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.