few months after her pregnancy became known, she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. With that news, Stacie was presented with the most difficult dilemma a mother could face. She could undergo chemotherapy to save her own life or she could forgo the treatment to save the life of her baby. Her choice was to spare the child. And thankfully, she lived long enough to hold her tiny baby girl, Dottie Mae, in her arms. Stacie died last year in September. The news media declared that this mother “exemplified the courage of womanhood” by the choice she made. But we, here in mother church, can take it one step further: she exemplified that great teaching of Jesus that “Greater love hath no one that this: that one lay down his life for his friends.”

Along with it being Mother’s Day, there’s another reason for rejoicing here at First Presbyterian this morning. We are welcoming new members, and, in today’s liturgy, celebrating two baptisms. Our little corner of “Mother Church” continues to grow, and that, rightly, should give us an extra jolt of joy today. With gratitude to God, we are glad to have Jackson, Janet, and Raymond Jones as part of our little flock. The same goes for Esther Mboto and Kim Tate. These new members know what we already know: First Presbyterian of Denton is not the perfect church. In fact, I’ve often remarked that if I ever found a perfect church I wouldn’t join it. Do you know why? Because if I joined it it wouldn’t be perfect anymore.

As Mike Cassidy and I discovered yesterday morning at a presbytery meeting, the church can be a messy place. Important information can be withheld and then excuses made for its withholding; misunderstandings can carry the day; divisions among people can happen; feelings can be hurt; tears can be shed. But smack dab into the middle of this comes a most timely word of Jesus today. He says to the messy church, the mother church: “Remain in my love…You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit – fruit that will last.”

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was pastor of a Lutheran congregation. It was a small church, and, looking back, I became something of a numbers cruncher. I was worried – almost to the point of being sick – about how many people were coming to church. I wanted the church to grow in numbers all but to the point obsession. People, even today, ask me: “Is the church growing?” If I could have a dollar for every time I’ve been asked that since becoming pastor of this church, I think I could take you all out for Mother’s Day brunch! I had a secretary back then, who, on the anniversary of my first ordination, gave me a plaque. It had an image of Jesus the Good Shepherd holding a sheep. Underneath were these words: “Count your blessings and not your sheep.” It was – and remains! – a gentle reminder that there’s more to being the church, the messy church, the mother church than the bottom line.

As Diana Butler Bass points out in her book Christianity After Religion, the first decade of the twenty-first century was not particularly good for the holy catholic church of which we Presbyterian are a part. In fact, some have called 2000-2010 the “Horrible Decade”. Churches across the board experienced a “participation crash”, as Bass and others described. There were five factors, she said, that contributed to this.

First, there was the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Politicians and others blamed the radical elements of the Islamic religion for this. But the more they did so, the more religion in general looked bad. Bass writes: “It did not help that some religious leaders, like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Franklin Graham, blamed American infidelity for the attacks, saying we had been too tolerant of homosexuals and feminists.” The religious left had its own take on the event. Burned into the database of every right-wing radio station in the country are the words of Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright: “America’s chickens have come home to roost.” Picking up on this post-911 religious chatter, Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken American atheist, wrote: “People of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and destruction of all the hard-won human attainments (art, literature, philosophy, ethics, and science). Religion poisons everything.” Bass concluded: “Anti-Islamic prejudice and unthinking hyperpatriotism worked as a double-edged sword of religious self-injury throughout the decade.”

Second, Bass lists the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal. Looking back, this led to an erosion of overall respect for the clergy – and not just in Catholic circles.

Third, Bass points out the Protestant conflict over homosexuality. With the ordination of Gene Robinson, an openly gay priest, in the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, the battle lines were drawn. Bass says: “Although some Christians surely felt theologically and morally uncomfortable with the idea of a gay bishop, many more were appalled with the nastiness of the controversy, the obvious politicization of their denominations, the low spiritual tone of the discussion, and the scandal of churches suing their mother denominations over property.” The overall effect was to underscore a new narrative – that Christianity is mean, bigoted, and makes people behave badly. That was 2003.

Then came 2004 and a fourth reason. The religious right won the battle, but lost the war. Time magazine touted the second election of George W. Bush as the greatest victory of conservative, “evangelical” religion in the last four decades. Yet, in a recent book, American Grace, the real victory of the religious Right may have been to alienate an entire generation of young people. And I’m telling you, you start counting Presbyterian sheep and the numbers are noticeably absent from the teenage years to about fifty years of age.

The fifth and final reason Bass cites is what she called “The Great Religious Recession” which she traces to the year 2007. Since the year 2000, General Social Survey data shows as much as a 12 point drop in public trust in religious institutions. The American public places more confidence in the scientific community, medicine, the U.S. Supreme Court, and education. The religious favorable rating now hovers around the confidence people have in Wall Street or major corporations.

Looking back over that horrible decade, I suppose you could consider it in one of three ways. You could be an optimist, dance through the rain, whistle in the dark, and say that things will eventually get better. Or, you can be a pessimist and claim that the sky is falling, the end is near, and so on and so forth. Or third, you could be the realist who tries to reconcile the opposing views of the optimist and the pessimist, and then says “Let’s all get along.” Are those the only choices? Some would say so.

But you know what, I’m holding out for a fourth option. I want to look at the facts not as a cheery optimist, not a dismal pessimist, and not as a boring realist.

Instead, I want to be an opportunis. I want, with you, to spot the opportunities that are out there. They may be hidden from us, but they won’t be hidden for too long if we take the time to look.

One opportunity – and perhaps the greatest one of all – is right in front of us in today’s Gospel. And that is the OPPORTUNITY TO REMAIN IN CHRIST’S LOVE, the OPPORTUNITY to AFFIRM that we did not choose God, or spirituality, or religion, or some combination of the three. Instead, God chose us to bear much fruit. And He urged these things upon us so that we might have, in our own lives, the fullness of joy. The opportunity, in a nutshell, is to go back to Jesus so that we might go back into the future with LOVE.

When this opportunity is acted on, you’re going to have more families like the Jones’s. You’re going to have more Esther Mbotos. You’re going to have more Kim Tates. The love will be multiplied – the love from God to, yes, the messy church, and, indeed, to the mother church, and, most certainly, to our church too.

Amen.