Anytime there’s a special event in someone’s life that requires me to buy a gift, you’ll likely find me at Books-A-Million. This isn’t a plug for that particular book store, just an acknowledgement that it’s the closest one. Perhaps really it’s just an excuse for me to wander through the titles as I think about the person I care about and wonder what words would help them make sense of their situation – because that’s how I usually come to my truth is with a book in hand.
This being said, many of you know that my sister is pregnant with her first child, and therefore becoming an aunt again has sent me wandering through the shelves – thinking about her being a mother for the first time, and thinking about the stage of motherhood I’m in now. It was fun to look at all the new baby titles and pregnancy advice books. It was my extreme pleasure to buy my soon-to-be niece the 25th edition of The Paperbag Princess, a book that I think no young girl should be without. And wandering through the motherhood section, I also found a book that caught my eye, Confessions of a Slacker Mom by Muffy Mead-Ferro.
As a member of the so-called “slacker generation” myself and as a mother who finds some of the chores of motherhood quite arduous, it called to me to start reading. I’m not shy about reading a chapter or so standing right where I am and laughing out loud as necessary – so that’s the position I found myself in just a little over a week ago before I went to see my sister.
The book begins with the author telling the first person story of hitting that time crunch in one’s first pregnancy when you begin to realize that maybe you don’t have all the “stuff” you need for the baby’s arrival. As a slacker, she had tried to resist the pressure as long as she could, balking at the latest baby gadgets like the heavily advertised tummy-headphones used to play Mozart to your unborn fetus to make her better at multiplication tables. However, she hits that time, as she put it, when the “chips are down” and she started reading all 5 of her pregnancy books at once, trying to keep up with all the experts in magazines, and all the complete strangers who were giving their stories in the grocery aisles. It was time to make the effort. She set aside a Saturday marathon shopping day to get everything in order.
She invited her super-organized girlfriend who had a baby eight months before, and as expected she came dutifully prepared with a four page list of the must-have baby items. Since she was in the mood to toss out the budget and get it done, I was off she said, “…contributing more than my share to the national epidemic of credit card debt.” The worst part was though, when 90% done with the list, they got to the store where weeks and weeks before she had ordered her bassinette - one of the more snooty baby stores I might add – only to find out it wasn’t in yet. She said, “I didn’t know whether to call the store and continue to hassle them, or just sneak over there with a can of gas and torch the place.”
That evening, after an exhausting day of shopping, she received a call from her friend in Alaska, one who was the Mother of two with one more on the way, and she was grateful to relay her tales of torture, especially her anger over the bassinette. But the friend’s response to this desperate state of affairs was to laugh out loud, saying, “Are you kidding? My little boy slept in a crab crate his first six months.” (Mead-Ferro, Muffy. Confessions of a Slacker Mom. Da Capo Lifelong Books: 2004. pages 2-7)
Yep, a crab crate – “one of those cage-type deals made of nailed together wooden slats that’s been underwater, with crabs in it.” Our first thought is YUCK. But funny isn’t it how we think we have to have all the stuff and then we find out that with the right relationship, a crab crate will do. It happens to the best of us. We go overboard with a party or gift. We find ourselves pouting when we don’t get exactly what we want on our time table. We try to impress our mother, or boss, or friend, or our even worse our in-laws. The stuff sells. We get sucked right in to all the things we “have to have” when it’s all really an effort of multiple sales organizations and advertising agencies to get us to part with our money.
Scripture reminds us that the ways that we handle our relationships are important; whereas, the stuff that we have doesn’t really matter at all beyond what’s necessary for life. We are guaranteed that having a friend who will comfort us after a day of being beat up in the marketplace is far better for us than having the perfect bassinette ready before the baby comes.
This letter of John reminds us that we know love because Jesus laid down his life for us – and therefore we ought to lay down our lives for each other. But it says nothing about the perfect nursery or sweet 16 party, the most magnificent wedding or retirement cruise. What it says is that God can tell we’ve paid attention by the way we treat one another. Rhetorically he asks, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”
We live in a time and a place where we have tremendous access to the world’s goods. We can buy baby things unheard of 20 years ago like monitors with not only sound but TV screens and tummy-headphones for the baby to hear music in-vitro. We can submit to fashion trends like having to have a pair of what looks like gardening shoes. We can watch TV reality shows about how much money people blow on super-vacations and birthday parties for their kids. Or my personal favorite that I indulge in – we can buy a four dollar cup of coffee at Starbucks and yet complain about paying six bucks for the bag of beans at Kroger.
Our state of affairs really is getting ridiculous. I can’t imagine the proportions being anywhere close to the choices we face on a daily basis in biblical times – and yet we have a scriptural letter that reminds us that having access to the world’s goods is no good unless we’re willing to share our stuff with anyone who needs our help. The bible reminds us, “It’s about love, stupid.” It’s not about proper behavior, or the right clothes, or the perfect gift, or about having the cleanest home or even a well-adorned sanctuary. Will we help when someone is obviously in need? Whether we do or we don’t tells us something about how God’s love abides in us.
That’s a pretty scary thing. We will be judged, and this isn’t the only place in the bible that makes it clear, we will be judged by the quality of the love in our relationships with one another.
I had the privilege this past week of being invited to be part of a panel speaking in our Presbytery about the “Essential Tenets of the Reformed Faith.” What I was asked to do was to say, in my opinion, what I felt were the necessary requirements for being faithful according to our tradition. It was a somewhat daunting task. I used a fairly traditional approach – talked about God’s sovereignty, human sinfulness, and our deep need for God’s grace. But what struck me going through our Book of Confessions was also our need for belonging – for belonging to God, for feeling God’s love, and the ways in which that calls us into relationships with one another. Another panelist, the Rev. Steve Musick, reminded us that we are not only elected for salvation, we are elected for service. Amen to that.
1st John also tells us that if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; and we receive from God whatever we ask, because we obey God’s commandments and do what pleases God. You’ve probably heard some of the same preaching I’ve heard that implies from that statement that the pile of stuff we have, therefore, can be seen and judged as an account of God’s blessing. The rich have favor with God and the poor don’t. Well, it’s quite the opposite. Scripture is also clear about God’s favor for the poor, for those who rely on God completely and absolutely will receive the kingdom of heaven. Having “stuff” in scripture is counted as a responsibility more so than a blessing. It is to say that God expects those with access to the world’s goods to use those goods for the furtherance of God’s reign on earth.
So love is not an afterthought; love, my friends, is an essential. No fancy bassinette is necessary to experience the love between a mother and her newborn. We are called to love, not in word and speech, but by putting our faith in God’s truth into action. The problem, and John knew it, is that our “stuff” gets in the way. We need to examine our lists of wants – carefully. That’s not to say “in slacker mom lingo” that we should berate ourselves for having any personal extravagant indulgences – but it is to say that we call them for what they are and not classify them as “needs.” For if our brother or sister has real needs, our indulgences are to swiftly take second place or not even come into play at all.
Put love first, in all that you do, in every choice. For a few verses later, John will tell those who open his letter, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love... Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.” My friends, let the love of God into your hearts, so that you can put all else into perspective.
Amen.