Sermons from the Pulpit

     "Then Rizpah, daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth, and spread it for herself on a rock, from the beginning of harvest until the rain fell from the heavens, and she did not allow the birds of the air to come upon them by day, nor the wild animals by night."

     The story of Rizpah is so small, so dwarfed by the big, important story of King David that it's a wonder anyone pays attention to it at all. Rizpah, this former concubine of King Saul, who has no place in society, no status, and certainly no recourse under the law - this Rizpah is simply a mother, whose sons are executed for crimes they never committed. Nonetheless, because the affairs of state demand that some must die to pay for an old offense, her sons end up among the unlucky ones. Not only are they impaled on stakes; they are exposed to the elements and the vultures and the wild dogs, an added disgrace. And Rizpah cannot save them. So she does what she can do: She stays with them in death, she will not leave their bodies until her action gets noticed in the corridors of power. Finally, she is brought to the King's attention, and then David gives all seven of the young men a decent burial.

     How can we hear this story and not remember the Argentinian mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who walked silently in a circle, in front of government offices, each carrying a white handkerchief embroidered with the name of her missing child?

     They were called las locas, the crazy ones. It's not the first time such gatherings of women have been dismissed as "overwrought." Look at our bulletin cover.

     Look at the faces of those mothers who make a circle around their children. What do we see there? Käthe Kollwitz, whose son and grandson were killed in the First World War, knew what it meant literally to risk one's life by spilling blood in the act of giving birth, only to have that precious child's blood spilled in the violence of war. But not everyone honored Kollwitz' witness. Kaiser Wilhelm called her work "gutter art," because, he said, it wasn't ennobling or triumphant.

     Today is Mother's Day, mostly a private family day of cards and candy and flowers and maybe a dinner out. Today, a TV ad picturing a mother and her newborn has turned the mystery of childbirth into a means of selling painkillers: "On behalf of the makers of Tylenol, Happy Mother's Day!". It's hard to imagine that Mother's Day was ever any different.

     But it was. In 1915, Anna Jarvis and a group of intrepid mothers walked through Europe's battlefields to meet with women of enemy countries, all of them wanting to save all of their sons, who were, as one of them said, "more precious to us than our heart's blood." And while they were on their dangerous mission, our Congress made Mother's Day official.

     And before that, in the 1870's, Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist and author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, organized the earliest Mother's Day. Horrified by the carnage of the Franco-Prussian War, she made an appeal to womanhood throughout the world:

Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Why do not mothers of mankind boldly interfere in matters of war, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost? Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of mercy and charity. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of a devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, "Disarm! Disarm!"

     That woman sure could preach!

     I only wish Ms. Howe were alive to see the Million Moms March on Washington. I read through their web site this week, or rather, cried through it.(web servants note: the web site is www.millionmommarch.com. It is here.) And I wonder if those in today's corridors of power will pay more heed to the women marching than folks paid to Julia Ward Howe.

     Because what we have here, in the marches of yesteryear and the march of today, is love speaking to power, love speaking to violence. In the world's eyes, this is a radical and unacceptable idea, of course, but it is not a new idea, and especially not new or unfamiliar to those who call themselves Christians. Because Jesus himself was a demonstration of love speaking to power, especially in his death. There, he showed us God's own heart. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Jesus is speaking of the cross, which is a demonstration of blood-spilling, non-violent love if ever there were one.

     It really is all about labor: God's labor, mothers' labor. I mean "labor" in a very gender-specific way: an image which is so concrete we just can't miss it! The ecstasy and turbulence of a mother working to give birth - this is a powerfully female thing, yes, but more than that, it's powerfully human.

     That must be why the Scriptures are so full of that image of a laboring woman. As the Bible tells it, the labor of love is costly, painful, and it is a life's work. There is literally no end to it. And this work of love is required of you, of me, all of us, whether we are male or female, mother or father, whether we are parents or not.

     This is a true story: A reporter was covering the conflict in Sarajevo. He saw a little girl get shot by a sniper. He rushed over to the man who was holding the bleeding child, and helped get them both into his car.

     As the reporter stepped on the gas, the man said, "Hurry, my friend, my child is still alive." A moment later, "Hurry, my friend, my child is still warm." And then, "Hurry, my friend, my child is getting cold." When they finally got to the hospital, the little girl had died. As the two men were in the lavatory, washing the blood off their hands and their clothes, the man turned to the reporter and said, "This is a terrible task for me. I must go and tell her father that his child is dead. He will be heartbroken."

     The reporter was stunned. He looked at the grieving man and said, "But I thought she was your child." The man looked back at him and said, "No, but aren't they ALL our children?"

     Happy Mother's Day.