Hilton Head Island, SC – May 14, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Proverbs 31:10-12, 24-29; John 15:12-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” – John 15:13 (NRSV)
MRS. XIE, THE SHOE-MENDER MOTHER
China Witness is the title of a book written by a Chinese woman who goes by only one name: Xinran. The author was born in Beijing in 1958. She moved to London in 1997, where she was a writer for The Manchester Guardian newspaper. She married an Englishman, Toby Eady. Xinran has gone back and forth between China and London several times in the last few years. China Witness:Voices from a Silent Generation is her oral history of elderly people who survived the Long March, the Chinese Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. These all were enormous political, social, and military upheavals, resulting in huge national disruptions throughout the Middle Kingdom.
The American Revolution was a Sunday School picnic compared to the Chinese Revolution and its bloody aftermath. Mao Zedong was a radical ideological extremist who oversaw the deliberate extermination and starvation of millions of his fellow citizens. Nevertheless he managed to lead almost a billion people into the twentieth century from their centuries of impoverishment under the various imperialist dynasties. But the price paid by many of the survivors was horrendous.
Mrs. Xie was one of those survivors. She was born into a family whom the communist government deemed “rich peasants.” They owned almost nothing, but they had a bit more than the poorest of the poor. Because of their arbitrary classification, Mrs. Xie, who was unusually bright, was prevented from going to any kind of institution of higher learning. Thus she and her husband moved to the city of Zhengzhou, where she set up a small outdoor shoe repair shop under a tarpaulin in the crowded street of a slum. For the past thirty years she has sat in the same place, making her living on her reputation as the best shoe-mender in the city.
Xinran had heard of Mrs. Xie, and she wanted to interview her, along with the other people chronicled in her amazing oral history. Mrs. Xie and her bicycle-repair husband have two children, a son and a daughter. Though the Maoist government had prevented her from entering a university anywhere in China, her native intelligence led her to see to it that both her children would attend the best schools possible in the New China, and that is what she did. Her son has almost completed his Ph.d. at Xi’an Communications University, one of the finest engineering institutions in China. Her daughter has a master’s degree from Beijing University.
All the while Xinran was talking to the shoe-mender mother in the chaotic din of her makeshift workplace, Mrs. Xie was fixing shoes and also conversing with her customers. Not a moment was wasted. At noon, Xinran, who is no shrinking violet and seems westernized in many surprising ways, boldly asked if she and her four associates might come home with her for lunch. She wanted to learn more about this amazing little lady. Without hesitation the elderly woman said yes. Mrs. Xie immediately went and bought a whole chicken, though she couldn’t afford it, but she wouldn’t allow Xinran to pay for it either. She did let Xinran pay for the vegetables.
They ate their meal in a home literally so small there was no place for anyone to sit down. Afterward Mrs. Xie broke down in tears. This was the first time in her life anyone had wanted to come to her home. Here is Mrs. Xie’s quotation from that supremely touching human encounter: “In thirty years no one has come to visit us or eaten a meal with us! City folk look down on us, no one respects us, in fact no one pays any attention to us at all! We have nothing. We’ve used every penny to put our children through university.”
Xinran dedicated her book “To the Mothers of China and my mother Xujun.” In America, Mothers Day is usually a sentimental event, and with good reason. Most of us feel a great deal of emotion and sentiment for our mothers. The mothers in China Witness are very strong women. But, like the best mothers everywhere, they are dedicated to their children, and to paving the way in life for them as best they can against severe obstacles. No one exhibited that more than Mrs. Xie, the Shoe-Mender Mother. She had nothing, but she gave her children everything she could.
Being a good mother or father of young children and teenagers is an extraordinarily difficult task in the twenty-first century. There are so many factors which make the assignment hard for both the parents and their offspring. Nearly everyone has schedules which are too busy. There is so much for everyone in the family to do, and so little time for doing it. “Quality time” has become something we all seek, but with competing schedules, it is a challenge for parents to try to arrange quality time with their offspring. The offspring also might try to avoid it if they can.
A larger issue is why both parents (if it is a two-parent family) are so busy. It is because American society has evolved into a too-much-and-too-big reality. A materialistic economy is often a strong economy, but it may create a weak family structure. Both parents need to work in order to afford a home that is bigger than it needs to be and thus more expensive than it needs to be, and to purchase all the material possessions they think their children need or at least want.
The main problems with the younger generation are probably explained by the excesses of the older generation. We acquired what we didn’t need, and our children paid the price for it.
Obviously any mistakes we personally made in raising our children happened well into the past, and there is nothing that can be done to change that. It is a very hard choice for young parents now to become counter-cultural in how they raise their children. Youngsters forever have told their parents in exasperation over the actions and possessions of their peers, “Everyone does it and everyone has it!” Saying it never made it true over the past hundreds of years. Nevertheless, that never deterred any of us from trying it all over again on our parents. However, parents need to be parents, they need to display proper adult values to their children. It is the responsibility of adults to act like adults, especially toward their own children.
The dialogue of Jesus with the disciples at the Last Supper in the Gospel of John is unlike that in any of the other three Gospels. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus says many things that are found only there. One of them is this: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” In the RSV, that is followed by a verse that is similar to the KJV: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (15:13). The New Revised Standard Version translate that verse as follows: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The inclusive language of that translation is preferable, even if it sounds more awkward and stilted, and thus is less memorable than the RSV version.
The tendency of all of us is to live too much for ourselves and too little for others, particularly the “others” who are closest to us. God wants us to give ourselves away in order to fulfill our purpose as human beings. That is a crucial part of God’s plan for every human being. We need to be less self-centered and more other-centered. Jesus put it this way: “Those who find their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for my sake will find them” (Mt. 10:39).
The shoe-mender mother and her bicycle-repairman husband virtually gave away their entire lives for their children. Without their extreme sacrifice, their son and daughter would likely have ended up in the poverty of their parents. That was the main message Xinran wanted to convey about those outstanding parents. My parents performed a lifetime of service to the four boys in our family. Greater love had no children extended to them than the four sons of Margaret and Warren Miller. Parental self-sacrifice is one of the best examples of “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life” for others.
In December of 2015, a bus in Kenya was attacked by militant Muslims. They were looking for Christian passengers on the bus, intending to kill them. The Muslims on the bus refused to identify the Christians, and told the terrorists to kill them all or to leave. Amazingly, and certainly providentially, they left. Three Germans have made a film of that incident. It is called Watu Wote, which means, in Swahili, “All of Us.” No one has greater love than this, to offer to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
Recently Lois and I went to see The Zookeeper’s Wife. This highly acclaimed movie is based on a true story from World War II. It depicts a couple who were in charge of the Warsaw Zoo when Poland was invaded by the German Army in September of 1939. For many months the couple observed and were victims of the carnage and savagery of the Nazi Wehrmacht. After a time, they decided to try to begin saving as many Jews as they could from the Warsaw Ghetto. The zookeeper regularly drove a truck into the ghetto to pick up discarded food scraps to feed to the animals in the zoo. Jews would quickly jump into the large bin on the back of the truck, and he would pour heaps of spoiling, abandoned food over them to hide them. Then he would drive back to the zoo. There he his wife would hide the Jews in the basement of the large home provided for them on the zoo’s grounds.
Though they narrowly averted having their plot discovered several times, they managed to survive to the liberation of Poland in the spring of 1945. The zookeeper and his wife were able to save over three hundred people by their courageous scheme. Now their names are enshrined on a plaque beside a tree planted in their honor on the Avenue of Righteous Gentiles at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. No one has greater love than they had.
Despite these dramatic examples, most of us are not called potentially to give up our lives as Jesus did or as the Muslims on the bus in Kenya or the directors of the Warsaw Zoo might have done. Instead God wants us to show our love for others in much less noticeable and more pedestrian ways. We read to a blind neighbor or buy groceries for someone unable to get out of their home anymore, we write letters of encouragement or sympathy to friends we have known through the years. Almost never do people literally lay down their lives on behalf of others. Yet every day all of us can do that through countless small acts of love.
In their ordinary activities, mothers and fathers lay down their lives for their children. Friends show their love for their friends by giving up their lives in small acts of friendship. And if we lay down our lives on a regular basis in these little ways, we may be prepared to do it in a big way if a unique occasion ever arises which may demand that we do that.
The last chapter of the Book of Proverbs in a paean of praise to women, and especially to what is described as “a good wife.” That phrase was the title for a television series, even if most people have no idea where the phrase came from.
For all of the centuries of biblical history, and in most cultures and societies of human history, males have dominated nearly everything, except in home life. There mothers usually are the ones who really rule the roost, and properly so. There are many factors which explain why men control most major activities of most societies. We shall not go into any of them here, however. This isn’t a lecture in Sociology 101. And if it were, it would likely only remind half of you why being a female probably seems to have more detriments than benefits. You might leave here steamed, on Mothers Day no less, at the injustices inherent in your existence as a woman.
All that set aside, it is remarkable , given the inherent male chauvinism of the Bible, that the Book of Proverbs ends by praising the stereotypical good wife and mother. “A good wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels….She opens her hand to the poor, and reaches out her hands to the needy. Strength and dignity are her clothing, she opens her mouth with wisdom, she looks well to the ways of her household, her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’”
“M is for the million things she gave me/ O means only that she’s growing old/ T is for the tears she shed to save me/ H is for her heart of purest gold/ E is for her eyes with love light shining/ R is right, and right she’ll always be/ Put them all together they spell Mother/ A word that means the world to me.” When I was about seven years old, my mother coerced me into going to somebody’s house (I don’t remember who) to sing that old Eddie Arnold song to the members of her ladies circle from church. She didn’t want me to do it for her; she wanted me to do it for them, for the other mothers there, because she thought it would please them. Those ladies looked to me like grandmothers. (They were probably thirty to forty years of age.)
It is almost impossible to be a traditional mother in today’s world. But mothers of all ages can still fulfill their chosen roles as the maternal parent of their children. Contemporary mothers can excel in contemporary ways. Furthermore, they may have no other viable choice than that.
In light of how thoroughly Old Testament society was male-dominated, it is truly surprising that the Book of Proverbs ends in praise of women. There is much speculation over who actually collected the Proverbs together, but no one knows for sure. Whoever it was, almost certainly it was a “he,” not a “she,” who gathered together these wonderful nuggets of wisdom. Nevertheless, he ended his assemblage of aphorisms by praising women, and particularly wives and mothers. Proverbs 31 is an illustration in its own way of what Jesus said in John 15. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for others.