Five Things We Learn from Our
Mothers (
Rev. Gary Cox --
University Congregational Church
I know that many of you were
expecting me to begin my two-part series on the rapture this morning. As you know by now, I write my sermons in
advance, and work on four or five at the same time. When I scheduled the rapture series, I did
not realize that this particular Sunday was Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is one of the holy trinity of
church days: Christmas, Easter, and Mother’s Day. Preachers learn early on not to mess with
those days, so I decided to slip in a Mother’s Day sermon, and delay the
rapture by a week.
There must be a couple of hundred
approaches to Mother’s Day sermons.
Everybody agrees that mothers are about the most important things in the
universe. Seriously. And I know there are bad mothers in this
world—mothers who do not love and care for their children the way they should;
but I am not going to talk about those exceptions to the rule of motherly love
today. I acknowledge that there are some
people in this sanctuary this morning whose mothers did not give them the type
of unconditional love I will talk about in this sermon. I’m happy to say that those few present I
know of, who were not blessed with great mothers, have themselves become
wonderful, loving parents.
Today, I’m going to talk about the
reason mothers are so important. It’s
not that they love their children, although they surely do. It’s not that they protect their children
from what sometimes turns out to be a very crazy world, even though they
do. I think the reason mothers are so
important is because of the things they teach their children. We learn from our mothers more than we learn
from any other person in our lives.
Psychologists tell us that we are shaped into the people we will be for
all our lives long before we ever set foot in a school. And that shaping, in most cases, is done
primarily by our mothers.
I set out to make a list of the
things we learn from our mothers, and it was a long list. I narrowed it down to the five things that I
think are most important—things we learn not from our fathers, or siblings, or
friends, or schools, but almost always from our mothers.
The first thing we learn from our
mothers is that it’s okay to cry. This
is an especially important lesson for young boys, because society tells us from
an early age that tears are something to be ashamed of. If you miss the nail and smash you thumb with
the hammer, just stand there stoically as if it doesn’t even hurt. Even if your thumb is throbbing to the point
you would swear it is expanding to the size of a watermelon with every
heartbeat, don’t let the world see your pain.
Typically a young lad in this
situation can hold those tears inside for a while. He looks at his dad, and his friends who were
watching him proudly hammer the roof on the dog house, and he informs them that
he needs to go in the house and wash off his smashed
thumb. No problem though. “Sure, it hurts, but hey, I’m a heck of a
man, especially for a little kid. I’ll
be back in a few minutes, and we’ll finish working on that dog house.”
And then he walks through the back
door, calmly, coolly, and he sees his mother, who has secretly observed the
whole scene as she nervously watched through the back window, wondering why
good old dad was letting her little boy swing that big hammer in the first
place. She stands there with that unique
motherly mixture of love and concern all over her face. And he breaks down and cries like a
baby. And it feels good! And there is this warm hug that can only
transpire between a mother and child, and a few minutes later it really has stopped hurting. Mothers can do that. And they teach us the healing power of tears.
We need to remember that lesson when
we grow up. Men still feel this
responsibility to respond to the pain in their lives with stoicism. A loved one passes on. “No problem.
Sure it hurts, but hey, I’m a heck of a man. Time to get back to work.” Hopefully we had mothers that taught us it is
okay to cry, because there are some wounds that just won’t heal until you’ve
washed them through your tear ducts.
So that is one of the really
important things we learn from our mothers: it’s okay
to cry. Another lesson we learn from our
mothers is the importance of telling the truth.
When we are children, we all take liberties with the truth. Picture this: there is a brand new batch of
cookies on the kitchen table, still warm from the oven, and a three year old
child is quickly munching one down while mom is in the other room. Mom calls back into the kitchen, “Don’t’ eat
any of those cookies!”
Do you know what virtually every
three year old in the universe will yell back as crumbs come flying out of his
mouth? “I’m not.” It’s not lying. It’s experimenting with the truth, and mom is
the one who gets to teach us not to undertake such experiments.
This is not an easy lesson. After all, what type of uncreative person has
to stick to the truth all the time? At
some point it occurs to most children that any idiot can tell the truth. It takes somebody with some real intelligence
and imagination to come up with a really believable lie. And as children, we get lots of
practice. We know we’re not supposed to
jump up and down on the bed, so we are careful to close the door before we turn
our bedroom into a gymnasium and the mattress into a trampoline. And when mom calls through the door, “Are you
jumping on the bed?” we answer, “No mom—just reading.” As if she couldn’t hear the bed springs
creaking and the whole house shaking.
Mothers are good at teaching us this
lesson—the importance of telling the truth.
They have some magical way of knowing just how far to let us go with our
deceptions. They somehow know when to
step in and put a stop to things, and when to let us go ahead and crown
ourselves on the headboard. They know
when to checkmate us: You’ve been jumping
on the bed, and here’s how I can tell…and when to let us learn from our own
mistake, and from the guilt of trying to cover it up: Wow—you got that bruise on your forehead because you went to sleep
reading and fell out of bed—you poor thing.
The importance of telling the
truth—that’s one we learn from good old mom.
Another lesson we learn from our mothers is to love ‘til it hurts. I don’t think that mothers necessarily love
more than fathers, but mothers usually feel less compelled to hide their
love. Emotionally, mothers tend to be
open books. When I played Little League
Baseball, there was this one kid who was always late to practice. He said it was because his dad gave him
chores to do around the house every day, and if they didn’t get done, he was in
big trouble. The coach told him one day,
“Just tell your dad you need to be here on time.” And my friend said, “I’ve told that to my
dad, and he always says the same thing.
He says, ‘I brought you into this world, and I can take you out. Now do your chores.’”
I can’t envision a mother saying
anything like that, even in jest.
Mothers just can’t hide their love.
We learn a vulnerability from our mothers that
we don’t see anywhere else. Mothers are
emotionally honest, and they teach—by example—that it’s okay to be the same
way. They really do love ‘til it hurts,
and if there is a more important lesson to be learned in life, I can’t imagine
what it is.
Lesson number four is the one I wish
people would remember when they grow up: Don’t fight—talk things out. There must be about a million books out
explaining that men and women are different—the Men are from Mars—Women are from Venus phenomenon. I don’t like to push that fact too hard. I’m a big believer that both men and women
should be able to pursue any vocation they desire. I absolutely stand against the attempts
society makes to define our roles in life according to our gender.
But I do recognize that generally
speaking, there are differences between men and women. Women tend to like to talk thing out. Men tend to want to make snap decisions and
take action. I suppose this is 90%
hormonal, but I’ll tell you one thing.
Most of the people who are in control of our world belong to the gender
that acts first and asks questions later.
I have to wonder what the world would look like if we tried letting
women run things for a couple of years.
We might build a few less weapons, and we would almost certainly find
ways not to use those weapons with such frequency.
As children we learn from our
mothers that things don’t always go the way we wish they would. I don’t want to share my toy with him.
I know there are only two pieces of candy, but I want them both.
I was playing with my ball, and she just grabbed it and started playing
with it herself. I want to play
basketball, and he wants to ride bicycles.
These situations don’t go away when
we grow up. The stakes just get a lot
higher. Mothers are the ones who teach
us from a very early age that most problems can be solved with a little
patience and a little conversation.
That’s a pretty important lesson that for some reason, adults tend to
forget, as their toys get more expensive, and the games they play are for
higher stakes.
Which leads us to the fifth lesson
we learn from our mothers: Dream big, but
grow where you’re planted. I think
our mothers are the primary nurturers of our dreams. They let us know that it is okay to use our
imaginations; in fact, they encourage it.
The encourage us to imagine what it would be like to grow up and be a
doctor, or a lawyer, or an astronaut, or to own a business, or to be a teacher,
or a nurse, or even the president! It’s
okay to dream.
But they also teach us to grow where
we’re planted. We realize our dreams by
taking a stand where we are. The grass
isn’t really greener on the other side of the fence—it’s just on the other side
of the fence. Dream the big dreams, but
make them happen by keeping your feet on the ground. Your future is in your own hands. You can realize your dreams from where you
are right now. The little community in
which you are being raised can produce fashion designers and astronauts and
presidents just as surely as
When I was preparing this sermon, I
made a conscious decision not to be theological. I wanted to anchor this sermon in the
real-life flesh-and-blood world of mothers and children. As I look back over those five things we
learn from our mothers, though, I realize that what our mothers are actually
teaching us—the lessons, the values, the wisdom—are
Christian principles.
Think about it: it’s okay to cry;
tell the truth; love ‘til it hurts; don’t fight—talk things out; and dream big
but grow where you’re planted. I
personally would much rather the children of this church learn those things—those
basic principles we learn from our mothers—than learn all the supposedly
“correct” theological views regarding the nature of Christ. I would rather our children talk about the
importance of telling the truth, than argue over who has been washed in the
blood of the lamb.
And this is not to belittle
Jesus. I just think that what Jesus said is at least as important as who Jesus was.
After all, great theologians have argued for two-thousand years about
exactly who Jesus was. Was he fully
human? Fully divine? Half human and half divine? Fully human and fully
divine? Created by God or fully
one with the Creator? An
atoning sacrifice for the sins of humanity? An example of God’s love
that heals our spiritual being?
The questions about who Jesus was go
on and on. That’s a big reason we have
hundreds upon hundreds of denominations.
And the truth is, no matter how much we argue about it; and no matter
how sincerely we believe we have it all figured out; and no matter how
insistent we are that our children believe the exact same things we do; we are
not going to solve two millennia of arguments in our children’s Sunday School
classes.
But we can teach them what Jesus said.
We’ve got a record, albeit somewhat faulty and confusing, of what Jesus
said. And the message is not only pretty
clear, it is as valid today as it was 2000 years ago. Jesus told us to love God with all our heart,
and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all
our mind; and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Everything else he said was anchored on that
simple teaching.
When we study the teachings of Jesus we come away not with a way of thinking about religion, but rather a way of living life. We discover in the teachings of Jesus these
basic rules that were written on our hearts, even before he gave them
voice. And we discover some very
important truths. We discover that it’s
okay to cry, because Jesus wept when he saw Mary and Martha mourning over their
brother, Lazarus. We discover that we
should always tell the truth, because Jesus told us to let our yes mean yes and
our no mean no.
We learn that we should love ‘til it hurts, because everything about his
life tells us that is the only reason God created us
in the first place. We learn not to
fight, and to talk things out, because he told us never to return evil for
evil, and he backed up that teaching by ordering Peter to shield his sword in
the
Those are the very things we learn
from our mothers. Which
leads me to believe that God was wise to create this world with motherhood as a
foundational institution. The
Book of Genesis tells us that on the seventh day, after creating all the
universe, God rested. Maybe God knew it
was safe to rest because mothers were left to be the primary shapers of God’s
children. Perhaps the author of the
Genesis creation account left out a verse.
Maybe it should read, “And on the seventh day, before resting, God
created motherhood. And God saw that it
was very good.”