The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
Mother’s Day
May 10, 2009
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: 1 John 4:7-21
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from
God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love
does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this
way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In
this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be
the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we
also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one
another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that
we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent
his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus
is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love
that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and
God abides in them.
Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may
have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this
world. There is no fear in love, but
perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever
fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because God first loved us.
Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for
those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God
whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers
and sisters also.
Sermon:
This quarter, I’ve been teaching a preaching class at the University of Chicago Divinity School. So every Monday afternoon, I drive to Hyde Park and walk from the parking lot to my class, which meets in the beautiful Bond chapel, a very popular spot for weddings.
I love to walk and I love to people-watch on the campus. I take in the students, see what they are wearing, watch what they are doing, what they seem to be about. It’s been a long time since I was in college or grad school so I like the chance to take it all in.
For example, the bumper stickers – my favorite Hyde Park bumper sticker, “Honk if you love silence.” Then there are the tee shirts. I saw one guy wearing this one: across his chest in big letters, “I’ll get married whenever I want to.” I found myself feeling irritated by it, annoyed at the very idea. “I’ll get married whenever I want to.” First, he looked about nineteen. Second, well, who’s asking, buddy? Lastly, I thought, it’s not true. You probably won’t get married whenever you want to. Marriage doesn’t work that way. It’s not just up to you. You may be ready, but you need another willing party who’s on the same timetable; but young people don’t see it that way. They can wear a tee shirt that says that with a straight face. Yes, they may say it’s just a joke, but underneath, some college students actually think they have that kind of control over the world. Particularly, at the U of C. That’s why the tee shirt annoyed me. It reminded me too much of myself at that age.
Back when I was in college, I started a strange habit that I kept up well into my early adulthood. I took a large yellow, lined legal pad, and wrote one year on each line, beginning with the year of my birth and going on into my forties, at which point, I must have assumed, life was pretty much over.
I remember mapping out my life plan in freshman year, beginning with marking the year I would finish college, adding various possible graduations in my future, which at that that time I thought would be law school. Sometimes I would add business school to that list, in a separate column, thus acknowledging that there could be more than one path I would take, my one nod to flexibility, but the rest was all mapped out.
Next, I added my personal plans to the legal pad. I wrote in the age I would get married, which I believed was most appropriately done in one’s mid-thirties. Next, I scheduled the births of my four children, two of whom I had decided would be adopted, thus allowing for appropriate spacing within biological limitations. According to the legal pad, within two short years my family would increase by 200% before I turned forty.
Here, I added another alternative path column, less a nod to flexibility and more my greatest hope, that allowed for the possibility that I might have twins. I might adopt another set of twins, thus accomplishing the whole reproduction project in one year. To my mind, that would have been hitting the efficiency jackpot. I had to be realistic. No one in my family had ever had twins. I would probably have to spend at least two years having all four of these children.
I had jobs listed on the legal pad, along with the purchase of my first car, my first house, and I even included plans to get various pets. While the dates and ideas on those legal pads changed somewhat over the years, even in grad school, which turned out not to be law or business, but divinity school of all things, I kept making those lists for an embarrassingly long time.
“I’ll get married whenever I want to.” I could have worn that shirt. I’ll have babies whenever I want to. I’ll get the job whenever I want to. Life was a mass of possibilities to which I merely needed to bring order, with my pen and legal pad.
Looking back, those lists were about more than order and control. What I think they were really about was fear. Control, while it may look like over-confidence, is more often a symptom of fear, and a way of coping with it.
We think if we map it all out, anticipate the unpredictable, we can eliminate scary things. That doesn’t usually do it. Fear and worries remain, because we’re only human.
According to today’s letter, 1 John, there is one thing that can cast out that fear, and it’s not a list, and it’s not a plan, and it’s definitely not a career trajectory. It’s love. The writer says that perfect love casts out fear. Love. He says that “Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as God is, so are we in this world.”
In other words, He is saying, divine love has been perfected in us. It’s there for us to tap into. When we do that, there’s no judgment we need to be afraid of. The ultimate thing we will be judged on is not our accomplishments, but how we give and receive love. “We love because God first loved us.” That is so profound, it bears repeating. We love because God first loved us. It’s in us, in our DNA, we are meant to live for love. Not fear, not worry, but love.
I once knew a woman who was very nervous to have children – to be a mother. Her own childhood had been so difficult that she worried that she was too deeply scarred to be a good mother. She told me that mother’s day was always tough for her. “All those people talking about their saintly mothers. I didn’t get that kind of unconditional love.” In her childhood, love was something to be earned.
When the mother was angry at her daughter, she shut herself in her room. Now a grown woman, the daughter remembered knocking on the door, pleading, crying to go in and talk things through with her mother, but the door remained shut and she knew that she was about to get days of the silent treatment. So she did what resilient human beings do. She coped. As a little girl, she learned to be very careful in her interactions with her mother. She was so afraid of making her angry. She said, “I kept thinking that if I just got it right, if I just behaved perfectly, she might love me. It was a story that broke my heart, but I’ve heard it from more than one person. We don’t all get the parents we deserve, and we don’t all learn about love the right way, the first time around.
Some people are raised to think that if you are fearful enough, careful enough and just try to get it right, you will eventually be loved. That’s looking for love from a place of fear.
Scripture says, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”
Here’s the good news of the gospel. Fear does not produce love. Fear, worries, the pressure to achieve, to be perfect, none of those produce love. Love casts out fear. Love takes all that other stuff and kicks it in the butt. Love sneaks up on you. When love doesn’t show up where it’s supposed to, when you get tired of the cycle of fear, and punishment, and a fruitless search for love in an empty place, love sneaks up on you from somewhere else.
We learn a different path to love. Ultimately, we can’t base our capacity to love on whether or not other people did a good job loving us. The good news of the gospel is this. Our capacity to love comes not just from what we learn in life. We love because God first loved us. So the first step is, as Jesus puts it, we must “believe the love that God has for us.”
This is what made the difference to that woman who was afraid of being a mother. She realized that her capacity to love came not from her own mom, but from God. She adopted a little girl who is loved with all the passion and generosity that she had not received, but she still had it all right here, ready to give, when she was ready. In the end, perfect love casts out fear. Who has perfect love? God.
I don’t know when I stopped making all those lists. I suspect it was after I got married about ten years earlier than scheduled. I suspect it was after I changed my school plans six or seven times, based on things I could never have predicted, like a call to the ministry, for example. I suspect it was after I had replaced my planned financial success with student loan debt. I suspect it was after I learned that you cannot schedule having or adopting a baby on an exact date, and that twins do not make for increased efficiency in anyone’s life.
I also suspect that love played a role. The love of a husband, who apparently had not read the business plan and had the nerve to show up 10 years early, the love of a baby, the love of deep friendships that grow richer with the gift of time – these were all things that I could never have understood until they happened to me. Until they stopped being abstract ideas on a legal pad and became instead the messiest, most unpredictable, unplannable mass of human connections and emotions, a complex web of stuff that is bigger than anything we can imagine, and so we call it love.
On Mother’s Day, I remember being pregnant with my first child. By then, my list on the legal pad was not about myself but about…who, was it a him or a her? I had no idea until after the delivery, when we met one another for the first time in the hospital.
During nine months of pregnancy, I never thought of myself as meeting my son. I felt so connected to the life inside of me, and so transformed by it.
When I say transformed, I am serious. I put on well over 50 pounds with both pregnancies – well over. After 53 pounds, I stopped weighing.
I was fueled by these appetites that were not my own. I craved things I had never craved before. I was a new person, melded with this other growing person, as if we were one, and suddenly we liked oranges and we hated salad dressing and we needed to build strong bones by eating ice cream, straight out of the carton. I remember explaining all this to my doctor after putting on the first thirty of those pounds at which time he informed me the fetus was now the size of a grain of rice.
So
I worked on a new list for this grain of rice, from the due date on, now
mapping out in my mind every month, the first steps, the first grade, the first
date. I planned it all and knew it all, because this growing person was a part
of me.
Then, he was born, and I looked at him, cleaned up in his little blanket and realized I had no idea what he would look like. He had his own little hands. He had his own little face. He was not a part of me. He was himself.
I remember saying, “It’s nice to meet you, Calvin.”
I welcomed this little stranger, this little independent being, into a scary world, where my notes and plans on a legal pad meant nothing. I wanted to tell him all this, to warn him in his first minutes of life that the world is an unpredictable place, where he might not get married when he wants to, or find the job the first time around, or get the affection he needs or the kindness he wants. I wanted to tell this little stranger all my fears.
Instead, I just said, “I love you.”