Creekside Church Sermon of May 11, 1997 "The Fundamental Things Apply" Mark 2:23-3:6	Rev. David Bibbee
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Today I submit for your consideration the case of several "mama's boys." James was a devoted son. His relationship with his mother was close and lasted a lifetime. She had unfailing, even blind confidence in him. Even on his deathbed, James' agony could only be overcome by writing to his mother.

Ted was eternally seven. Throughout his life, friends warned others about to meet him that he often acted like he was seven years old. A real mama's boy. Letters to his mother began, "Darling beloved little motherling". She had a compulsion for cleanliness. So did he. Ted and his mother were one in the same.

There was Bill. His mother said, "Willie needs constant watching and correcting. It requires great caution and finesse, but I don't believe we can love our children too much." You can imagine how he turned out. Then there was Woody. He emotionally and physically clung to his mama into adulthood. There was only warmth between them. He said he came to love the best in womanhood through her apron strings. Consider Frank. He wouldn't go to school without the support of his mother. The school was Harvard. She had a drive for perfection and focused it all on Frank. For six decades she tried to organize his life in minute detail, and he relished it.

Harry's mom was always there for him and he for her. She lived to ninety-four, and up till the last, he was there, conducting business from her bedside. Let me tell you about David. Even as a big boy in the Army he never stopped writing to his mother. In fact, he once swiped a top secret directive to order a mother's day card. Throughout his life he unconsciously imitated mama. Her smile. Her laugh. Her expressions. But then again, John did the same. He and his mama were close, and in times of crisis, she always came to mind.

If you think you can't be too close to mother, then you have something in common with these men. James Garfield. Teddy Roosevelt. William Howard Taft. Woodrow Wilson. Franklin Roosevelt. Harry Truman. Dwight Eisenhower. John Kennedy. Mama's boys. Each gladly credited who they were to women who brought them into and guided them through life. There was in these bonds something fundamental that sowed seeds of confidence and character. For better or worse, we become what we are immersed in, or as someone put it, "A child can't be what he or she hasn't seen."

I want us to focus upon that one thing which does more than all else to shape lives and relationships for the good, and it is applicable not to mothers only but fathers, sisters, brothers, Christians, and churches all. In our text Jesus and the disciples are walking through a grain field on the Sabbath. The disciples casually pluck some grain. Some Pharisees see it and tattle. "Why are your men doing what is prohibited on the Sabbath?" Jesus then reminded them of the time when David broke the rules. He strolled into the temple, ate the consecrated bread and shared it with some friends. Don't lose sight of what's most important. "The Sabbath was made for us, not the other way around." Jesus said.

The next scene is in the synagogue. It's still the Sabbath. A man with a withered hand is present. Even as Jesus is moved by compassion for the man, he knows he is being watched. He becomes angry because he knows what they are thinking. Their hard hearts which placed Sabbath law before human need ran headlong into Jesus' compassion. For the Pharisees the highest good was obedience to the rules. But for Jesus, it was words and acts of love that made lives whole.

When I read this passage, an old song sung by Jimmy Durante came to mind: "You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is but a sigh, the fundamental things apply, as time goes by." The fundamental things apply. And the fundamental thing for Jesus was love. Like the Pharisees, Jesus was passionate about obedience to God, but where as obedience for them led to a controlled, constrictive spirit, it led Jesus to open up and reach out...to hold, to heal, to listen, to forgive, to challenge, to invite, to bless. These are the fundamental things which matter most, matter for mothers, matter for all who take life in Jesus seriously.

I would hope we could all strive to be fundamentalists in the best sense of the word. Not the religious sort that divides people into us and them. Not the kind that sees the Bible and truth only one way, their way. Not the kind which uses Jesus as a barrier instead of bridge.

Tony Compolo, Madeline L'Engle, Richard Foster, Karen Mains from the Chapel of the Air, and Eugene Peterson are prominent Christian authors whose books you have read and we have used in Sunday school class. What you may not know is that these authors whose books touch thousands of Christians and have led many to Christ, have been the target of a smear campaign by a Christian fundamentalist broadcaster whose influence is growing. He and others have accused these authors of promulgating New Age ideas and being soft on homosexuals. Their writings don't adhere to this broadcaster's definition of the faith. Therefore they are branded as the enemy. They have experienced the cancellation of scheduled talks because sponsors were influenced by the negative reports.

What is troubling is that this sort of character assignation in the name of the Bible, doctrinal purity, and Jesus Christ, is growing. Like the Pharisees of Jesus' day whose closed minds and hard hearts lost sight of what God was doing in Jesus, there are hard, mean spirited people in too many churches destroying others in the name of Christ. I just spoke with a pastor who was denounced in a congregational meeting because he wouldn't come down hard on those who had been divorced. In front of everyone, one parishioner yelled at him and called him a "Spiritual Wimp."

If we are going to be fundamentalists, at least let it be the sort that is rooted solidly in scripture and Jesus Christ which opens the mind and not closes it, which keeps the heart tender and not rock hard. There is a kind of fundamentalism which accomplishes this. It is built upon the greatest command of all the scriptures. "O Israel, the Lord our God is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, mind, and all your strength." The second is this, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There is no commandment greater than these. (Mark 12: 28) Jesus said, "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." (John 15: 12) And tucked away in that little epistle of I John we hear it again. Love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Those who do not love, do not know God. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God abides in us and God's love is perfected in us.

Just as children cannot grow to be confident, caring, trusting, and loving people without mothers who are committed to the difficult day in and out work of loving, there is no credible Christian witness that does not have Christ love at the heart of it. Let me illustrate what this means.

The largest bussed ministry in the United States is in the most dangerous part of New York City called Hell's Kitchen. A church there ministers to society's forgotten people. After accepting Christ, a young Puerto Rican lady came to Pastor Bill Wilson with a request. She couldn't speak English, but through an interpreter she said, "I want to do something for God, please." "I don't know what to tell you," he said. "Please, let me do something." "O.K., I'll put you on a bus. Ride a different bus each week and just love the kids."

The church has fifty buses, and each week she rode a different one, and did as she was told...she loved the children. She found the worst looking kid on the bus, put him on her lap and whispered over and over the only words she had learned in English..."I love you. Jesus loves you." After several months she latched onto one little boy. "I don't want to change buses anymore. I want to stay on this bus." The boy didn't speak. He came to Sunday school week after week with his sister and sat on the woman's lap, but he never made a sound. But week after week all the way to church and all the way back she kept telling him, "I love. Jesus loves you."

One day to her amazement the little boy turned around and shyly, slowly stammered, "I love you, too." He wrapped his arms around her neck and hugged her. That was a wonderful moment, because just four hours later that little boy was found dead in a trash bag. A family member had beaten him and thrown his body in the trash."

I love you. Jesus loves you. These were the last words he heard from a Puerto Rican woman who could barely speak English. No training. No qualifications. No idea of what she would do for God. She just knew that as a new Christian she had to do something. And she did. And you?

Pastor Bill Wilson writes:
"The days of religious rhetoric are over. People must see Christianity. And we are the only Jesus they will see. You--one person, can make a difference. In Christ's name let yourself get close enough to people who hurt. Feel the pain. Sense the urgency. Turn to God and take your stand between the living and the dead."

Do you see why the things which apply as time goes by are the fundamental things? If we have all understanding, possess prophetic powers, have faith to move mountains, take the stand for right and remain steadfast on the moral issues of the day, if we live by all the rules, know the Bible forward and backward, but have not love, we're nothing but noise.

I began by telling you about some presidential mama's boys. I close with someone who wasn't. He said that those who loved their mothers and fathers more than him weren't worthy of him. At a party his mother told him the wine was running out and he snapped back, "Woman, what have you to do with me?" His mother and brothers came looking for him one day; wanted him to come home. "Who are my mother and brothers?" He said. "My mother and brothers are those who do God's will." Even as his mother watched him dying, he didn't call her mother. "Woman, look to my disciple John. He is your son now." It was his way of repaying her for all she had done for him...to see to it at the last that she was cared for in a way he could not.

Finally, fundamentally, that is how we honor and repay our mothers, by caring for them, and perhaps even more as someone said, "The best way of repaying them for their love is to love God and our neighbor as faithfully and selflessly as at their best our mothers have tried to love us."

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