Things My Mother Said

Adam Jones
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

June 8, 2008
Laity Sunday

My mother had a very interesting way of turning a phrase. Occasionally, this meant torturing a phrase. She invented a number of memorable mixed and mangled metaphors; some of them were down right poetic.

It all started when the Dallas Cowboys pulled out an exciting game that came right down to the wire and had everyone on the edge of their seat. The Cowboys finally prevailed.

“That was a real tree climber,” my mother exclaimed.

This started a tradition of sayings which were almost correct, but just a little off...they made perfect sense to her, of course.

When my father lacked a certain enthusiasm for a social outing, she told him to quit being such a “hole in the wall.”

(as an aside, when Dad said something that really annoyed her, she used to tell him to “go butt a stump” -- still one of my favorite expressions). 

One day I brought a report card home and she noted that one of the days I had been sick the previous week had, instead, been counted against me. She had forgotten to call the school office. She resolved to correct the problem the next day, because, she noted:

“There is no excuse for an unexcused absence.”

That was good, but she was at the absolute height of her linguistic powers one day when she described a task as being so easy that it was like: “shooting hens in a barrel.”

--which, when you think about it, would be a fairly grisly scene.

But there was one turn of phrase that my mother used that required no double take. No pause. No translation. For I always understood what she meant when she described those people in life who lived with passion and courage and fire. When she encountered those who would go to such remarkable effort to make a difference, she would call that:

“throwing your heart over the wall.”

We all know people like this. Some of them are sitting among you.

Life, at its very best, is about throwing your heart over the wall. We spend much of our time as Christians deciding when and how and why and where to try and make a difference. My old friend and former pastor Howard Childers used to say that we try and make these decisions in life complicated, but they’re not really. He always said that life is really about who you love, who loves you and what you decide to do with that love.

Or where you decide to throw your heart.

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In the gospel reading today, Jesus does as much as he can to completely irritate the Pharisees. My mother used to love these stories. She said once that her problem with the fundamentalists was that they were always telling us what God wanted, but she was never sure that they had consulted God in the matter.

Jesus starts by inviting a tax collector to follow him. Let’s be very clear: tax collectors were Jews who collected taxes on behalf of the occupiers. Quite often, they turned a personal profit along the way with back-up from the rather imposing Roman army. They were the ultimate sell-outs and hypocrites, reviled by all quarters. Matthew gives up this life, but before he leaves with Jesus, he throws a party at his house to tell the other tax collectors and assorted riff-raff that he’s going. So Jesus goes.

The Pharisees don’t like this, but in a textbook case of human passive-aggressive behavior, they don’t take it up with Jesus. With their best high school clique behavior, they complain to the disciples: Peter, Andrew, James and John--these are the relatively clean fishermen, as opposed to the unclean heathens Jesus has decided to have dinner with.

But Jesus answers directly.

“I’m not here for you” (the righteous, those that have proclaimed themselves as rigtheous). “I’m here for them.”

Jesus is here to bring grace to the sinners. He then tells the Pharisees to figure this out for themselves -- “Go and learn what this means” is how the RSV translates this. You, Pharisees, are the ones who read and study and interpret.

Go and learn how, Pharisees, how to throw your heart over the wall.

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Jesus moves on. Curiously, right in the middle of a narrative that has Jesus on his way to raise a woman from the dead, the Gospel drops in one of the best stories in the Bible about the nature of Jesus. Three short verses. A woman is following Jesus and she’s been sick for twelve years—bleeding the text says, which would make her unclean according to Jewish law. You would imagine an untouchable would trail behind and only get close enough to touch Jesus’ cloak, which she believed would make her well, trying her best not to be noticed.

But she gets caught. Jesus tells her “Be of good cheer…your faith has made you well.”

Your faith has made you well.

It’s not the cloak. This isn’t superstition. It’s not magic. It’s not mythology.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is always telling us to do something with what we have. “Go” seems to be his favorite verb. It was also my mother’s.

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My mom died in the summer of 2002, just about six weeks after I married Erin.

At the very end, we had one last chance to talk. One of the very last things I ever said to my mother was when I told her that she was the best mom anyone could have ever had.
She laughed at me. Then she said something that absolutely was not in the script.

“No, I wasn’t. I didn’t have to be.”

If you want to know what Grace sounds like, this is it. What Mom was telling me was that I was hardly the kind of person who needed some sort of superhuman mothering effort. She was telling me that my life was about me, not about her. That was the last thing she told me. Then Mom was gone.

Go, and find a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Go, tell all those people on the beach that we will find a way to feed them.

Go, because your faith has made you well.

Go, and learn what this means.

Go, to all corners of the world.

Go, and make disciples of all nations.

Go…

and throw your heart over the wall.