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The Mother of Believers Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis May 11, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 66:7-13 Acts 2:37-47
The title of John Calvin’s first chapter in the fourth book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion speaks of, “The true church with which as mother of all the godly we must keep unity.” The Holy Catholic Church” says Calvin “is our mother.” Reading further in anticipation of this Sunday when the pouring out of God’s Spirit at Pentecost coincides with the honoring of mothers in the culture, I found myself wondering what an understanding of the church as our mother might mean for the church today. If we take our cue not from Hallmark but from Holy Scripture, two mothers first come to mind: Eve the mother of all living and Mary the mother of Jesus. Eve and not Mary, writes Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “is the mother of my children, born in travail to a world of suffering their presence may refresh….Even the alienation from God we feel as a direct consequence of her Fall makes us beholden to her: The intense desire for God, never satisfied, arises from our separation from [God]. In our desire—this desire that makes us perfectly human—is contained our celebration and our rejoicing.” The church that is Eve is mother of our longing to live in relation to the God our prodigal lives cannot help but abandon. She births the community of those who know enough to desire God even though, from the beginning, we have desired most everything else in our lives more. First given the gift of life for the sake of mortals more inclined to blame her than love her, she nevertheless lives to serve. In travail from her womb are born, generation after generation, siblings whose rivalry has been bloody and murderous since the beginning of time. The church that is Eve embodies the church’s humanity. She reminds us that she is at once “a community of need…a child of time and space…and [a body] limited by temptation and sin.” [Wallace Alston] She is the church viewed from below, from the dust, from the muddle of mortal existence always on the brink of death. And yet in her desire—the desire that makes her perfectly human—is contained our celebration and our rejoicing. The church that is Mary enfolds the church’s divine body which is Christ. “According to thy Word,” Mary says, “be it unto me.” Mary receives and bears God’s word to the world. Theologians taught that the Word to which Mary submits, “at the very moment of submission, miraculously impregnates her womb.…What is really occurring,” they say, “what turns everything upside down—laws of nature, the course of time, the salvation of human beings—only obliquely passes through the exchange of words, like a light of absolute otherness….In an instant…the Word of God is made flesh, the body of Christ is formed entirely and takes on life….” The church, wrote Paul in these latter days, is that body. The church that is Mary is completely receptive to God’s Word and from her womb a sibling is born in whose flesh our humanity is redeemed. At the instant of Christ’s incarnation, our longing and emptiness are addressed by the God who has assumed both. Mary is the church as seen from above, our broken lives in time at last beheld whole in eternal life which is another name for God. To say the church is the mother of believers brings to mind at once Eve, the mother of all living and Mary, the mother of Jesus. In their wombs were wrought the rivalry and the redemption, the hubris and the hope that have marked the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church from the beginning. Yet the theologian who first called the church our mother had neither Eve nor Mary in mind. Calvin, in fact, did not originate the metaphor but borrowed it from a third century bishop and martyr named Cyprian of Carthage. Living in a time of persecution that found Christians renouncing Christ and the church in order to save their lives, Cyprian wrote, “You cannot have God as your Father unless you have the church for your mother.” He meant this not as a threat, I think, but as a word spoken to help terrified men and women stand fast and together against the powers of death lest they orphan themselves. He even devised a right of penance—practiced to this day—in order to give people a way back to the church and to God. As a newly baptized Christian himself, Cyprian had come to realize that having a God on whom to call was inextricably bound to a life nurtured in the community of faith. The necessity of the church to faith soon became a doctrine of the church that declared “Extra Ecclesium nulla salus”: outside the church there is no salvation. In words we can wrap our minds around, the doctrine held that without the community of faith nurturing and guiding us, we cannot know the God who is God. We may worship something we call God, but the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the God who gathers us in community. For Cyprian who originated the doctrine, the statement again was simply a matter of fact. The Reformers concurred. Martin Luther wrote, “…he who would find Christ must first find the church. How should we know where Christ and his faith were, if we did not know where his believers are? And he who would know anything of Christ must not trust himself nor build a bridge to heaven by his own reason; but he must go to the church….For outside of the Christian church there is no truth, no Christ, no salvation.” Citing Cyprian and under the heading of “The necessity of the church” John Calvin writes: “…let us learn even from the simple title ‘mother’ how useful, indeed how necessary, it is that we should know her. For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast, and lastly, unless she keep us under her care and guidance until, putting off mortal flesh, we become like the angels. Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives.” You and I were born into the church’s motherly care at baptism as were our children. From the font we were carried as we carry these little ones now into the midst of the community of faith that promises to nurture and teach and tend. Every Sunday we proclaim God’s word to them on these steps in a way that I pray will be used by God for their growth and maturity in faith. They run off to the Village on the Hill where we tell them the stories of God’s people. Then as they learn we lean in to listen for God’s word ourselves, to ask what it means because we are God’s children still and it has been quite a week. Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives. For Calvin the church that was mother to believers was, supremely, a teacher. So with Eve and Mary in mind, with Cyprian and Calvin in the classroom, we finally must ask whether or not it is still the case that we cannot have God as our Father unless we have the church for our Mother, whether or not it is the case that outside the church there is no salvation. For in this pluralistic age of spiritual options, the doctrine is either a theological trick created to coerce people into church membership or it is a word of hope proclaimed in a world of motherless children. Consider again the sacrament of baptism in light of this doctrine. Parents promise and the church joins their promise to bring the baptized up in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord” which means in the life and faith of the church, Eve giving birth to the child’s longing and Mary to the child’s redemption. No doubt the sacrament of baptism is meaningless and ineffective this side of the grave apart from the life that follows the promise in the community of faith. The meaning of the sacrament of baptism still presumes the truth of Cyprian’s ancient doctrines. We baptize children trusting that an infant’s parents are adults who keep promises and who especially will keep this promise. The elders, the deacons, the church’s musicians, the ministers and congregation are at hand to help and support the promises a parent makes at baptism. By these ordinary means, the church acts collectively as the mother of our children, nourishing and guiding them even as every adult in the congregation has been nourished and will be guided from cradle to grave. But like any mother, the church is powerless to make a single one of them love her. She has only the discipline that comes from love. That is to say, a mother disciplines those whom she loves. When parents appear at the church’s door having been lost since the first child’s baptism, appear in order to “do” the second child, then if this doctrine still holds the conversation must be stern because our children will never have God as their Father unless they have the church as their mother. The church, if she loves, refuses the sentiment of the culture for the sake of returning a young family to the bosom where God is pleased to guide them by the church’s motherly care. For outside the community that passes belief on from generation to generation, there can be no relationship with the God who gathers us in community and comes to us in Jesus Christ and sends the Spirit that we not be left as orphans. “Sam is the only kid he knows who goes to church,” wrote Anne Lamott a number of years ago. “He rarely wants to. This is not exactly true: the truth is he never wants to go….I make him because I can. I outweigh him by nearly seventy-five pounds. But that is only part of it. The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of [God]. They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians—people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle….” On this Sunday when the Spirit promised by Jesus was poured out upon all flesh, let us like those who were baptized devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers, for outside the community that has given us birth, has nourished us at her breast and lastly has kept us under her care and guidance, we are indeed motherless children. Thanks be to God for the church that is our mother!!! Amen. |