5th Sunday of Easter A (May 22, 2011) - John 14:1-14 - The One Truth Among Many Truths

5th Sunday of Easter - A
John 14:1-14
May 22, 2011

The One Truth Among Many Truths

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

There it is right on the bulletin cover, straight from the horse’s mouth as it were: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” Wow!

Jesus is the way. There isn’t any other. There is only one mountain and there is only one road that goes up the mountain. If someone isn’t on that road, they’re on the wrong road. Pretty simple, huh?

Jesus is the truth. There isn’t any other truth. Anything that looks like truth that isn’t that truth isn’t the truth at all. This could save a lot of money for anyone who had thought to go to college—what would be the point, really? We already know the whole truth.

Jesus is the life. Any life that isn’t Jesus is really death in disguise. If you want the life that God has to offer, it’s right there in Jesus and nowhere else.

Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life. Apart from Jesus there are only false roads, falsehoods, and death.

If we follow this logic, then the practical upshot is this: the only way to get to heaven is to profess Jesus and believe in him in our hearts. Otherwise we are going to hell. There are hard truths in life and this is one of them. Good people whom we may admire, people like Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, even our grandparents and our children are all either in hell or headed there unless they—the ones who are still alive at any rate—become professing Christians. After all, Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life.

Now there are, I think, at least three problems with the reading that I have laid out. The first is a pastoral problem. The problem is this: how do I go about explaining to a family’s Aunt Sarah that her husband Fred, though he was a good man who worked hard, loved her and their children, and strove to leave the world a better place than he found it, is in fact not in heaven because he wasn’t a Christian. It seems that he experienced the church as falling pretty far short of its ideals and this scandalized him, so much so that he refused to have any thing to do with Jesus or with Jesus’ God who, after all, ought to stand behind the brand name of the family business. I can’t paper over this difficulty, either, not if there is a chance that someone will misinterpret my kindness as suggesting that they don’t need to be a Christian to avoid his fate.

So, at a time when this family needs the love and care and support of God that is present, however imperfectly, in the church, they get from the church instead a proclamation of God’s merciless wrath against those who don’t believe or say the right things.

The second difficulty with this “Jesus’ way or the highway” reading of John is theological. It asks us to believe that the God who loves us so much that Jesus came to die for us is also the same God who sentences people to hell forever with no possibility of parole for failing to confess the right creed or have the right experiences. It asks us to believe that God is not as merciful as the governor of Iowa or the President of the United States because they pardon people, but God does not. It asks us to believe that because I am willing to forgive Gandhi for not being a Christian I am more loving than God.

I know I can’t point to a specific biblical text that says this, but from what I have learned from the Bible of what God is like and how God is with us, I have come to believe that God never stops loving us. God will woo us through this lifetime and into the next if need be until we respond in kind. Because we are free to refuse God’s love, I believe that hell exists, but I also believe that it’s mostly empty and that the only residents are the temporary ones who still think they don’t want to be in heaven. If God’s ultimate nature is love and if love is the deepest meaning of the universe, then hell as proclaimed by the Christian right makes no sense.

The third problem with this line of thinking has to do with the fate of the world and the splendid and bewildering array of life that it hosts. If there is only one truth and we are in possession of that one truth and everyone else is either wrong or agrees with us, then any other opinion firmly held must be a threat to us. This line of thinking carves the world up into “us” and “them.” “We” must oppose “them” with every fiber of our being, because we are right and they are wrong. “We” can never make peace with “them” because that would mean betraying the truth. “We” can’t even engage “them” in serious conversation, at least not the kind where we really listen to each other because we dare not risk being converted away from the truth.

By definition there is only room for one absolute truth in the universe. It must exclude every idea that is not already implied by it. Of course, each of us will understand this truth differently and so only one of us is right and the rest of us are wrong and the one who is right has an obligation to persuade the ones who are wrong. By force, if necessary. A universe with an absolute truth can never have a population greater than one. An absolute truth asks us to believe that we are capable of having infinite minds.

This is Harold Camping’s tragedy. He has been holding out for his version of absolute truth for years, but the rest of us have, for the most part, been pretty unreceptive. Recently he invited us into his revenge fantasy in which he and his followers are rescued and the rest of us fall under the judgment of God. Today he has discovered that he is still in the world with us. We are still in the world with him. Will he get it that our task is not to figure out when the world will end, but to do what we can to preserve it? I don’t know. What I suspect is that none of us stand much of a chance of doing that unless we become more modest about our truth claims.

So what, then, do we toss out John’s gospel, since I seem to be saying that everything is relative? I mean, what’s the point if we’re all going to heaven anyway?

Well, I don’t have any problem opposing a text of the Bible. Remember I’ve said that the Bible is not a book so much as it’s a conversation. We are not so much being asked to submit to the Bible as we are to enter its conversation. And sometimes in conversations we agree and sometimes we disagree—at least if it’s a conversation worth having—and the important thing is to stay with it. So if we need to disagree with John, I’m okay with that.

But let’s make sure that we understand him first. At first reading John’s Jesus is serene and lofty, far removed from the ordinary world. He may give his life, but no one can take it from him. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke may struggle to understand and do what God wants, but not John’s Jesus. John’s Jesus knows what is going to happen before it happens (a little like Harold Camping!) and is untroubled by it. The disciples may not get it, but Jesus lays it out for them over and over again.

The reality of John’s community was far from the serenity we see in John’s Jesus. John’s community was in trouble. They had come to a final divorce from the Jewish synagogue. The painful and hostile feelings left over from that are very much in evidence. They were having real struggles trying to decide who they were as a community and what their task in the world was to be. They were wounded, abandoned and confused. They took it out on each other and their Jewish neighbors. They set a pattern that has played out in European history and led finally to the Holocaust of the last century. It was a terrible thing they did, but perhaps it is, if not excusable, at least understandable coming as it did out of their desperation.

John was writing to a demoralized community, divided against itself and threatened from the outside. Jesus’ declaration, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” was meant as a comfort for their grief and as a support that would strengthen them in their difficult struggle for existence.

It was not meant to become a program for oppressing people who did not follow Jesus. It was not given as a creed to an institution with a membership of a billion so that they could use it as a club against its non-member neighbors. No, it was something more modest than that. It was reassurance and a reminder to a struggling community of Jesus-followers.

John’s community had other options available, other ways of being in the world. There were other ways of thinking, speaking and seeing the world, other truth systems that they could choose. There were other possible lives than the hard one they were living. John wanted to remind them of who they were. John wanted to remind them of the commitments they had made and how that shaped the world they lived in. For Jesus-followers, Jesus is the path. For Jesus-followers, Jesus is the truth. For Jesus-followers, Jesus is life.

When the going got rough these Jesus-followers needed to be reminded of this.

We find ourselves in difficult times, too. Our difficulties are not the same as those faced by John’s community, but sometimes we need the same reminders. We’re not always sure how to live in the world as Jesus-followers. In fact most of the time we’re pretty unsure. There are other ways of being in the world, there are other messages, there are other lives. Being a Jesus-follower is not the only available option.

Any of us can see this simply by turning on the television or cranking up a web browser. You who are graduating and headed for college or the world of work will experience this, too. There are other choices than being a Jesus-follower.

I’m here to remind you of the commitments you have made, commitments we have all made. Four or five or eight years ago you stood in front of this congregation and you committed yourself to being a Jesus-follower. If you’ve tried to do that on your own, you may have discovered just how easy it is to place that commitment in the background while you’ve gotten on with seemingly more important things: getting good grades, cultivating a social life, scraping together the money to buy the latest gadget.

I’m here to remind us all—on behalf of the Church—that we are Jesus-followers. And for those of us who are Jesus-followers, Jesus is our way, our truth and our life.

That’s not a invitation to intolerance or arrogance. Our neighbors may have their way, their truth, their life and they may be different from ours. We don’t have to impose our way, our truth or our life on our non-Christian neighbors. We just have to follow the Jesus who is our way, our truth and our life. That’s all. Because we are Jesus-followers. And that’s what we do.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Unrealistic Aspirations - May 15 (4th Sunday of Easter - A) Acts 2:42-47

4th Sunday of Easter - A
Acts 2:42-47
May 15, 2011

Unrealistic Aspirations

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

“Back when I was your age.” Everyone knows the scene. And everyone knows what’s coming next. It will be a story of the way things never used to be, a story of the good old days. The story will be about tough times and hardships. And yet it will be told with a wistful look in the eyes and maybe even a catch in the throat. Grandchildren will roll their eyes. Grandpa is telling his stories. Again. For the hundredth time.

The music we grew up hearing plucks a particular heart string. I listened to the Mamas and Papas’ “California Dreamin’” over and over the first time I got my heart broken. This was in the days before there were mp3 players and earplugs. I inflicted my musical ennui on the whole family. And mostly they let me. If I hear that song again, I still feel a pull, an aching longing. Time has left a patina on my memories.

When Carol and I move, packing our belongings brings us up against our past as we pack away old photographs and yearbooks. We recall memories of an earlier time, when our dreams were new and uncompromised, when we asked a great deal of the world and had not yet been disappointed by the answers, when we could be anything we wanted to be.

It was a different era for each person, each generation. For my generation it was the sixties. Love was all you needed (especially if your parents were paying the bills). The Monkees sang, “We’re the young generation and we’ve got something to say.” Never mind that they never got around to actually saying it. The same Establishment that we despised marketed the revolution to us and it never occurred to us to see the irony or the trap. Cynicism would come later. Then, we could change the world. We were full of dreams and the energy needed to make them come true. The world looked to us for answers and let me tell you we had them.

For an earlier generation the era was the Depression and WWII. It didn’t matter if it was hard. They remember with fondness a simpler world when issues were stark. They were part of a shared enterprise on behalf of the whole world. It was up to them to stop world fascism. No challenge since has ever really measured up to that one. There are still annual reunions of WWII military units, though the number of attendees is falling at an alarming rate.

For ancient Israel of Isaiah and Jeremiah’s day it was the period of the Exodus, the time of desert wandering, when the people were utterly dependent on God and God fed them each day with manna and was there for the taking, food that took on whatever flavor you wanted it to.

For the church of the New Testament it was the time just after Pentecost and before the uprisings that brought the destruction of the Temple and the Jerusalem church, before the rift with Judaism. This is how they remembered it:

⁴² The members of the Church devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. ⁴³ Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. ⁴⁴ All who believed were together and had all things in common; ⁴⁵ they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. ⁴⁶ Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, ⁴⁷ praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

We have a need to connect with the past. This is not the same thing as the need to know the past in any objective, realistic way. When historians come along they tell us things we don’t really want to know. What we really want is nostalgia. What we really want is for our fantasies of the past to remain undisturbed by inconvenient facts from historians.

So the early church is indulging in nostalgia in our text. It cherished the fantasy that it had “the goodwill of all the people” in this episode sandwiched in between the execution of Jesus and a series of endless conflicts with religious and political authorities. The church with a history of internal conflicts and arguments, cherished a fantasy that there was a time when they “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” with one accord. They cherished a fantasy that there was a time when they “had all things in common.” But do we have any particular reason to believe that this communalism was ever the rule?

The commentators are pretty sure that this is not an historical recollection but a bit of nostalgic idealization. Combine that with the fact that this text smacks of socialism or worse. We have good reasons for dismissing this tale completely.

And yet. There is something here that shouldn’t be ignored. Memory is creative. It makes sense of the present by reconstructing the past. When nostalgia “remembers” it holds up something as an ideal, as something to be imitated, as a value to be cherished. The WWII generation remembers a time that required the courage to face implacable enemies, a time that called for the surrender of individual goals for the sake of the common good. These are good things; they are worthy ideals.

The children of the sixties remember a vision of freedom for all people, a vision of a planet at peace. These are good things; they are worthy ideals. If the way we remember is false history, it is nevertheless true memory. We remember the way it could have been, might have been and might be still if we chose it, worked for it, lived toward it.

What are the childhood memories of the Church? There was a time when “all who believed were together and had all things in common.” There was a time when want was unknown.

These are echoes of still earlier memories. There were memories of manna in the wilderness. They would gather the manna according to the size of their family. Those who gathered little had no lack. Those who gathered much manna had no more than they needed.

There were memories of a great crowd that had followed Jesus into the wilderness. They were hungry, but the only food they could come up with was contributed by one boy with five small barley loaves and two fish. But Jesus took that meager offering, blessed the bread, broke it and gave it and the fish to the crowd of thousands and everyone had enough to eat.

The story has a challenge for us. Should there ever be real need among us? How far would we be willing to extend the limits of this common concern? Should any Christian suffer want while others have leftovers in the fridge? Should we ever be so anxious to hang on to our stuff that we close our ears to the cry of the hungry?

Imagine what our life would be if this “memory” were our vision for the life of our congregation, our community, our world. Surely it would be something like this:

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

It really doesn’t get any better than that.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Mothers' Day: An Idea Whose Time Has Come - Luke 24:13-35 (3rd Sunday of Easter A) May 8, 2011

3rd Sunday of Easter - A Mothers' Day
Luke 24:13-35
May 8, 2011

Mothers' Day: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

I share several meditations with you this morning. I believe that they are connected. I start this Mother’s Day with a nursery rhyme you may have heard from your mother:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Humpty together again.

In the picture books I grew up with, Mr. Dumpty was always portrayed as a very large egg. I don’t know where this notion came from—it isn’t in the rhyme. In our shared memory and imagination, though, Mr. Dumpty was an egg. His fall was catastrophic. Even massive military intervention couldn’t restore Mr. Dumpty to his pre-fall condition.

Of course, we note, as an egg Mr. Dumpty should have known better than to perch on walls. The world is a dangerous place for an egg, full of hard objects, like the ground, for example. He should have been careful. I’m sure his mother warned him about this. But he refused to listen to his mother and you see what happened. Let that be a lesson to us all!

This is certainly one way to read the nursery rhyme. But it’s not the only way to read it. There is a little niggling detail that doesn’t really fit that reading. Why did the king imagine that the best way to restore Humpty to health was to send his infantry and cavalry? Wouldn’t his engineers have been a better choice? Or better yet, his physicians?

If we follow this line of thinking—and I have to admit that I find it fascinating—we fairly shortly come to two conclusions: First, Humpty did not simply fall; he was pushed. Second, the king was almost certainly behind this “accident” and sent his army to make sure of it. So, behind a text that blames Humpty for his own injuries and praises the king for attempting to give aid, lies a quite different reality. The king had Humpty wacked and had his press secretary “spin” the story to cover up the truth and make him look like the hero of the piece.

This is a method of reading texts. It’s called “a hermeneutic of suspicion.” “Hermeneutics” is a technical term. It has to do with interpreting texts. A hermeneutic is a method or way of reading or interpreting a text. Mostly we do that interpreting unconsciously. We seldom say, “Now what sort of a hermeneutic am I going to apply in this instance?” But there are times when it would be useful. For example when our mothers say, “Where are you going? Who are you going to be with? What do you plan to do? When will you be home?” we may be tempted to respond to their apparent attack on our freedom and autonomy. But a conscious hermeneutics may help us to understand that when she asks all those nosy and demeaning questions, what she really means is, “I love you.” And the proper response is to say, “I love you, too, Mom.” Unless, of course, we are less than eighteen or still living at home, in which case the proper response is to say, “I love you, too, Mom” and then to answer her questions. She has a right to ask them; that’s her job.

My second meditation. Mostly we are not aware of our hermeneutical choices. When we realize that many messages have something to hide, we may find it useful to engage in a hermeneutic of suspicion. A hermeneutic of suspicion recognizes that we often often use written or spoken forms of communication to avoid communicating, to obscure rather than to bring to light, to hide the truth rather than to reveal it, to miscommunicate rather than to communicate. It also recognizes that the attempt to obscure, to hide, to misdirect almost allows leaves traces in the text. Like a poker player, a text has “tells” that broadcast, if not the whole story, then at least the fact that the whole story is being withheld. The presence of infantry and cavalry as supposed rescuers of the shattered Humpty is the nursery rhyme’s “tell.”

Now we’re ready for this morning’s text, the story of the two disciples who were on their way to Emmaus on Easter Sunday. Jesus fell in with them on the road as was the custom in those days when numbers meant safety from bandits. The two disciples were sad. Jesus asked them why. They expressed their amazement that Jesus hadn’t heard of Jesus and his death. Jesus, in turn, gave them a quick run-through of the Hebrew Bible and laid out the necessity of the events that they were mourning. When evening approached and the two disciples neared their destination, they pressed Jesus to stay with them. He yielded to their request. Contrary to custom, he assumed the role of host at the table to which they invited him. He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it to his companions and vanished from their sight. And, yes, the actions are supposed to remind the reader of the actions at the communion table. Well, the first four anyway, not the vanishing part. The two disciples recognized Jesus in his action of breaking bread and, overjoyed at this evidence of his resurrection, dashed back to Jerusalem in the middle of the night.

That’s the story. Now there is a little detail in Luke’s telling of this story that asks for the use of a hermeneutics of suspicion. The details about the two disciples are a little odd. The story names only one of them: Cleopas. About the other it is silent. We may assume that the tradition had simply forgotten the name of one of the disciples and remembered the other, but the facts may be quite different. We’ve all seen Robert Zünd’s Der Gang nach Emmaus (“The Road to Emmaus”) depicting this story. It has two male disciples walking through the Swiss countryside around Lucerne. Jesus walks between them, dressed in flowing white robes and the other two are walking on either side of him, half-facing in his direction.

But the text doesn’t tell us that both disciples were men. Later tradition has done that.

Feminist theologians noticed that the text is strangely silent about the unnamed disciple. In fact, the whole of the New Testament is strangely silent. Almost without exception the New Testament reduces, obscures, brackets or even erases the role of women in the early Christian community. A feminist hermeneutic of suspicion argues that the “other” disciple is unnamed because to name her would reveal her gender. For a number of reasons, Luke was not interested in doing that. This unnamed disciple is a woman, perhaps the wife of Cleopas, perhaps even more disturbingly one of those to whom Paul may be referring in 1 Corinthians: a unmarried female Christian, that is a “‘sister’ who went with Cleopas as a wife.”¹

In this reading, the Emmaus road story is not just a witness to the resurrection of Jesus (which it is). It is not just a witness to the experience of the risen Jesus in the “breaking of the bread” at the table in worship (which it is). It is also a witness to a disciples of equals in the early Christian church, to a form of shared life that radically challenged gender roles in ancient culture, to an equality of men and women in at least some parts of the early Jesus movement.

It’s amazing what we forget, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose. This brings me to my third meditation.

Today we are celebrating the role of our mothers in our lives. For most of us this is a good and appropriate thing to do. Most mothers have done, and do the best that they can. Most of us become mature enough to recognize this and to appreciate what our mothers actually did, especially in light of what they had to work with. Mothers are human beings and they don’t always get it right. But most of them get it right enough for us to have a good foundation for taking on life.

What you won’t hear in the advertisements for flowers, jewelry and greeting cards (and let’s face it, Mother’s Day is big business: According to the National Retail Foundation it’s worth over $14 billion each year²) What you won’t hear in the official media presentation of motherhood is that some mothers are so neglectful or abusive that their children are left scrambling for “mothering” wherever they can find it. What you won’t hear is that for some people today is painful reminder of what they did not have rather than a celebration. We forget them sometimes, whether accidentally or on purpose.

We forget that behind our contemporary Mother’s Day is a history of politically active women who rowed against the cultural tide. Anna Jarvis is credited with launching the modern Mother’s Day, but she became so disgusted with its commercialization that she publically regretted ever having started it. She had actually gotten the idea from her mother, also named Anna Jarvis, who organized mothers in her community in West Virginia to stand in solidarity with each other across the fault line that had been cracked open by the Civil War.

We forget Julia Ward Howe’s attempt in the late 1800s to launch an international Mothers’ Day. We remember her for the hymn that she wrote after having visited the Union Army camps in and around Washington, DC, in early 1862. The Battle Hymn of the Republic was a favorite among Union soldiers and became a resource for fighting the Civil War. She had seen a vision of truth conquering falsehood and justice making war on injustice. There were real falsehoods and real injustices at stake. But what Howe saw later was the terrible, excruciating and finally unacceptable cost of war. She regretted her own role in providing war with a soundtrack.

She concluded that, left to their own devices, men would never bring about a permanent peace. Women, especially mothers, she reasoned, would have to step in where men had failed. If she could get mothers together, she thought, they would change the world. She gave it her best shot:

Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: “...our husbands will 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 charity, mercy and patience. We, the 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! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”³

Her best shot was pretty good, but it wasn’t good enough. Mothers’ Day as a day of empowerment for women so that they could transform the world sputtered and coughed along for ten years and then collapsed, only to be replaced a generation later by a different sort of Mother’s Day altogether. We forget.

Finally, my last meditation which began earlier this week when we heard the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Bin Laden was responsible for destruction and death on our shores and around the world. He was influential for a time because he was able to cast his grand pretensions as humble service to God. Our nation’s leaders of nearly all political persuasions ascribed far more power and influence to him and to his organization than he ever deserved. And I believe his death will prove to be far less important than nearly anyone makes it out to be.

The reality is that bin Laden had already been left behind by history. And the reality is also that this didn’t happen because of the courage and sacrifice of honorable servicemen and servicewomen who have been engaged in the longest war in our nation’s history. It is no fault of theirs that when violence answers violence the result is never simply justice.

No, it was the mothers of Cairo and Alexandria who showed how pathetic a man bin Laden actually was. It was the mothers, not bin Laden’s terrorist organization, who brought down the oppressive regime in Egypt. Their courage kept this revolution from becoming a blood bath. Their unfailing presence in the streets gave the lie to bin Laden’s dreams of glory and revenge.

We forget. Osama bin Laden had a mother. I know nothing about her. I know that she carried him under her heart for nine months, that she felt him kick within her, that she labored to bring him into the light of day. I know nothing else about her, really. But I cannot imagine that this was the life that she wanted for her son. This was not her dream.

Howe’s proclamation was unusual in part because of its dream of the power of mothers for peace, but also because its vision went beyond the boundaries of Christendom. She intended that there be room for mothers whether they were Christian (that is, those whose baptism was of water) or whether they were simply the grieved mothers of dead sons (that is, those whose baptism was of tears)? There is room in Howe’s vision for bin Laden’s mother.

Howe’s proclamation never got the traction it needed to overcome the interests of all those who stood to profit from the making of war. There are still great war-making interests. But there might be an audience for Howe’s proclamation now. Osama bin Laden’s mother, baptized as she is in tears, might be ready to hear Howe’s call. The mothers of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans might be ready. The mothers of our own dead might be ready. We might be ready. It’s an idea whose time has come.

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

11 Corinthians 9:5. The NRSV has “a believing wife.”

2National Retail Federation, “Mom Second Only to Winter Holidays, According to NRF Survey” http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=News&op=viewlive&sp_id=918 (May 7, 2011)

3Julia Ward Howe, “Mothers’ Day Proclamation”, 1870, http://womenshistory.about.com/od/howejwriting/a/mothers_day.htm.