Mother's Day 2016: Worth Beyond Motherhood

So this morning I want to speak more directly to our ladies.

So guys, you're along for the ride.

I think you'll still get something out of it.

Some of you are moms, uh, some of you are not.

I love what Christy said at the beginning.

Some of some for some of you this is a sad day.

Maybe your mom has passed on, or for some of you it's a sad day because maybe you just didn't have a good mom.

Some of you want to be moms, and it hasn't worked out yet, and that's incredibly frustrating and grieving.

Some of you are moms, and you're wondering what you were thinking at times, um, how that happened.

Well, actually, I know how it happened, but you're wondering how you are thinking.

And I just want to begin by saying, um, you know, like when you're scrolling through an Instagram feed or you see a picture of yourself or you see a reflection of yourself in the mirror, um, that's not your whole story.

And that's what I want to say this morning is that your physical self is not your whole story.

Your story is not what that selfie projects, or your address size, or your job title, or the job you don't have because you're at home with your kids.

Um, your whole story is not how beautiful your home is or how beautiful your kids are.

Your whole story is not how much feedback you get on a social media post that you put up.

Your whole story is not how well you serve this church, how much money you give, or whether you're here every week or you're not, or uh, or how well you serve your neighbor.

That's not your whole story.

Your whole story is not what the culture says you should be.

That's not your whole story.

And you know this.

You know this deep in your soul.

You know this.

You know that the core of your inner self must be centered on something more than those things before you ever come to those things.

So now I want to talk a little bit about the ancient world that Jesus was in, that the scriptures were in, that we read about.

And so in the ancient world, in the in the Greco-Roman world, the value of a woman was very little.

Uh it was incredibly demeaning.

I mean, women were seen as property, not as people.

Uh, Roman law stated that all sons had to be raised, but only the only the firstborn of the girls.

And so what this meant is is there, I think there's like 140 uh men for a hundred women.

A lot of times there's more men than women because because even discarding of baby girls would occur because they weren't a boy, wasn't a boy.

This happened.

I mean, this this was normal.

In ancient Athens, girls had little or no education, uh, and women were classified as a child, even in adulthood, they're classified as a child because they were they were property.

Women were property.

It's just the cultural value that was put on women.

Almost nothing, almost nothing.

And Jesus shows up into this horribly demeaning world, and he speaks what should be basic value to any human being, but is unbelievably radical at the time.

And so I want to look at this in two different places this week that I ran into this week as I was studying and listening to sermons and reading, and I ran into these different places, two different stories where we see Jesus speaking quite radically, and maybe perhaps you've heard these stories, you just read right through it, you just read right by how radical Jesus' words would have been to esteeming a woman at that time.

And so the first one's in Luke chapter 10, and this is the story where Jesus enters a village, and there's two sisters there's Mary and Martha.

Luke 10 · chapter mention

Maybe you've heard the story, and he comes into their home, and Martha gets busy.

She's busy, she's doing what the culture says she should do.

She's prepping the meal, she's making sure everything's okay.

And Mary sits at Jesus' feet.

Here's what it says jumping in, verse 39.

And she had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching.

But Martha was distracted with much serving.

Now that's usually where we usually teaching comes out of that.

You know, it's better to rest, don't always be distracted, always be busy.

Good teaching, good lesson.

And she went up to him.

So Martha goes up to him because she's been busy and there.

Mary is just sitting at Jesus' feet.

It'd be a little frustrating.

Your sister doing this, so that's even more irritating.

Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone?

Tell her then to help me.

But the Lord answered her, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary.

Mary has chosen the good portion which will not be taken away from her.

Now, what's radical in this teaching is that Jesus is esteeming what Mary's doing.

And there's this phrase, there's this phrase in here to sit at someone's feet.

And this was a phrase used when a man as a disciple sat at a rabbi's feet to learn.

This was a position that a man would take.

This was not a position that a woman would take.

And for Jesus to esteem what Mary was doing, he was esteeming Mary, who was breaking every conceivable cultural rule.

He's saying she's doing what's right.

I mean, still today we're not, we're not even as radical as Jesus was in this moment of breaking the cultural rule of what a woman should be.

He was daring to see a woman as absolutely equal.

Here's another story.

It is actually the longest recorded conversation we have with Jesus, with somebody else, and it was with a woman, which would have been insane at the time for him to do that as a rabbi, and then to record it, and then for uh for people to read this, this would have been mind-blowing.

For Jesus to have been conversing with this lady for this long, and then somebody thought it was a good idea to record this and document this, all of that would have been culturally just out of the box.

And here he is, Jesus, and he's talking to the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4, and he's talking to her at the well.

John 4 · chapter mention

A lot of you know the story, and so he comes to the well, it's the middle of the day.

So what this means is it means that this lady has something to hide because the women would have drawn water early in the day, but no, she's there in the middle of the day, which means she was avoiding all the other women.

And once you get into her life a little bit, you can see that she's probably avoiding them out of shame.

She's ashamed for the way that her life has turned out.

So she's avoiding them, but Jesus comes and he's ready to talk to her and to esteem her.

And this is where in John 4, 13, Kristen read it, Jesus said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again.

So he's talking a lot, he's metaphorical here.

The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

And the woman said, Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty, or have to come here to draw water.

So she's not picking up on it right away.

Jesus said to her, Go call your husband and come here.

So now he's getting into her life a little bit.

The woman answered him, I have no husband.

Jesus said to her, You're right in saying I have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.

What you have said is true.

So he says, You've had five husbands.

Maybe there's some commentary on her loose sexuality, but we don't know what the husband's situation was.

We don't get the background.

We don't get the background of what those husbands were like.

We don't get the background, maybe some of the husbands died, maybe there's doors.

We we don't get the background of all of that, but we do know is there's some shame attached to all of that.

We do know that life's been incredibly hard for this woman.

What we also know is that back then a man could bring in a poor woman into his house as a slave and as a concubine, but not as his wife.

And that this would be a means of survival for some women.

And maybe that's what this lady's doing.

I mean, maybe this is her only means of survival.

John Orberg, pastor and author, he tells it this way.

And Jesus says, I know you.

I know you are a woman.

I know you are a Samaritan.

I know you've been rejected.

I know you're poor.

I know your life is hard.

I know people don't give you much honor or glory.

I know your story, and I care about you.

And this Jewish rabbi sits at a well and engages in a deep, personal, serious theological conversation.

He takes her mind seriously, he takes her soul seriously, he takes her life seriously, he takes her identity seriously.

Is there any wonder she couldn't stop talking about this man?

He is doing something real subversive.

He is treating this poor, rejected Samaritan woman like somebody who has an identity on her own.

And see, that was radical at the time.

And I heard that this week in a sermon, and I said, that's what I want to talk about this morning, because what is easy for us to do, what's easy for us to do is to take the piggy bank, and it says approval and worthy, to take the piggy bank of the inner self, and just get in the cycle of making deposits by our work.

You know, we're gonna overcome our shame or our inadequacy by our work, by another good work, you know, our home to be more beautiful, for our reputation to be better, for our children to be better, and it's just gonna be work after work after work, and then I'll feel approved, or then I'll feel worthy.

And what nobody tells you is that there's no end to it.

There's no end to it.

You'll never fill that piggy bank of the inner self.

But we just keep doing it over and over and over again.

By the way, my seven-year-old was very happy to find out that I was adding money to her piggy bank when I borrowed it.

A couple points.

The first one is this is you are more than the deposits you make.

You are more than the deposits you make.

A couple of quotes, a bit of reading, you hang with me, it's it's in your handout.

These are these are these are pretty awesome.

I actually looked at trying to cut them down a little bit, and I said, I don't want to cut them down, they're too good.

So we printed them out.

Uh the first one is uh it's a Washington Post columnist of Bridget Schulte, and she wrote this book, Overwhelmed, Work, Love, and Play.

And it's about role overload.

Anybody?

Any moms want to say, yeah, any ladies know about role overload?

Here's what this lady says.

This was in an interview she gave about her book.

You've you're expected to be incredibly creative, to give 110% and take this ball and run with it and create something new.

Nobody's really working a nine to five punch the clock job anymore.

And if you are, you're not gonna, you're not going to last very long because there's competition and there's globalism and there's this constant feeling that the lawnmower is going to take your head off at any moment.

So you run as fast as you can to stay relevant and up to date on technology.

There are a lot of pressures at work, of course, but then there's email, you just say that word and people's hearts start beating faster.

Just trying to keep up with email can be a full-time job.

So there are all these pressures at work.

And then at home, there are pressures that I certainly experienced as a middle class mother to be supermother, to stage birthday parties, I staged D-Day for one child, I turned the backyard into Mount Olympus for another.

You know, whatever happened to pin the tail on the donkey like I had or the lopsided angel food cake with a few neighborhood friends, why is that not enough?

Why did I feel like that wasn't good enough?

Of course, part of that problem is the guilt associated with working mothers.

The cultural expectation that if you're a working mother, you're somehow not as good a mother.

So you're constantly looking for ways to try to prove that you are, to make it up.

But in a weird way, you're throwing parties for other people, not necessarily doing it for your kids.

So motherhood standards are higher.

Fatherhood standards are also higher, and partly because men want to be more involved than perhaps their fathers were.

They don't want to be distant.

They want to know what to get when their son says, Surprise me for Christmas.

Whereas a generation ago, fathers would have had no idea, oh, talk to your mother.

So the roles of men are changing as well, and along with that fear of missing out feeling because of Facebook and technology, for anyone and everyone, there are so many options out there.

It creates this harried restlessness, the kind that leaves you saying, Oh my goodness, I better be doing something interesting and productive, and I better be constantly improving myself.

So lots of people feel this role overload.

And I think that comments on how we then easily begin to live out of guilt and out of fear for these roles in our lives rather than out of a more secure, loving, uh rested place.

Here's the second quote.

Ruth Whitman in New York Times did a series on anxiety.

She wrote an article called Guilt Trip.

Like many women, I have the capacity to feel guilty about almost anything.

There's the basic glossy magazine guilt package, the fetishly complicated skincare regimens and man-pleasing instructions, the bikini bodies and never-to-be-cooked recipes that give rise to them.

These provide the background hum of failure.

The specifics cut deeper.

I feel guilty that I almost certainly hurt my mother-in-law's feelings when I said that thing on the phone to her the other day.

I feel guilty that it has taken me three weeks to respond to my best friend's supportive and lovely email.

I feel guilty that I throw my recycling in the regular trash when no one is looking, and that one of my son's earliest two-word speech combinations was mommy's wine.

Most of all, I feel a crippling self-loathing that I am wasting time worrying about any of this self-indulgent nonsense when right now there are children starving in Africa.

Such is the awe-inspiring flexibility of the guilt muscle.

It can be activated by any given action and also its exact opposite.

Hence, I can spend a week at home with my son feeling guilty that I am neglecting work and haven't written a single word, that I am letting down my editors and myself and failing to make use of the education my parents worked so hard to provide.

Yet now, as I type, the guilt bubbles up for the fact that my son is languishing in daycare while I am busy not appreciating the minute-by-minute wanderama that is his precious early childhood.

Not that it will work.

Guilt is usually pretty ineffective overall.

Despite its lofty claims to stand in the way of wrongdoing, guilt is really just closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.

It also allows us the luxury of hedging our moral bets instead of making a choice and standing by the consequences.

We behave as we please and then cash in our moral credits by feeling bad about it afterward.

So if you've been around here, this is why we hammer home over and over and over and over again that the weight of law and standards is good for you, gives guide for you and boundaries for you for what your life should be and could be, and yet it crushes us because we never live up to it.

So the only place of true motivation for life and relief for life is grace.

That's it.

So our second point.

You have a core truth beyond your roles and beyond your results.

So if we go back to the piggy bank, and we've been in this process, just making deposits, making deposits over and over and over again to become approved, to think we're gonna have a all of a sudden have a sense of approval based on our work.

And the entire time, the reality is that we are already approved in God's grace.

We're already justified, we're already forgiven and relieved of that guilt, of that shame.

We're already His beloved.

So the path forward is not one of living by our work to become approved.

You don't have to give your life to that.

The path forward is to remember and rest in the approval you already have by God because of his work and his grace toward you.

And that's not abstract.

That's not just that's not just a philosophical notion.

We know it concretely in the incarnation, in the person of Jesus.

We know this in God's humility and love to you.

Even when you don't act like that beloved approved child.

Even when you don't think like that beloved approved child, he is still moving toward you.

See, Jesus says to you, I know you.

I know you are poor.

I know you are broken, I know you're not a perfect lady, I know you're not a perfect mom.

And I still love you.

See, anything of sin and shame, whether it be behavioral or just that that position of trying to redeem yourself by your own work and your own pride, even that, all of that was put on God's humility and love and sacrifice that we know in the cross that he might transfer to you his perfect righteousness, that you are secure.

You're secure with him.

You're at rest, you're forgiven.

See, this is about a deep, secure inner identity.

And it comes not by circling around this deep truth that you are God's beloved child, it comes by resting your whole self there, by shifting faith from your work to his work.

So that's point number two.

You have a core truth beyond your roles and beyond your results.

And so that's speaking to the fact that there's kind of three things here.

You kind of have identity, and then you have roles, and then you have results.

Now, often we end up living in roles or results, and we like that because there's a lot of control there.

There's a lot of we can get a sense of control, we can get a sense of pride.

And even in the reaction, we can we can belittle ourselves, which is you know, sort of still the selfishness, the self-orientation, versus living in an identity given to you that is secure from outside of you and spoken to you.

And we all live somewhere, and the reality is we fluctuate some, we find ourselves living under some results, and then we go, what am I doing?

This is so pointless, or you're living in your roles and you're like, oh, I'm exhausted, you know, and you have to keep finding and pushing yourself and coming back to the rest, found an identity given to you.

Here's what all this means.

Here's what all this means.

If you don't have children, if you don't have children, you have not missed out on a whole identity.

You haven't.

And if you have children, you are not bound by who they become.

Because in both cases, your whole story is not based on your role or your results, but on what rather what God deems you.

So, ladies, the great thing here is that what you have to offer to your family or your friends or your spouse or your neighbors, the great thing here is what you have to offer is not your perfection.

You don't have to curate that, you don't have to manage that.

You can be at rest.

The great thing here is the thing that you have to offer is your presence.

And that is imperfection, that is vulnerability, but it is the reality that in that you are perfectly loved.

It's what Jesus is saying to you.

I know you, I know you are a woman, I know you've been rejected, I know you are poor, I know your life is hard, I know people don't give you much honor or glory.

I know your story and I care about you.

So, my brothers and sisters, may that be good news and great rest in a world of high demand.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that while we are not perfect, you love us perfectly, and we do not have to live out of guilt or shame.

Would you help us in greater ways to live out of the places of deep, secure identity that we are your children, secured in your work for us.

Even when we don't have the feelings of great security, would we still be at rest?

God, would you help us to trust even when we don't trust?

Would you give us joy when we don't have joy?

God, I pray for these ladies in this room when they find their great story and the identity that you give to them.

We pray all things in Christ's name.

Amen.