Mother’s Day, Pine Valley Christian Church, Rev. David Hansen
When I was thinking about today, my mind went to Aretha Franklin for some reason and to that scene in the movie Blues Brothers. If you know the movie, you know the scene. Momma Aretha is running her dinner when the brothers show up. They tell her that they are getting the band back together and they need her man. She asks the boys for a little respect. Actually she asks for a whole lot of respect and she gets a little. When the boys pull out of town, she is left to run the place by herself.
Women have been standing up and demanding for R-E-S-P-E-C-T for a long time now. What we are going to do this morning is listen to the voices of three women who can speak to us about women’s rights and respect on this Mother’s Day. The first woman is Julia Ward Howe. We associate her name with the Battle Hymn of the Republic and with her poetry. After the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe she was sickened by the bloodshed, death and loss of life. She called on mother’s and women everywhere to come together and work of peace. In 1870 she issued the first Mother’s Day Proclamation.
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!
Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.
This powerful history is often buried under a stack of Mother’s Day cards or hidden behind bouquet flowers, and I have nothing against either cards or flowers, but I think that it is important to recall the history of this day. We should remember that Mother’s Day began with a call for disarmament and peace.
Julia Ward Howe was drawing on a history of women who had been there before her, standing where she was standing. Many of these women met at Seneca Falls in 1848. They wrote the Seneca Falls Declaration. It is a longer statement from which the following is an excerpt.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they were accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.
Jumping forward from the past to a little bit closer to the present, Jeanette Rankin was the first woman elected to the United States Congress and the only member of Congress to vote against the U.S. entry into World War I. Listen to her wisdom:
- You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
- I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war. I vote no. (Congressional speech, 1917)
- As a woman, I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else. (Congressional speech, 1941)
- Killing more people won’t help matters. (1941, after Pearl Harbor)
- There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense; for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible. (1929)
- It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam…. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail. (1967)
- If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again, but this time I would be nastier.
- Men and women are like right and left hands; it doesn’t make sense not to use both.
- We’re half the people; we should be half the Congress.
- Small use it will be to save democracy for the race if we cannot save the race for democracy.
- What one decides to do in crisis depends on one’s philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn’t any philosophy in crises, others make the decision.
- The individual woman is required . . . a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.
We remember these women today is because as we remember them we are then able to envision a future that we desire. We honor these women today and in a moment I will invite you to lift up the names of other women you would like us to honor today, this Mother’s Day, this day to honor all women. Before we do that, I want to tie this back to the psalm we read this morning and to the word R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
The psalm is a celebration of life. Sing a new song to the Lord. The heavens, the nations, the seas, the fields, the trees in the forest, and all peoples are invited to sing to the Lord a new song. It is a song of justice. That is what the psalm celebrates in the last line: “The Lord will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with truth.” In the Bible, justice is about establishing right relationships. It is restorative justice—the fruit of respect. On the Lord’s Day, when God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, then we will respect God’s good creation and we will respect each and we will respect ourselves and all of creation will sing God’s praise. That is what this psalm is saying.
Try this experiment sometime when you are reading the Bible. Substitute the word “respect” for the word “love.” Read the Letter of James, it is a short letter, and use the word “’respect.” Read the 13th chapter of First Corinthians, “If I have not respect, I am a noisy gong and a clashing cymbal.”
Julia Ward Howe, Sojourner Truth, the women of Seneca Falls, Jeanette Rankin, these women are part of a great cloud of witnesses that stand with us today. Who are some of the other women you who help us honor and remember today?