Preface
Who is the real mother? How do you measure authentic mothering? Is it by the mere accident of birth, or is it by something deeper?
Who is the real mother, who is the authentic mother? Is it simply the woman you gave you birth and who wiped your messy nose during your growing up years, or is the power of mothering measured by some personal response that goes beyond the boundaries of biology?
Several years ago, on a Mothers’ Day like this one, I asked that all the mothers in the congregation stand to be recognized. Then I also called for all those who had served as mother figures ... those who had played the role of mother for somebody. Male that I am, I was expecting a few maiden aunts and older sisters to get to their feet. Imagine my surprise when one of our oldest men stood up. I thought maybe he had misunderstood. But when I found out more about him and his life, I knew that he had heard me perfectly. He stood, and with good reason. He had done what a real mother does.
Obviously he was measuring mothering by something more than biology, something longer than nine months’ gestation, something more powerful than cooking meals and cleaning house.
Who is the real mother? How do you measure authentic mothering? May I suggest this morning that real mothers are defined by the way they respond to the sword? Real mothers, whether female or male, are measured by their response to the sword!
Introduction
I don’t envy King Solomon his job. What is a mere male to do, when confronted by two loud, brassy, argumentative females? Most of us men have enough trouble putting two sentences together in the presence of assertive women, but come on … this is too much. Here are two women, not exactly model citizens -- prostitutes -- each clamoring for the ear of the king, each claiming to be the real mother of one tiny sleeping infant. "King Solomon, sort it out for us. I’m the mother. No, I’m the mother. I am. No, I am. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap." Hey, why don’t you girls just go shopping and leave me alone to watch the ball game!?
But the king of Israel took seriously what these women had brought before him. He saw some issues here and he rendered a decision. So each woman claims to be the real mother of this little baby? Then let’s be fair. Let a sword be brought, and we will divide the baby, and each of you can have half of him, and everybody goes home satisfied. Right?
In a moment I’m going to contrast and compare the two mothers who appear in this story. I’m going to ask you to study them with me in order to see two contrasting ways of understanding responsibility. But first, let’s take a few moments to get in touch with King Solomon and this decision of his.
I
I think we ought at least to be grateful that in ancient Israel two women of the streets had access to their government. It seems not to have mattered that they were prostitutes: there were no handlers around to keep these ruffians at arm’s length and to arrange for photo opportunities. They had the ear of the king, they had
access to government.
And they felt that government was the place to look for justice. How striking the contrast between Jerusalem then and Los Angeles now, that the poor, the lowly, and the socially disreputable not only find their way to government, but also that they expect justice from the system.
Of King Solomon the Scripture says that, "All Israel stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to execute justice." How we could wish that all of the citizens of our land might also have confidence that whether it be the White House, the court house, or their own houses, justice might always prevail. I am not today arguing whether justice was or was not done in the Rodney King verdict: I am simply lamenting the loss of confidence in our institutions of justice.
And I am observing that government has to get that confidence the old-fashioned way: government has to earn it. Respect has to be earned. Solomon earned the respect of the people. "All Israel stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to execute justice."
Well, I need to be careful here. Getting political. Shouldn’t do politics on Mother’s Day! And so I will not take the time to observe that the king asked no questions about whether there was a man in the house. I will not bother you with speculation about whether these children were illegitimate, because, frankly, I don’t think there are any illegitimate children. There may be unsanctioned relationships, but there are no illegitimate children. All children have the right to live and to thrive. Solomon didn’t get into that, and neither will I.
Nor will I spend much time worrying about why this man, authority figure that he was, male that he was, did not just go ahead and make the final decision for these women. Notice that in the way Solomon proposed a solution, he really didn’t exercise control over the wills and bodies of the women. He just posed the question in such a way that they made the choice themselves. But we won’t get into that.
Nor can I use my limited time to lay out for you that the role of government is to brandish the sword in order to convince the straying more than to use it to punish. If I had more time, we could speculate together about what it really means to be pro-life -- about whether if you are concerned for the lives of babies you ought not also to be concerned about the lives of youth and of adults. We could speculate about being completely pro-life, about seeing justice as touching the whole range of issues from abortion to child protection to handgun control to capital punishment to care for the dying. But I don’t have that privilege today.
So the point about Solomon is really very simple. No matter who we are, whether rich or poor, whether black or white, whether we own a football stadium or just watch the games on TV. We have the right to insist that government earn our respect. "All Israel stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to execute justice."
Now to these two mothers.
II
How, again, do you measure authentic mothering? What is the measure of a real and responsible person, whether male or female, who cares about living in this world? It lies in how she responds to the sword.
One mother is nothing but possessiveness. Her hands do nothing but grasp. She wants what is hers, and when what is hers is denied her through a terrible accident, then she wants what is yours. Waking up one morning to find her own son dead, she switches babies and tries to pretend that her roommate’s son is her own.
She wants what is hers, and when she cannot have that, she wants what is yours.
There is, running through our society, a culture of greed, a culture of possessive violence. It was not very hard to see that in the streets of Los Angeles the other day, as rioters took what they could carry and burned what they could not. That is deplorable. No question.
But I want you to see deeper. I want you to see through the eyes of this mother of ancient Israel what the culture of greed is all about. I want you to understand the culture of possessive violence.
Put no gloss on it, this woman was a prostitute. How did she get to be one? Likely because the economic system of ancient Israel put her there. In the ancient world, if a woman did not marry and thus get a man to take care of her, she would starve. Selling her body was just about the only form of livelihood she could hope for.
And so, imagine her plight. Starving for money, used and misused by scores of men, now one of them leaves behind more than a few dollars and bang, wham, thank you ma’am. One of them leaves her pregnant. This little baby boy, you can imagine, is the only thing of beauty and of value she had to show for her long, sordid career.
And then she kills the baby. You and I call it an accident, but she may have called it the last straw. The last and most bitter blow in a long litany of abuses things gone wrong. Life is not fair.
And so on that bitter morning I can well imagine her saying, "I’m as mad as a hornet and I’m not going to take it any more. I will not be a victim this time."
What she did was wrong, yes. To take what was not hers was wrong. To defraud her friend was inexcusable. I grant you all of that.
But I am saying that we have to understand that there are people in our society who have been beaten down and abused so many times that no longer can they make good decisions. They are like a boxer who has been hit on his head so many times that he cannot even see straight. There are those who see no way out except to take what is yours because so often they have lost what they thought was theirs.
It’s pretty easy to condemn this woman, until you stand in her shoes. But when you do for a little while, you will not so much condemn her as you will sorrow for her.
You will sorrow for her, because look what happens when the sword is suggested to her. King Solomon says, "Let a sword be brought, and we will divide the boy, and each of you can have half of him." We will not get into the fact that quite often government makes decisions that are just about as nutty as that sounds! No, we will watch this mother’s response.
"It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it." Sure, that sounds fair, your majesty. If I can’t have my boy, and I can’t have her boy, then I’ll have what I can get. Half a loaf is better than none, you know.
Except, of course, we are not talking about a loaf, we are talking about a life. We are not talking about having possessions, we are talking about possessing our souls.
I want you to understand that the poor and the desperate, those who feel alienated from privilege, feel such rage that they would rather have something, anything, however pointless, than the nothing they now have.
In the Los Angeles rebellions, among the shops that were looted was a wedding shop. One bride’s handmade, custom-fitted gown, all ready for her wedding day, was stolen. Not too likely that anybody else can use it. Somehow I don’t see the Cripps and the Bloods staging a formal wedding. But someone took it because it was there for the taking, and half a loaf is better than none, something is better than nothing. And at least it felt like they punished the privileged.
Friends, are you with me? I am not defending the rioters. I am sorrowing for them. I am disappointed that they have so bought into the culture of greed, the culture of possessive violence, that they would destroy the very things that could have brought them happiness.
Like the mother of ancient Israel who would have preferred to see the other woman’s son destroyed if it could not be hers, Angelenos burned up jobs and markets and good will, and will pay a terrible price for years to come.
But I sorrow for them and for the rest of us, too, because we have so much and we want to hold on to it. We are a part of the culture of possession. We have fostered this thing of having and keeping what you have. May God forgive us!
III
But I must take you now to the other mother. I must ask you again to consider what real mothering is, what authentic humanity is. I have tried to say that real mothering, real humanity is measured by its response to the sword.
One mother said to King Solomon, "All right, carve up the boy. If I can’t have him, then she can’t have him either. Neither of us will." One mother bought into possession and greed and violence.
But the other mother, the other mother, when the King proposed that a baby be treated like a loaf of bread, said, "Please, my Lord, give her the living boy; certainly do not kill him."
King Solomon, we can’t do this. We can’t save the situation by destroying it. Unlike the American officer who would say in Vietnam, "We had to destroy this village in order to save it", this mother understood that her child’s life was more valuable than her own wants and wishes. This mother recognized that as much as she wanted to keep her own son, still overriding all of that was her desire that the child live.
This was the real mother. This was the authentic human being. Solomon had known that character will come out, and that true mothers, real people, caring people, will respond to the sword with sacrifice. With sacrifice.
God’s people will not say, "I want what I want when I want it". God’s people will say, "If I can help somebody, so let me live my life." God’s people will let justice be tempered with mercy and will override their own wants with sacrifice.
I had the privilege of visiting my own mother this past weekend. She is now 85 years old, very frail, severely arthritic, with the thinnest and most easily torn skin her physician has ever seen. She can just sit in a wheelchair and end up bleeding. Her arms and legs are a mass of bruises and scabs and bandages. It is as though sharp swords were everywhere around her.
Now, you know, I grew up in a home where we didn’t have a whole lot. My father’s top earnings before he retired were about $8000 a year. We were not poor; but we certainly had no luxuries.
On the other hand, let me tell you what we did have. It came time for me to attend the university. I had done well enough as a high school student, and so received a full tuition scholarship for my first years of college. But then the scholarship ran out. My parents had to help me with the rest of my university education.
At about the same time, my younger brother, who was in junior high school, was developing as a fine and talented musician. His teacher said, "This boy has gone as far as I can take him. He needs private lessons with the best teacher in the city. And he needs to be practicing on a grand piano, instead of your rickety old upright."
I never really knew how I could be getting university tuition and my brother could be getting private lessons and a new piano out of an $8000 income. I never really thought about it at the time.
But now I know that it was not only my father’s hard work but also my mother thinning down the soup, making most of the clothes, finding a little part-time job. It was sacrifice. Real mothers sacrifice the things they might like to have so that their sons will be whole and not carved-up, useless halves.
Last week my brother and I sat with that frail little body and counted ourselves the two most privileged men in the world. Sacrifice.
Somehow I think that God is in that. The wisdom of King Solomon came from God. So did the sacrificial heart of this mother. They indict profoundly our greedy, possessive culture of violence.
Somehow, I say, I think that God is in that. The woman said, "This woman and I live in the same house; and I gave birth while she was in the house. Then on the third day after I gave birth, this woman also gave birth ... [And] this woman’s son died in the night ... please, my lord, give her the living boy." Don’t use the sword. Sacrifice me, not the child.
In the temple, the child Jesus, presented to the priests by his mother Mary. .. Simeon the priest says to Mary, This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel... and a sword will pierce your own soul also."
"Woman, behold your son; son, behold your mother." That word from a cross, a cross.
God so loved the world that He gave, He sacrificed, Mary’s son, that the world might be saved.
Then on the third day ... please, my Lord, give her the living boy.
