The Sixth Sunday of Easter (Year C, RCL)
May 13, 2007
The Reverend Paul R. Abernathy, Rector
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Today is Mother’s Day, our annual celebration of motherhood. Declared, in 1914, a national holiday by President Woodrow Wilson. This preceded by the
crusade of Anna Jarvis to establish a memorial day for mothers, the first commemoration held on Sunday, May 10, 1908. This originating from the protest
of Julia Ward Howe – American abolitionist, social activist, and poet, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic – against the death and
destruction wrought by the American Civil War. Her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation, beginning with the stirring words – “Arise…women of this
day…Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!” – was a pacifist reaction, indeed, rejection of the carnage of that great conflict and a feminist
declaration that women had a responsibility to shape society at the political level.
Mother’s Day has become, it seems to me, our annual national nod to niceness, for motherhood, with apple pie and the American flag, remains for many
the proverbial expression of all things wonderful and unobjectionable. The American greeting card industry sells more cards on this day than any other.
And the National Restaurant Association tells us that Mother’s Day is the most popular day for dining out. How nice! Yet, I shared an overview of the
origins of this day so that we will not forget that they are rooted in the soil of protest and change.
This is the point to which I will return. However, for a moment, I digress so to acknowledge an oddity and a reality.
The oddity is that I am a man preaching on Mother’s Day. I confess to my own internal sense of feeling, perhaps being out of place. The
authenticity and accessibility of my feminine side notwithstanding, I, simply, am not a woman, the experience of which, in its fullness, is beyond
my ken.
The reality is that all mothers, those who have borne children in and from their wombs, are women, but not all women are mothers. A sad fact in the
lives of many women – some of whom I know most intimately and who are most dear to me. Hence, I risk raising this heartfelt concern not simply, however
sincerely, for the sake of honesty, but rather, for the sake of honoring the truth, I pray, with sensitivity and sympathy.
Now, I return to my primary point – that Mother’s Day was founded in advocacy for change. A vision of which I see in today’s reading from the Book of
Revelation.[1] A vision out of time, for it is after the end of time. A vision of paradisal existence – paradise – when all
is made well. A vision of the city of God, the realm of God’s eternal presence.
Visions – even those as strange as the ones in the Book of Revelation – often arise, I think, out of our very human recognition of the way things are
in the world. Oppression unending – politically in the disenfranchisement of civil rights or economically in the form of crushing, unalleviated poverty.
Violence unmitigated, regionally and globally in ceaseless war and in our more personal acts of enmity one to another. Visions, born out of the horror
of our experience of the “what is” in the world, express our longing for the hoped for “will be” within our human hearts against which the
world’s reality screams an incessant, deafening “No!”
So powerful is our longing, our hope that in Revelation the very language of negation, the word “no” is appropriated, really, rehabilitated to
articulate the vision. A vision so extraordinary, so reality-overturning that the word “no” means “yes.”
In Revelation’s vision, there is no temple, no house of God’s presence, for God is fully, eternally omnipresent. There is no need
for sun or moon, for God’s shekinah, God’s glory provides everlasting light. Therefore, there is no night, for it is always day. There is
nothing, no thing unclean or accursed, which I don’t interpret exclusivistically to say that the righteous are in and the unrighteous are out,
but rather that nothing is unclean or accursed because all is made clean and all is blessed.
You probably know by now that I usually need to find some connection to life as I experience it in order to understand something. Therefore, I must see
this Revelation-vision of cleanness and blessing, this Revelation-vision of an end to oppression and violence in the concrete context of our earthly
existence. Even more, I must be able to see through the lens of this vision what it is that you and I – that we – can do to bring it to light.
In this last regard, I recall an old African Methodist Episcopal preacher once saying, “Praying is alright” – and I would add that having hope
and having visions are alright – “but after we pray, we have to get up off of our knees and do something!” So, on this Mother’s Day, I want to
imagine a world in which oppression and violence against women are no more.
I think of the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs – eight objectives adopted by 189 nations gathered at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000
to be achieved by 2015. The eight objectives, each with quantifiable measures, are:
Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Achieve universal primary education
Promote gender equality and empower women
Reduce child mortality
Improve maternal health
Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Ensure environmental sustainability
Develop a global partnership for development.
Given that four of these goals, meant to address the world’s most pressing developmental challenges, pertain to women and children tells us something
about the precarious state of existence of our sisters and our youngest sisters and brothers today.
At last year’s General Convention, The Episcopal Church, when, for a breathless moment, we took a break from our interminable bickering about sexuality,
actually did something else – adopting the MDGs as actionable and achievable. An immediate result of this adoption is the One Episcopalian
campaign – an evangelical effort to recruit Episcopalians one person, one parish at a time to work toward one world where the challenges that the MDGs
attempt to address are no more.
Closer to home and to heart, I think of The Vagina Monologues – Eve Ensler’s award winning play based on interviews with over two hundred women
about their views of sex and relationships, intended as a clarion call to end all violence against women, and performed in this nave in February 2005,
my wife, Pontheolla, being one of six monologuers. I still can recall the powerful impact of the performance. How it led me to reflect on my childhood,
growing up in a household with an alcoholic and abusive father and a dutiful, quiescent mother, which is to say that my formative education regarding
relationships wasn’t very healthy. How it led me to reevaluate and change my own behavior in my relationship with Pontheolla – behavior, which, if
not violent and abusive on its face, certainly, in many ways was and, at times, still is far less than sensitive and sympathetic.
On this Mother’s Day, I envision a world in which oppression against and violence to women are no more. Even more, I envision what we might do to help
bring it to light. Still more, I envision that if, when, as it comes to light, then we might truly say, Happy Mother’s Day!
