Stardate: May 12, 2014
4th Sunday of Eastertide
Upon which my motherly efforts bear fruit
....And by fruit I mean chocolate. I was very pleasantly surprised this morning to discover that my family had prepared a small Mother's Day breakfast and gift perfectly in line with my own complicated thoughts on the day. While I do not endorse emphasis on one's worthiness as a human being based upon the happenstance of propagation, nor the commercialization of a holiday intended to sweep motherhood up into a tide of anti-war activism (I'm not making it up--that's the original intent of Mother's Day, read Julia Ward Howe's early slam poetry on it here and why we should still care here), neither am I immune to the idea of a day that acknowledges that Moms try real hard, and you should probably make one breakfast.
I feel like it can be a fine line to walk. Extravagant gifts invite ego inflation, but complete dismissal makes one feel small, then sad, then angry, then sad because you got angry which turns into guilt and more sadness. This year the family nailed it.
While I was getting ready, the eldest kid brought me a breakfast of:
One expired orange (gratefully acknowledged, then 'misplaced')
One piece of bread smothered in jelly (ate it)
One glass of water. (drank it)
Yes, this was perfect, because she did it all herself.
Then they gave me a small heart-shaped cardboard-and-cloth box (super cute! Some lucky person will see this regifted) and a bar of organic fair trade dark chocolate (be still my heart! You DO love me!) Inside the box was a lovely set of fair trade purple Tagua nut earrings and necklace. It's actually pretty cute, and simple enough that it won't fall apart (which is, alas, the great critique of much hand-made artisan-supporting jewelry from Ten Thousand Villages--it is pretty and eco and yay, but it also is often made of tin and bits of trash, so it doesn't exactly wear well. I mean, it's a nice idea that I'm going to keep supporting, but yeah. Wear with care.)
It actually wasn't until after worship services that I realized the real coup of the deal--they'd done it all without any plastic (well, you could count the tray, but that thing was bought from a garage sale anyway, so it is like second hand leather and furs--didn't buy it new, consumer re-used, doesn't count. I think). Ha HA! My dogged and possibly overzealous focus on plastic awareness had rubbed off onto my family's consumer habits! Success!
I, of course, didn't realize that this was intentional on their part until I was reflecting on the miracle that the sermon went better than usual that day (and obviously, this is a completely arbitrary statement. I hope most ministers would agree with me that sometimes the sermons we think we NAIL are actually awful, nails-on-a-chalkboard disasters, and sermons that we despise are actually kinda ok in a wrestling sort of way.) I say the sermon was better than usual, because it had no right to be, as so often is the way of things. One person asked for it to be posted, so I'll do that. It's on the church website now (http://www.firstpreslr.org./sermons) and since you're all lazy, I'll stick it here too.
The thing that got me to realize the awesomeness of my kids was what I thought was a theme of the sermon: it's really hard not to be terrible to each other in relationship (and a good thing about this holiday is that we try to be better at it. Try). However, the black sheep motif of Good Shepherd Sunday (welcome to your annual 4th Sunday of Easter exploration and regurgitation of ancient mid-eastern animal husbandry practices! So relevant to your lives today that we have to spend the entire sermon explaining it!) made me realize something else that was a theme and I didn't know it:
Radical Inclusion makes people uncomfortable, and we should ask why.
And a piece of 'radical inclusion' that I realized ties to Mother's Day, and gracious reception of hospitality, and the gay rights movement, and even the Communion Table, is this: acceptance of The Other. Not approval per say, but acceptance that this person is who they say they are, regardless of whatever mask you think they might be wearing. It's actually REALLY hard to not layer upon people all the disbelief and cynicism of the modern world, because the temptation to NOT believe people is incredible--just look at how we treat politicians and celebrity gossip.
But what if you wore your heart and your trust on your sleeve, and just believed--that this person is as real as they can be right now, and even if that's not "really real", they still deserve the respect and dignity of acceptance at face value. How would that change how you treat those you don't usually trust?
Be honest. How you treat that panhandler on the off ramp. Or the kid with hair just a shade too perfectly odd; are those piercings all real? The hipster who always annoyingly knows the cool new thing before it was cool? The black sheep of the family?
What if you just decided to trust that they simply ARE who they say they are?
To put that another way, Jesus doesn't care about the color of the sheep.
Yeah, so anyway, here's the sermon, if you want to read that sort of thing. It'll make a whole lot more sense if you read the scripture it's based on first: you can read it here or you can listen to the readings for the day here. Happy Mother's Day! I'm glad you exist.
