May 13, 2018

These sermon notes are provided so you might follow along at home, if you wish. I promise you there are typos and they will change when delivered and maybe even before… so make the best of it that you can. If you have any questions, I am always happy to speak with you: 631-827-8611 or [email protected]

Peace, Ray

[Intro as part of Children’s Message]

Mother’s Day

It is celebrated around the world and has been, in one form or another, celebrated for thousands of years, from the Greek Cult to Cybele, an Anatolian mother goddess, to the devotion of many to Mother Mary, to our modern Mother’s Day observance.

Its origins over the millennia, however, have different and often contested starting points, depending on your view of mythology, archaeology, theology, sociology, gender studies, and sitz im leben a biblical criticism term, sociologically-based, which translates from German to - “setting in life.”

Like all things, the observance of Mother’s Day is seen through the eyes and the heart of the individual and the community, so it has a variety of legacies and practices.

In US historical terms, the observance of Mother’s Days began in 1908, when Anna Jarvis held memorial for her mother at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, WV and handed out 500 white carnations to all the mothers at the church.

It was a day set aside to honor her mother, Ann Marie Jarvis who had died in 1905 and had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War. Her goal was to create “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to address public health issues and to “keep the peace” in her own way.

By 1911, her work was so successful and struck such a chord that Mother’s Day was celebrated in all 46 states, New Mexico, Arizona would be added in 1912; Alaska and Hawaii in 1959.

It has been 60 years since any state has been added to the Union.

It was in 1911 that then President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating Mother’s Day to be held on the second Sunday in May as a national holiday to honor mothers.

It might be interesting to note that Anna Jarvis, the founder, was not a mother herself, although she gave birth to a way of remembrance…

As an aside, two points: Anna Jarvis became increasingly resentful about the commercialization of the day, suing card companies and other, to the degree where protesting at a candy maker’s convention in Philadelphia in 1923 against the commercialization, she was arrested fro disturbing the peace! Sometimes, even then, the peace needed to be disturbed, to preserve it.

Misdemeanor Mom…[story]

The second point is that Mother’s Day is always in the singular - a way of calling each family to honor its own mother, rather than all the mothers of the world. That changed my perspective…

Tracing motherhood back before Anna Jarvis eventually leads toward a path of “mother goddess” and other concepts of deities such as the Anatolian Goddess Cybele, as creators of life, the procreation of all there is, and has most often been associated with the feminine personification of nature, motherhood, fertility, creation, destruction and recreation,

All this, embodying the bounty and fertility of Earth - and the reference of Mother Earth or Mother Gaia = Mother Earth, as the Mycenaen Greeks referred to it in the 13th Century BCE - over 3,000 years ago.

In Hinduism, for example, the Goddess Durga represents the feminine aspect and the energy/ power or shakti of the One God or Brahman. Durga is the empowering and protective nature of motherhood. Time and space proceed from this Goddess, as does the creative force of life and extistance. This Goddess is referred to as The Divine Mother.

Mother Earth, Mother Gaia or Nature, Divine Mother…

In Christianity, we know that Jesus was born of a young Palestinian Jew named Mary. Perhaps the most famous mom of all. It occurs to me that had Jesus wished to he could have just appeared, but was born of a woman whose nurturing brought the infant Jesus into the world and gave birth to “the cosmic event of all creation.” She, Mary, The Holy Mother.

Motherhood has always been a profound creative and gender-specific term in most literature and descriptions.

Proverbs 8 points to the earliest of God’s creations, from which all Wisdom flows in the feminine Sophia: “God, sovereignly made me — the first — the basic, before God made anything else.” Proverbs 8:22

Perhaps, then, Motherhood first originated in Wisdom, continued in the making of space and time, the creation of the earth, and the birth of its promise through Jesus, and a reflection on the continued work of caring for others and peacemaking of Anna Jarvis and her mother Ann.

We are surrounded, galaxies and all, in motherhood.

We are all, after all, children of The Universe, with a capital U. And that may be the point, that looking at each other in this way, Jesus’s saying: “And I tell you, unless you change and be like little children…” Matthew 18:3

may be a way of saying that our point-of-view is in need of continuing transcendence from what is to - what really is - we are a planet of children of God.

It’s a carnation-view: can one look to a flower and see the broader design of the heavens, or heaven and God, if you wish. Maybe that was Jesus’ frustration - “How could you not see the kin-do of God at hand?”

“kin-dom…” Kail Gibran, the Lebanese-American author of the 1920’s who’s book The Prophet I have been using in worship these last few weeks…says

“Say not I have found the truth…but rather I have found a truth.” “Say not I have found the path of the soul; Say I have found the soul talking on my path, Unfolding for me, for you for all as a lotus of countless pearls.”

We don’t need all the answers to everything…we are not equipped to know such things, push or frustrate ourselves however hard we may to know it all. But we get a glimpse of the ideal - and that moves us, transcendence, transformation - even to become changed to the point of transfiguration… Motherhood is an ideal, embraced, it reflects our mom close at hand for man o f us, and a notion about the fullness of creation and the higher order of its origins:

The Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi is a prayer of that kind of motherhood:

An ideal that swells with peace, love. unity, truth, pardon, faith, hope, light, joy, consolation and understanding - and passing that on until like a thousand lotus pearls it overwhelms us.

Motherhood, Fatherhood, Siblinghood… seen in the light of these ideals creates in us an expectancy about the coming birth of the future, seeing ourselves not only as the recipient of what is to come, but as the co-creator…

No where is the expectancy higher, the anticipation at more of a fevered tempo in the gospels that with the words of this morning’s gospel, filled with the expectancy of what’s next; what could possibly follow to be more stunning than the resurrection of Christ -

What comes next is very important; I am sending what God has promised you, so stay in the city until the Holy Spirit arrives: the Comforter, Counselor, Advocate, Guide, Intercessor, Revealer of Truth, Spirit of God, Breath of Life - Sophia…

- Don’t run, - Hide - Look for other solutions - The solution is on its way to you - Be present - Believe in me - You are not alone - I love you - Like a mother - Like a father - Like a friend or sibling - And love each other as I have loved you…and as I see you loving one another.

The nurturing Spirit, whether Divine Mother, Mother Earth, Holy Mother, however you know the nurturer in your heart…

“God is doing something new… even now.” We cannot limit anything to our “sitz im leben” for that too is changing, and we must change with it to grow into what the world needs, for we are the guardians…of the beacon within us that moves us in one direction… In the Journal of Mother Studies, the September 2017 issue, Matha Joy Royce says this: “I begin (this thesis) with a broad statement that every human being is the result of the procreative experience. The procreative experience and resulting birth action transpires via a mother, historically a woman, but perhaps sometimes in the twenty-first century via a man (a male mother in the case of a trans man): perhaps in the future via an artificial womb. The intention here is to point out that we are defining a mother even in cases of more fluid identity.”

A little later on she states: “…[In the premise of motherhood studies it is] the lived experience of mother, within all of these interpretations of mother, mothering, and motherhood [that defines motherhood.]

As we open ourselves to myriad ways of identifying ourselves, including the mystery and futility of gender, it’s easy to get caught up in the syntactical and grammatical soup of pronouns and miss the point…

Gender, perhaps, is the next big discussion about God; the mystery of God’s diverse and manifold motherhood of creation in identities and ways that reflect a shimmering God’s Presence, as the Hebrews called it: the Shekinah; the divine presence interpreted symbolically as light - in Kabbalist known as a divine feminine aspect.

So, I close on this Mother’s Day with the specific experiences of motherhood and those that touch us as a part of our transcendent role in bringing peace and love and kindness to the world, yes, as its mother, all - as it has always been - and as you are.

Happy Mother’s Day, sitz im leben - whatever that may be.