Message

Our lesson for the day from John’s Gospel is perfect for Mother’s Day, because it is about love.

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.

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.

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 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 tenderly 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. Her mother’s nurturing hands were now touching her heart 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 mother’s surprise, Bev told her Mom that, to her, they were the most beautiful hands in all 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.

(Chicken Soup for The Christian Soul 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit pp. 111-112.)

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.

True love is sacrificial.

Love is what life is about. In I Corinthians 13, Paul summed it up like this: “These three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

As Christians faithfully seeking to make Christ’s love incarnate in and through us, we will sooner or later, all discover the bottom line of life is love. Love is what life is all about. God created this world so that the Creator would have persons God could love.

At the Lord’s Table we remember 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.”

May we go into the new week more determined to live a life of love that you might perfectly embody the commandments of Christ. To love God, and to love others…

Pastoral Prayer

Dear God, we give you thanks for this glorious day and the opportunity to be together to worship you and to sing praises to your holy name.

Gentle and nurturing God, today we pray for those we know who are hurting: those people who struggle with illness; those who know the pain of death; those who feel trapped under the weight of sorrow or depression; those who struggle just to find the place where they belong.

Embrace them with your healing. Help them find their way to you and your marvelous light; or, if darkness is all that they can see right now, we ask you simply to make your gentle presence known to them. Comfort those people who know only lost-ness.

On this Mother’s Day, we give thanks for the gift of our mothers, and for all those who mothered us along our journey.

We pray for those for whom this is a difficult day: those who miss their mothers; those who might be estranged from their mothers; and those who long to be parents. We pray you would grant patience, peace and strength to all of us, regardless of family circumstance.

Today we honor all those women whose love has made us strong. Help all the women among us to become bearers of your redeeming love to all the young lives they touch, to all those who are their children either by affection or by birth.

Help us raise the little girls among us to be strong women of God, that in them the world may see the fierce and tender love with which you, O God, have loved us from the beginning.

Gracious God, we also pray today for those we do not know, those who suffer hunger, war and injustice.

At times, O God, the suffering of the world seems overwhelming. And yet, we are not a “lost cause” — you provide us with hope and a vision for a better world.

Help us to embrace that vision in our lives. Help us to lose ourselves in your love. Help us to find refuge in your steadfast peace.

We pray in the name of Jesus, who is our peace, and who taught us to pray, saying…

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.