Faith, Hope, Love, and Families

A Sermon on Mother's Day 2020 inspired by 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Part 3 of #DaysofHope Sermon Series 

(a worship series adapted with permission from 
HOPE: Living with Confident Expectation Creative Brief 

by The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection)

In his letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul sets a high bar for what love lived out looks like. For many of us, on this Mothers’ Day Sunday, we give thanks to God that we experienced glimpses of this kind of love through our moms. I say glimpses because, let’s be real…the kind of love Paul describes sounds impossible. Consider the way Eugene Peterson translates these few verses about love:

Love never gives up.

Love cares more for others than for self.

Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.

Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,”

Doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel,

Takes pleasure in the flowering of the truth,

Puts up with anything,

Trusts God always,

Always looks for the best,

Never looks back, but keeps going to the end.

Love never dies.

We only need be a teensy, little, itsy, bitsy honest with ourselves to say…that kind of love is hard!

Some of us are lucky enough that we experienced love in some of these ways most of the time through the moms we celebrate this weekend, whether they are mothering figures in our lives through birth, adoption, fostering, or mentoring. Yet, I also recognize, that for many, this weekend is more complicated. Some are mourning the loss of their moms and the special love they miss in their absence. Some are full of love, ready to give it away, praying for the chance to become a mom. Some moms are barely making it through the day because the child they loved with their whole heart is gone, whether because of accident, illness, or violence, and the sting of death feels more painful today. And, yes, some will scroll past our social media outpour of love and walk quickly past greeting card and flower displays in dollar stores and drugstores because their earthly mothers left the acts of love more undone than done in this life.

How ever this particular day hits you, we can all agree that the love Paul describes in this 13^th chapter of 1 Corinthians is HARD! And for good reason.

Paul is writing to a church in conflict. The Christians in Corinth have found new freedom in Christ, but they have been abusing that freedom to justify doing whatever they want to do and asking God for forgiveness after the fact. They have been celebrating communion together through a shared meal, but as they remember Christ’s sacrifice they forget to wait on the blue collar folk in the church to get off work and get to the table before they eat up all the food. They know the power of the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon them, but they are spending more time arguing about whose spiritual gifts are the best rather than using these gifts in love for God’s mission.

Right before we pick up with some of Paul’s most famous words today, Paul has spent the entire last chapter of this letter using the metaphor of the body to describe the church. Just like a body, Paul says, that is made up of diverse parts like an eye, a foot, a mouth, a hand—the body of Christ is made up of diverse members with different spiritual gifts. Just like you wouldn’t chop off a body part and expect to be able to function like normal, Paul teaches the Corinthians that each person has an essential role to play for the good of the whole church. We belong to each other. If one member suffers, we all suffer. If one member rejoices, we all rejoice. And LOVE, the more excellent way that Paul shows the Corinthians and us, love is how we are to care for one another.

The kind of love Paul wants us to show is the kind of love my single mom of two teenage children instilled in our family with “family meetings” after arguments and fights that set ground rules for how to treat one another and always ended with hugs and saying, “I love you,” even when we didn’t feel like it. The kind of love Paul urges the church to embody is the love that recognizes we are all in this together—not to get our way with church decisions, not to make sure we get our personal preferences in worship so that we are happy and comfortable, not to let self-righteousness cover up self-interest—but to know God and make God known through the way we practice love. The love Paul teaches us about today is the kind of love that hopes all things and endures all things, even this current pandemic crisis, because we are called by our faith to this highest standard of love for God and love for neighbor.

Love is the total sum of what it means to be a Christian. To belong to God’s Church, to Christ’s body, is to be an agent of love in the world—not seeking our own advantage but, instead, working on behalf of others. When Jesus gathered with his closest disciples the night before his crucifixion, he did not say that the world would know his followers by their political policies, their unkind memes, their name calling, their judgment, their divisive talk. Jesus said, “Everyone will know you are my disciples when you love each other.”

Even in all of its impossibility, I have experienced the kind of love that Paul describes through the mothering influences in my life. As a child when I skinned my knee, I experienced it in the patient love of a mother who cared for me, cleaned me up with hydrogen peroxide that we called “magic water,” and covered me in band-aids and kisses to let me know it was going to be okay. I experienced it in the kind love of a grandmother who let her kindergarten-aged granddaughter talk her into buying a giant coloring book as they waited in the lobby of the auto shop while her car’s oil was being changed. I experienced the love that kept no record of wrong through aunts who continued to show up for me at important milestones in my life even when I was being a teenage turd.  I experienced the unjealous love of a mother-in-law who raised a son to be caring and kind and then released him to share deep love with his spouse. And, I have experienced the love that does not seek its own advantage through female friends, colleagues, and mentors who have cheered me on, have cried with me in seasons of hurt and pain, and have never, not once, seen me as competition but, rather, as another woman to lift up and empower. Not all of the women who I remember today may have children…but they have been mothers to me. And today, for their love, I give thanks to God.

Even the mothers throughout the Bible had unique experiences of motherhood and offered love in different ways. Motherhood plays an important role in the Bible. It binds the beginning and the end. The stories of mothers offer us a glimpse into the heart of God.

Consider the women we meet in the pages of Scripture.[1]

"In the beginning, the first woman was gifted with the responsibility of bringing forth life. She was named Eve because she was the mother of all living, but she was also a mother in her own right—the first of many mothers to come.

Though Sarah’s womb was closed, God promised nations and kings would come from her. Ten years passed, and motherhood seemed as impossible as the day it was first promised. But the Lord is faithful to keep his promises, and Sarah bore a son who made her laugh.

Leah was the first born, overlooked by her husband Jacob who gave his heart to her younger sister. When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb. Despite Jacob’s disdain, she found her motherhood in the Lord.

When Pharaoh became angry at the fruitfulness of the Hebrews, Jochebed sacrificed her motherhood for the sake of her son. When Pharaoh’s daughter saw the child, she had compassion on him. Because of Jochebed’s sacrificial motherhood, the Israelites found freedom.

Naomi was a mother who experienced the loss of her son, yet she gained a daughter in Ruth who declared, “For where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people. Your God, my God.” Naomi and Ruth became family by faith. Mary, a virgin, and not yet married, was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. The motherhood of this blessed woman was more than the continuation of a family name. But a means for God to bring a savior into the world to save his people from their sins.

From the garden to the cross, there have always been mothers. These women paved the way for all women, representing the full spectrum of the ways one could be called, “Mom.”

Whether, a mother in faith, mentorship, adoption, or birth, mothers play an important role in the stories of generations to come."

Today, we remember the women who have mothered us through all our ages and stages as representatives of God’s agape love, the kind of love most fully embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Jerry Irish, a professor of religion at Pomona College, reminds us, “The love described in 1 Corinthians 13 is love we experience as God’s unshakable grasp upon our lives. It is the source of our greatest security and, thus, our freedom to actually be patient and kind, to bear all things and not insist on our own way.”

In short, the kind of love we know through Jesus Christ is a love that makes the hope we need right now possible. As Frederick Buechner writes and as I often life to remind us, “Resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing.” The love that raise Jesus from the dead, the love that Paul teaches about today, the love we glimpse through relationships with mothering figures in our lives, the love we will one day experience in its completeness in God’s presence…this love gives birth to hope and reminds up that the future will be better than the present.

Because of God’s love, a love that never fails.

So as we wait for the day when that love will be known completely in the world, even as we are completely known by God, let us hold onto and practice the three things Paul names that will remain.

Let us practice faith by trusting steadily in God.

Let us practice hope, choosing to believe the future will be better than the present moment and offering our lives in service to make it so.  

Let us practice love extravagantly…because the kind of love Paul writes about, the kind of love we know through Jesus…that love is gonna take a lot of practice. But it’s the best kind of love!

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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[1] The following about mothers in Scripture is a script of video produced by and purchased from Igniter Media for this sermon in it spoken form.