Today we celebrate and thank the women whose love has surrounded us through the years so we would thrive and flourish, our mothers and grandmothers, and for some of us, it’s our godmothers, aunties, and big sisters we honor on this day. The lectionary for this Sunday includes, quite appropriately, though nobody thought about Mother’s Day when the readings were assigned — the lectionary includes one of the very few passages in the Apostolic writings that speak of infants and milk. In First Corinthians and Hebrews, milk is mentioned as baby food for baby Christians who haven’t matured enough in their faith to digest the solid food of weightier teachings.[1] Here in First Peter, though, we hear a different theme. Here it’s not about the contrast between milk for newborn infants who’ll eventually become meat-and-potatoes Christians.
First Peter is addressed to believers who often struggle with how to live the new life of faith, the new life of hope and love in a world that often gives more reason for fear and despair. The Apostle points to babies as perfect examples because they are new to the miracle of life and they simply know what’s best for them when it comes to eating and thriving: You pick them up and you cradle them in your arm, and if they’re even just a little hungry, they’ll turn their little face toward you, and with their mouths open they begin to feel their way to the source of all goodness and fulfillment.
“Since you have tasted that the Lord is good,” the Apostle writes, since you have tasted sweet mercy and rich wisdom and abundant grace in the community of believers, long for that milk, that new-life milk, that pure, whole-life milk. Get rid of all ill will and all deceit, pretense, envy, and slander and whatever else they serve at the former-life bar; that stuff has zero nutritional value. It doesn’t nourish you, but rather consumes you and those around you. Look at an infant: that’s you in the arms of Christ. Like a newborn baby, desire the pure milk of the word. Drink the love that will not let you go, drink the life given for the life of the world. Nourished by it, you will grow into salvation.
Penelope Duckworth is an Episcopal priest, and she’s also a mother; or perhaps she would say she’s a mother and also an Episcopal priest. She wrote a poem about the sacrament of nursing, titled simply, Milk (For Clare).[2]
Pulled by your cry, it surged out.
Welling from the nipple’s pores, it was thin,
bluish, sprayed in tiny streams,
caused a slow, dull, homesick pain.
We laughed in astonishment as it kept coming
until your shining mouth let go
and you drowsed in sunlit bliss.
You, at seven months, nurse and pedal
rhythmically, your hands explore the air.
I fill to meet your whitest need,
The hind milk now, grown thick and creamy,
will hold you sleeping with its weight.
Dame Julian, in her mystic state,
perceived Lord Jesus as her mother
offering to nurse us all,
milk flowing from his giving breasts.
It is a glory, this feeding from the body:
Take and eat this simple meal.
This is my body given for you.
…
We know there’s a vast difference between a body given and a body taken, between life freely given and life violently taken.
Wanda Cooper-Jones is a mother. Her youngest child was born on Mother’s Day 1994, and she named him Ahmaud. And this week, the men who killed him were finally arrested, 74 days after grabbing their guns and chasing her unarmed 25-year-old son in their pickup truck.
Terri Hord Owens, our General Minister and President, and also a mother, shared her lament:
Enough, America. Enough. We are tired, we are heartbroken, we are angry.
There is an historical record that is hundreds of years old documenting the horrors of violence upon black lives and black bodies. Generational trauma which began from the time of the Middle Passage is yet being inflicted upon black lives today.
My great-great grandfather was borne of the trauma of a white slave master raping a black woman.
My great-grandfather grew up in the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan and knew the trauma of constant terrorization of his community.
My great-grandmothers suffered the indignities of having to enter the back door when they worked as domestics in white homes.
My grandfather faced death threats when he fought for desegregation.
A family member was beaten up when he stopped to help a fellow college student whose car had broken down because he had spoken to a white girl a few days before.
In elementary school, I was called “nigger”, and told that “if it hadn’t been for us white people, you niggers would still be slaves”. I was then slapped in the face and my glasses were shattered, leaving shards of glass on my cheeks.
My son was accused of stealing his own jacket from the school cateferia when he returned to retrieve it. He asked, “did they think that because I am black?”
My husband and son have both been stopped over and over by policemen for no reason, given no tickets, simply because they drove a certain kind of car in predominantly white neighborhoods.
I am grateful that none of these family members died, but all around them, others did. Too many lynched. Too many beaten and killed. Too many shot by police, and by people assuming the right to be judge and executioner. Too many dead as a result of escalated response that was unwarranted. Too few of the killers have been arrested, and too few have been convicted. Too many black and brown people are dying of COVID-19; too many black and brown people are in poverty and are low-income and underemployed. Too much pain and injustice, too much blood spilled, too many bodies battered, too much indignity to bear, too little justice and reparation.
And so, I ask you, America: when will it be time for justice? How can I be sure that you are not raising your children to devalue and kill ours?
There are no words, no emojis for the heaviness of this pain, frustration and anger.
Let me lament for now... I will rise to fight... another day.
I got nothing to say unless and until I have heard her out, so I can even begin to feel the heaviness of her pain, her frustration and anger, and begin to bear it with her.
Michele Norris, also a mother, wrote,
I am so tired of seeing black death on small screens. Exhausted by the constant reminder that black bodies immediately represent a threat. Anguished because when I look at these videos, I see the people I love — my husband, my sons, nephews, my people. I am reminded that, despite their accomplishment and commitment to civic life, they can so easily encounter men who will see none of that, men who will feel justified in extinguishing a perceived threat. … This country will never confront the attitudes, the fear of black bodies, the slow roll of justice for black lives cut short too soon unless and until enough people who don’t see their sons and husbands and loved ones in that grainy footage work up enough umbrage and will to do more than just issue condolences on Twitter.”[3]
I got nothing to say unless and until I feel the full weight of the scandal that I can watch that grainy footage and not immediately see my son or my nephew or myself in the place of the victim.
When Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,”[4] he doesn’t mean do not let your hearts be touched or shaken or broken.
Quite the contrary. Trust in Jesus. Trust in God. Trust that you are worthy of saving, not because you are great, but because you are loved. Trust the promise of reconciliation and the hard labor of love it inspires. Trust that the way of Jesus is indeed the way of life.
We live in the house that slavery built. We live in the house where every corner, every rafter reeks of injustice and exploitation. And whenever we feel like we have finally renovated a few rooms in the colors of freedom and equality, we turn around, and violence and fear have added a whole new floor of hurt. But this house is not our home.
“Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a house whose cornerstone is Christ, a house whose every dimension and angle is determined by the vision of life that Jesus embodied and served with his whole being. First Peter and all the words of scripture give us only glimpses of a house under construction, not a complete set of drawings and 3-D models built to scale. But we can trust the master builder: The house that love builds is a house where justice is at home. In the house that love builds we name without fear the fatal dreams of supremacy, and we hear each other’s stories, the whole story of each of us and all of us, and we see each other, we really see each other, and together we grow into salvation.
[1] 1 Corinthians 3:2; Hebrews 5:12-13
[2] Penelope Duckworth, “Milk (for Clare),” Congregations 30, no. 3 (2004), 19.
[3] Michele Norris https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ahmaud-arberys-mother-will-take-part-in-a-very-different-mothers-day/2020/05/08/2913c5dc-916c-11ea-9e23-6914ee410a5f_story.html
[4] John 14:1