May 8, 2005

Sermon for May 8, 2005, Sunday after Ascension Day

This is a day of many celebrations. Every year the Second Sunday in May is Mother’s Day. This year it is the 60^th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day; 140 years ago Confederate soldiers were coming home. President Jefferson Davis would be captured on May 10. In the church calendar this is the Sunday after Ascension; next Sunday is Pentecost, 50 days after Easter, the celebration of the experience of the Holy Spirit that made the apostles bold to proclaim the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection to the ends of the earth. And this is the last Sunday this year we sing “God’s Paschal Lamb” and the last Sunday I’ll preach on the First Epistle of Peter. My text is from chapter 5, verse 12, “I have written this short letter to encourage you and to testify that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it.”

When God appears in the bible to anyone he begins by saying “Do not be afraid.” Fear is the natural response of sinful human beings to the presence, power, and goodness of God. But God says to us, “Do not be afraid.” There are 63 references to “Fear not” in the bible. I’ll give you a few: In the Old Testament - in Genesis 15 to Abraham in a vision, 21 to Hagar in the desert, 26 to Isaac at the Beersheba well, and 46 to Jacob going down into Egypt, Exodus 20 Moses speaking for God to the people as he gave them the Ten Commandments, Deuteronomy 1, 20, and 31 Moses again as the people prepared to cross over Jordan to the promised land, Joshua 8 at Ai, Judges 6 to Gideon, First Samuel 12, Isaiah 35, 41, 43, 44, 54, Jeremiah 47, Daniel 10, Zechariah 8, and Malachi 3. In the New Testament St. Luke 1 to Zechariah the priest in the temple about John the Baptist, by the angel to Mary at the Annunciation, St. Matthew 1 to Joseph in a dream, St. Luke 2 to the shepherds in the fields Christmas Eve, 5 Jesus calling the disciples, 8 Jesus to Jairus before he healed his daughter, 12 to the disciples, St. John 12 Zechariah’s prophecy recalled on Palm Sunday, St. Matthew 28 the angel to the women at the tomb, and finally to St. John in exile on Patmos in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day.

God comes to us in his presence and power and goodness and love to encourage us, literally to fill us with his courage and presence and power and goodness and love. He comes to us in families, in the love of husband and wife, in the love of parents for children. And Mother’s Day, a celebration almost as old as this congregation, is a witness in our society to this love God gives us to share. I read a Spanish proverb, “An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest.” There’s a saying among the Hasidic Jewish community, “God could not be everywhere, so he gave each child a mother.” Zora Neale Hurston, one of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920’s wrote, “Mama exhorted us children at every opportunity to jump at the sun. We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”

St. Peter wrote, “this short letter to encourage you and to testify that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it.” Jesus Christ gives us the example in his life and in his death of how to live. “Since Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same intention (for whoever has suffered in the flesh has finished with sin).” While we live we sin and fall short of God’s intention, but while we live we are able to repent and return.

At a meeting I attended a while ago someone suggested that we take up a collection for a statue of the perfect functional family. But we couldn’t think of a suitable model. All of us have had good, and bad, experiences of family life. When I talk to couples before they are married I ask, “How do you want your life together to be different from what you grew up with?” Sometimes people are ready to answer that question; if they are not I assign discussion of that question as home work. All of us who are parents are well aware of our inadequacies and our failures, but we also know something of the unconditional love and encouragement that comes in the good times of family life. How many of us have sat down and held out our hands to encourage a child to take those first steps to us. How many of us put pictures on refrigerator doors, and read to children, and listen to them read to us. In the nature of things mothers get to be there for many of these events, and we give thanks for the encouragement mothers give children.

The time is short. It just seems eternal. Children do grow up. Some of us are blessed with grandchildren and great-grandchildren to enjoy and help and encourage. Many of us have been blessed with the encouragement of friends and other family members. There is some truth in the bumper sticker, “It is never too late to have a happy childhood.” It is never too late for us to receive the love and support and encouragement of God in Jesus Christ.

We all have to go through some tough times. We all went through the trauma of birth, and growing up, and skinned knees, and learning to receive and give love, and deal with the rejection we feel when we are not appreciated as we think we ought to be. We will all go through the trauma of death and face God’s judgment. “Everyone is judged.”

And the judgment we receive from God is perfect judgment because God is perfect. Our human judgments are limited and partial. That’s why God calls us to limit our judgment to those situations where we must judge – either in managing our own lives or because we are called to exercise judgment on another. Part of a mother’s responsibility is to teach children to deal with dangerous situations. “Be careful crossing streets, look both ways. Do to others and you would have them do to you,” and all the other prudential advice we are given, and give. When this teaching is given in the spirit of God’s love we need to pay attention, and when we disobey take the consequences.

Some judgment we receive, and make, is not given in the spirit of God’s love. St. Peter calls us to be humble of spirit, to discipline ourselves, to be alert to the temptations of that “roaring lion your adversary the devil who prowls around, looking for someone to devour.” The spirit of evil was at Auschwitz and the other concentration camps liberated 60 years ago but never to be forgotten. We honor those who served in the war to defeat that kind of evil, and those who serve today in the cause of freedom and peace. We honor our mothers and all those who resist evil, steadfast in faith, for we know that our brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after we have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called us to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish us. To him be the power forever and ever. “I have written this short letter to encourage you and to testify that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it.” Amen.