Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter
Happy Mother's Day
Theme: To the pure, all things are pure.
Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed!) Alleluia! In today's
Gospel, Jesus says to you, "I am the Vine; you are the branches. apart from
Me you can do nothing.
Dear Christian friends,
Mother's Day is a secular holiday. As of today, there is nothing
churchly or liturgical or Christian about the celebration. As we now know
it, Mother's Day is about elevating and honoring one particular
person-mom-above other people. A good argument could be made from the
Scriptures that this is a bad idea for Christian worship. We Christians must
neither show favoritism (James 2:1) nor elevate anyone in our midst except
for "Christ crucified" (1 Corinthians 1:23).
Because Mother's Day is a secular holiday-a day that probably
benefits greeting card companies and florists more than it benefits
mothers-many pastors oppose the idea of Mother's Day observances in the
Church. Quite a few of my dear colleagues in the pulpit would rather be shot
than preach a so-called Mother's Day sermon, and in many respects I cannot
blame them. (I don't think I have ever preached a Mother's Day sermon-but
who can remember such things?) It is not that my fellow pastors do not love
their mothers or feel jealous of yours. It is not that they are insensitive
to the hard and thankless work of maternity. They oppose Mother's Day
observances in worship for one reason alone: These faithful and earnest
shepherds of the Church want the focus of our Christian worship to be
exclusively upon our Christ and the work of forgiveness that our Christ
fully accomplished for us upon His cross-and these men are right and nothing
in our worship should focus our attention upon anything except for Jesus and
His gifts.
Mother's Day is a secular holiday, but maybe we should change
that. Maybe we should make Mother's Day a liturgical feast of the Church
Year. It doesn't have to be big; we could make it a minor feast. But after
all, it is not like the Church has never before stolen a pagan holiday from
the unbelieving world.
· Nobody knows why we celebrate the Christmas on December 25, but
there is a good chance that this date was chosen to replace either a holiday
devoted to a Roman god or the religious observance of the winter solstice.
· How on earth did the Council of Nicea in 325 AD decide that Easter
should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon that
occurs on or after the spring equinox? Some scholars claim that these
Christians tapped into a pagan method of keeping time in order to establish
Easter's date.
· Similarly, colored eggs, blooming flowers, and newborn animals all
appear to have been symbols used in idolatrous worship before they became
today's symbols of our Lord's victorious resurrection from the dead.
The holy Christian Church has a grand history of transforming pagan
religious observances into Christ-centered acts. Time and again we
Christians have taken something man-centered or even idolatrous and we have
changed its focus so that it may glorify Christ in our midst and fix our
attentions upon Him.
Why don't we do the same with Mother's Day? Why don't we take this
secular holiday and transform it into something that will fix our attention
all the more upon the Christ who loves us and who died for us? You could
still take your mom out to lunch, buy her flowers or serve her breakfast in
bed. You could still give her a card that says mushy things to her. Mom
still can have the larger part of the day on Mother's Day.
In addition to these things, we could also bring Mother's Day into
the Church by celebrating a liturgical feast that uses the imagery of
motherhood. We would NOT want to do this as a way of transferring the focus
of our worship away from Christ and toward our mothers. We could do this as
a way of understanding all the more the great, on-going gifts that Christ
daily provides to us. Stated another way, Mother's Day could focus our
attentions exclusively upon our Christ. Mother's Day could be the feast day
on which the Church hears and rejoices that God's forgiveness of your sins
in Christ is a rich, unending supply of forgiveness that preserves and
protects you every day of your life. Mother's Day could be the day on which
you hear about how your Christ acts like a mother toward you, gathering you
"as a hen gathers her brood under her wings" (Matthew 23:37).
The life-giving Scriptures of God proclaim some wonderful things
to you, using the image of motherhood to help you understand the point. For
example,
1. St. Paul explains to the Galatians that Jerusalem, the holy
Christian Church, "is our mother" (Galatians 4:26). Luther used these words
to explain, in a beautiful way, that when the Church is our mother, we all
together are one family: We "have the same Gospel, the same faith in Christ,
the same Holy Spirit, and the same sacraments" (AE 26, 439). Stated a little
more maternally, all of us Christians suckle from the same breasts, as it
were, nourished with forgiveness and life from Mother Church through the
proclamation of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments.
2. St. Paul also uses the image of motherhood to describe the tender
devotion a Christian pastor has for his dear congregation. St. Paul writes
to the Thessalonians Words of love that apply directly to the love that I
also have for you:
We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother taking care of her own
children. we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but
also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us (1 Thessalonians
2:7-8).
3. Add to this the way that God also describes Himself as being like a
mother to you, and even better than a mother: God the Father asks you in
Isaiah, "Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no
compassion on the son of her womb?" Then God declares, "Even these [mothers]
may forget, yet I will not forget you" (Isaiah 49:15). A second time in
Isaiah, God declares to you a maternal image of your salvation:
You shall nurse, you shall be carried upon her [the Church's] hip, and
bounced upon her knees. As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort
you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem (Isaiah 66:12-13).
When we hear these images from the living Scripture of God, we do not need
to do something silly, like pretending that our God could also be called
"earth mother" or some other nonsense. We could use these images of
motherhood in the way that they were intended-that is, as a way of
explaining and understanding the otherwise inexplicable love and devotion
that our Triune God has for us.
4. Today's Gospel might even be a good Gospel to assign to the new
liturgical feast that would call upon the imagery motherhood. Jesus says to
you today, "I am the Vine; you are the branches. apart from Me you can do
nothing." With these Words, Jesus uses a vivid and powerful image to
describe the forgiveness and life that continually flow to you through His
connection to you. He is the nourishing vine, full of life-giving and
disease fighting sap. This sap, as it were, unceasingly flows to you,
continually providing you with strength and life. Because Jesus is the Vine
and you are the branches, you can reason to yourself:
[My life] is grafted on Christ the Vine and grows from Him. My holiness,
righteousness, and purity do not stem from me, nor do they depend on me.
They come solely from Christ and are based only in Him, in whim I am rooted
by faith, just as the sap flows from the stalk into the branches. Now I am
like Him and of His kind (Luther, AE 24, 226).
There is only one other image I can fathom that describes your
connection to Christ along the same lines as this image of Vine and
branches. Not only may your connection to Christ be described as Vine and
branches, but your connection to Christ may also be described as pregnant
mother and unborn child. To follow the wording of today's Gospel, Jesus is
the momma and you are the child
· Just as Jesus is a Vine for you, He is also mother to you in the
sense that everything you need for your life and salvation flows to you from
Him. A pregnant mother nourishes her child through an umbilical cord, and
Jesus likewise nourishes you through His Word and His Sacraments.
· Just as an expectant mother's body removes and collects her unborn
child's waste products during the full course of pregnancy, so also has your
Christ collected up from you and taken into Himself all of your sin, all of
your death, all of your damnation.
· Just as a mother's body shields her dear child from harm and
danger, so also does your Christ continually guard and protect you.
· Just as an unborn child will surely die without the continual life
of his mother, so also shall you and I likewise die and perish eternally,
were it not for the continual life of our Lord Jesus Christ, poured into our
ears and served into our mouths.
"Apart from Me you can do nothing," says Jesus. This is the voice of a Vine
to its branches; this is the voice of a pregnant mother to her unborn child.
The new liturgical feast celebrated on Mother's Day could be of great
benefit to us. Among other things, this feast could:
1. Remind us that our Christ has loving seen fit, not to abort and
destroy us, but to carry us until we, like Him, shall be born from the dead.
2. Impress upon us that there is not a moment of our lives that passes
by in which we do not need our Lord Jesus and His constant forgiveness. Like
children in the womb, we are too weak, too vulnerable, to powerless to fend
for ourselves. We need the constant supply that Jesus gives.
3. Teach us to look at women and children anew. Just as every newborn
child can be looked upon as a reminder of the Christ who became an infant
for us, so also could every pregnant mother be looked upon as an image and
reminder of the Christ, apart from whom we can do nothing.
4. Give us cause to rejoice, knowing that while we hear the Word and
kneel for communion, our Christ is acting maternally for us, providing us
with those good gifts that only He can give.
Happy Mother's Day, Christians! In Christ you live and move and have your
being, as an unborn child likewise does in the womb of his mother. The peace
of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through
Christ Jesus. Amen.
___________________________________________________________________________
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