A little boy watched, fascinated, as his mother gently rubbed cold cream on her face. “Why are you rubbing cold cream on your face, mommy?” he asked.
“To make myself beautiful,” said his mother.
A few minutes later, she began removing the cream with a tissue. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Are you giving up?”
Welcome on this Mother’s Day. It’s not easy being a Mom. Those of you who have children know it’s not easy, regardless of their age.
One Mom says that she’s going to try something different next summer with their dog and with their kids. Next summer, she says, she’s sending the dog to camp and the kids to obedience school.
That wonderful writer Erma Bombeck once said, “What mother has never fallen on her knees when she has gone into her son’s bedroom and prayed, ‘Please, God, no more. You were only supposed to give me what I could handle.’”
It’s not easy. Or as someone has said, “The hand that rocks the cradle usually is attached to someone who isn’t getting enough sleep.”
Of course, sometimes it’s not easy having a mom, either. Comedian George Wallace says, “I grew up hearing such stupid things. My mother would say, ‘That’s the last time I’m gonna tell you to take out the garbage.’ Well,” he adds, “thank God.” (1)
Maybe Mom’s advice sometimes seemed a little silly to us.
One mother, Pam Hodgskin tells about when her son arrived back in the United States after fighting with the First Marine Division in Iraq. She says she still couldn’t help reacting like a mom when she saw him running across the base carrying a bayonet to give to some of his buddies.
“Kevin!” she shouted halfway across the base, before she could stop herself. “Don’t run with that knife in your hands!”
Every mom has done it at some time or another, but let’s face it: most of us would have been lost without our moms.
A couple was moving across the country. They decided to drive both cars. Their 8-year old son Nathan worried. “How will we keep from getting separated?”
Dad reassured him, “We’ll drive slowly. One car can follow the other.”
“But what if we DO get separated?” Nathan persisted.
“Well, then I guess we’ll never see each other again,” Dad joked.
Nathan quickly answered. “Then I’m riding with Mom.” (2)
Smart young fellow. Actually, the situation can be summed up in the words of one mom when she said, “I’d like to be the ideal mother, but I’m too busy raising my kids.” Touché!
Our lesson for the day from John’s Gospel is perfect for Mother’s Day because it is about love: “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit fruit that will last and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.”
There are several thoughts we can draw from this lesson. Note, first of all, that love is a command. Jesus isn’t giving us a suggestion that we love one another. This is a command. To be a follower of Jesus Christ is to love love our families, love our friends, even love our enemies. “By this all men will know that you are my disciples,” said the Master, “if you love one another” (John 13:35).
You can’t be any more direct than that. There aren’t many rules to the Christian faith, not really, but this rule is iron clad. We are to love. Of course, this was not the first time that the Master lifted up love as the great commandment.
In Matthew’s Gospel an expert in the law tested Jesus with this question:
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments,” Jesus declared (Matthew 22:34-40).
A young boy in elementary school was given a test in English grammar. He was being tested on the perfect tense of verbs. One question had a column of verbs in the present tense, and he had to put the perfect form of each of these verbs in the opposite column. He came to the verb live, and in the opposite column for the perfect tense of the word live he wrote the word love.
Grammatically he was wrong, but from a Christian standpoint he was right on target. The perfect form of “to live” is to love.
John Ortburg talks about a friend of his who had a tough life. This man had virtually no father growing up and his mother was a difficult person. She married five times, none of the relationships lasting long. She had little time for her children and gave them little encouragement. This adult man still carries many wounds from her inattention.
However, late in life his mother developed a degenerative muscular disease and gradually lost almost every physical capacity. You can imagine how difficult she was to care for. None of her other children would have anything to do with her. Neither would any of the men she had married no one except this son, Ortburg’s friend.
Ortburg says, “My friend decided to love. He took her into his home and cared for her, feeding her by hand, combing her hair, and cleaning up after her messes . . . about all she could do was cry and moan incessantly.”
Ortburg thought to himself about his friend, “How can he stand this? I’ve been given so many blessings the church, Scripture, family exponentially greater than this guy, and I don’t know if I could love like this.”
When his friend’s mother died sixteen people came to the funeral. None of her other kids came. The son who cared for her had a little toy tape recorder his mother had gotten him one Christmas and he played a tape of he and his mom singing a Christmas carol. He talked about how she loved Christmas and how that when he was a kid he would play the guitar and she would sing with him.
Ortburg says, “He didn’t love her perfectly, not by a long shot. But he loved her when loving was hardest. He loved her when no one else would love her, and he remembered her with kind words.” (3)
That must have been difficult loving her when she showed him so little love. But that’s what Christian love is. That’s the kind of love Christ gave us when we were undeserving. Love is a command.
Note, secondly, that love is sacrificial. Christ speaks of “laying down one’s life for one’s friends . . .”
For many of us love is a squishy emotion without any real content. “I love you for what you can do for me,” is the basic rule of such love. “You meet my needs and so I have a warm feeling for you.” We sing about such love, but in our hearts we know such love is horribly superficial. True love is sacrificial.
There is a story about two tribes in the Andes that were at war. One tribe lived in the lowlands and the other high in the mountains. The mountain people invaded the lowlanders one day, and as part of their plundering, they kidnapped a baby of one of the lowlander families and took the infant with them back up into the mountains. The lowlanders didn’t know how to climb the mountain. They didn’t know any of the trails that the mountain people used, and they didn’t know where to find the mountain people or how to track them in the steep terrain. Even so, they sent out their best party of fighting men to climb the mountain and bring the baby home.
The men tried first one method of climbing and then another. They tried one trail and then another. After several days of effort, however, they had climbed only several hundred feet. Feeling hopeless and helpless, the lowlander men decided that the cause was lost, and they prepared to return to their village below.
As they were packing their gear for the descent, they saw the baby’s mother walking toward them. They realized that she was coming down the mountain that they hadn’t figured out how to climb. And then they saw that she had the baby strapped to her back. How could that be?
One man greeted her and said, “We couldn’t climb this mountain. How did you do this when we, the strongest and most able men in the village, couldn’t do it?”
She shrugged her shoulders and said, “It wasn’t your baby.” (4)
Every parent worth his or her salt understands. There is nothing that we will not do for our children. Of course, some of us are at that stage of life when it is our parents who need our sacrificial love. It’s part of the circle of life. Our parents provided for our needs when we were young, but now it is they who have pressing needs. Who will be there for them? You may be part of what is often referred to as the “sandwich generation,” caught between the needs of your children and the needs of your aging parents. That really is a difficult place.
A lady named Bev Hulsizer tells about a time years ago when her mother came to visit. Her mother asked Bev to go shopping with her because she needed a new dress. Bev confesses that she is not a patient person, and did not look forward to shopping with her Mom, but they set off for the mall together nonetheless.
They visited nearly every store that carried ladies’ dresses, and her mother tried on dress after dress, rejecting them all. As the day wore on, Bev grew weary and her mother grew frustrated.
Finally, at their last stop, her mother tried on a lovely blue three piece dress. The blouse had a bow at the neckline, and as Bev stood in the dressing room with her Mom, she watched as her mother tried, with much difficulty, to tie the bow. Her hands were so badly crippled from arthritis that she couldn’t do it. Immediately, Bev’s impatience gave way to an overwhelming wave of compassion for her Mom. She turned away to try and hide the tears that welled up involuntarily.
Regaining her composure, she turned back to her mother to tie the bow for her. The dress was beautiful, and her mother bought it. Their shopping trip was over, but the event was etched indelibly in Bev’s memory.
For the rest of the day, her mind kept returning to that moment in the dressing room and to the vision of her mother’s hands trying to tie that bow. Those loving hands that had fed her, bathed her, dressed her, caressed and comforted her, and, most of all, prayed for her, were now touching her in a most remarkable manner.
Later in the evening, Bev went to her mother’s room, took her Mom’s hands in her own and kissed them. Then much to her surprise told her Mom that to her they were the most beautiful hands in the world.
Bev says she’s so grateful that God let her see with new eyes what a precious, priceless gift a loving, self sacrificing mother is. She prays that someday her own hands, and her heart, will have earned such a beauty of their own. (5)
Some of you can relate to that simple story. You remember the many loving sacrifices your Mom or your Dad made in your behalf. Now you watch sadly as your parents struggle with aging. Now it’s your turn to make sacrifices. Again, it’s not easy. Christ never promised that it would be easy. But love is sacrificial.
Love is what life is about. In I Corinthians 13 St. Paul summed it up like this: “These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Author J. Allan Petersen tells about a flight he once took on a 747 out of Brazil. He was awakened from sleep by a voice announcing, “We have a very serious emergency.” Three engines had quit because of fuel contamination and the fourth was expected to go at any second. The plane began to drop and turn in the night, preparing for an emergency landing.
At first the situation seemed unreal to Petersen, but when the steward barked, “Prepare for impact,” he found himself and everyone around him praying. As he buried his head in his lap and pulled up his knees, he said, “Oh, God, thank You. Thank You for the incredible privilege of knowing You. Life has been wonderful.”
As the plane approached the ground, his last cry was, “Oh, God, my wife! My children!”
Petersen survived. As he wandered about the airport afterward in a daze, aching all over, he found he couldn’t speak, but his mind was racing, What were my last words? What was the bottom line? As he remembered, he had his answer: relationship.
Reunited with his wife and sons, he found that all he could say to them over and over was, “I appreciate you, I appreciate you!” (6)
He discovered as sooner or later we all discover the bottom line of life is love. Love is what life is all about. God created this world so that He would have persons He could love. God sent His only begotten Son to die on the cross because of love. When one day we are gathered around God’s throne with all those we love, we will discover that the final payoff for living is love. “These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Today go forth from this place determined to live a life of love that you might perfectly fulfill the commandments of Christ.
1. Judy Brown, Squeaky Clean Comedy (Andrews McMeel, 2005).
2. http://1stpres.home.bresnan.net/Sermons/John%2020_19-31%20-%20Peace%20Be%20With%20You.htm.
3. Cited by Chuck Queen, http://www.ibcfrankfort.com/sermons/030908.pdf.
4. Meir Liraz, The 100 Top Inspirational Anecdotes and Stories.
5. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for The Christian Soul 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, Inc, 1997), pp. 111-112.
6. God’s Little Devotional Book (Tulsa: Honor Books, Inc., 1973), p. 153.