A few days ago, Heyward gave me a copy of the very first Mother's Day Proclamation, published in 1870, long before Woodrow Wilson officially declared Mother's Day a national holiday in 1914, long before Mother's Day was taken over by Hallmark Cards and FTD Florists. A mother by the name of Julia Ward Howe was this proclamation's author. In a few minutes I'll read you her 1870 proclamation, but before I do, I want to put it in its larger historical context, because I believe that Julia Ward Howe's life story dramatically illustrates two different understandings of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, which we can see develop and change from one to the other as she grew in her understanding of her role as a loving mother, a patriotic citizen, and a woman of deep and abiding faith. Her story, in short, challenges us to follow the Good Shepherd wheresoever he leads us in our own day.

Some of you may already be familiar with the name of Julia Ward Howe. Even if you aren't, you're probably familiar with the one poem for which she's best remembered, for in February 1862, The Atlantic Monthly magazine published her "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Mrs. Howe wrote it for Union troops to sing to the tune of "John Brown's Body," originally a Southern battle song deriding the abolitionist who was captured at Harper's Ferry and later hanged. Most of us probably know at least its famous first line, [sing] "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," and its chorus of [sing] "Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!" but I doubt many of us could recite it from memory. Let me read you three of its five original stanzas:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightnings of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
"As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal;"
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free:
While God is marching on.¹

That's quite a hymn, isn't it? At the beginning of the Civil War, Mrs. Howe was obviously convinced that the Union cause was just-and moreover, that this war was God's will. The Union soldiers were God's "fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel," God's own instruments of vengeance on the Southern oppressors and God's means of liberating those held in the bondage of slavery.

No one can doubt that Mrs. Howe was a deeply patriotic woman with high ideals-an opponent of slavery and a champion for equality. Her work included campaigning on behalf of voting rights for freed slaves and for women. And while the right to vote was granted to former slaves in 1870, the same year she published her Mother's Day Proclamation, women were not given the vote until 1920, half a century later and a decade after Mrs. Howe herself died. So while she lived to see the freedoms she fought for on behalf of others granted, she never exercised those same freedoms herself.

As a woman involved in the affairs of her nation even before that nation recognized her legal right to participate in the election of its leaders, Julia Ward Howe was no stranger to opposition, derision, and abuse. Even in her home life, she had to face many obstacles. She bore her husband six children, two of whom died before reaching adulthood. Her husband insisted that a woman's place was in the home and, according to her diary, was at times violent, controlling, and unfaithful.² He even threatened to keep her children from her if she tried to free herself of his abusive grip. No wonder she fought on behalf of the slaves!

Julia Ward Howe lived a turbulent life in turbulent times. She knew well the heartaches of domestic strife, both within her own home and within her own nation. Eight years after publishing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," she published her Mother's Day Proclamation. Its tone is just as fierce as the Battle Hymn, but it is a battle cry of an altogether different sort:

Arise then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will 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, the women of one country,
Will be too tender to those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the voice of a 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 out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession."
As men have forsaken the plough 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 solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God-
In the name of womanhood and 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.³

According to biographer Jone Johnson Lewis, Julia Ward Howe "saw some of the worst effects of the war-not only the death and disease which killed and maimed the soldiers. She worked with the widows and orphans of soldiers on both sides of the war, and realized that the effects of…war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. She also saw the economic devastation of the Civil War, the economic crises that followed the war, the restructuring of the economies of both North and South." But, Lewis writes, "She failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace."⁴ Nevertheless, she continued to be a prophetic voice for peace, having gained first-hand knowledge of the devastations of war.

In the week following the attacks of September 11th, Sage Stossel, in The Atlantic Monthly-the same magazine in which Mrs. Howe first published her battle hymn-wrote: "At the conclusion of Friday's service of prayer and remembrance at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the congregation (which included President George W. Bush and former Presidents Clinton, Carter, and Ford) joined voices to sing Julia Ward Howe's defiant anthem, 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.' For many, the singing of this hymn, which enjoins the American 'hero' to 'crush the serpent with his heel,' and to 'die to make men free' signals America's willingness to retaliate against the recent terrorist assault….Now it seems, as the United States girds itself for what President Bush has referred to as 'the first war of the twenty-first century,' Americans are once again drawing encouragement from Howe's resolute words."⁵

Well, besides the fact that the "Hero" of Howe's hymn is God, and not an American, as Stossel all-too-tellingly assumes, I am sincerely sorry they did not also read Mrs. Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation at that service, if only for balance. For as we shall see, the change of heart that Julia Ward Howe obviously underwent in the eight years between the Civil War and Reconstruction strikingly parallels two different ways of interpreting Jesus' words about the Good Shepherd.

In "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," we can hear the judgment of a vengeful God against the Southern oppressors who herd their slaves like lambs to the slaughter. While below the Mason-Dixon line, some of us might have a more charitable view of the situation in which Southerners found themselves during the "War of Northern Agression," to Mrs. Howe, the Confederates are the bad shepherds, and worse: they are like wolves, who snatch God's sheep and scatter them. The Battle Hymn enjoins Union soldiers, "the hired hands," not to run away at the sight of the wolf, but to follow the Good Shepherd on the long march to martyrdom: "As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." Or, as Jesus put it, "I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." "I know my own and my own know me." From the viewpoint of the Battle Hymn, it's quite clear that the Yankees are his sheep…and the Southerners are not. "Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!"

By contrast, in the "Mother's Day Declaration," we can hear the sorrow of a reconciling God speaking through the grief of all mothers, North and South: "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, the women of one country, will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." This Mother's Day Proclamation was written by a woman who had come to see that violence against "them" merely led to more violence against "us," and had come to believe that our energies are better spent in seeking reconciliation than revenge. Through her proclamation, we may hear the true voice of the Good Shepherd, who does not distinguish between "us" and "them." As James Alison, in an essay entitled "The Good Shepherd" writes, when we understand John Chapter 10 rightly,

…we begin to see Jesus not as "for us" over against others, but as in our midst as one who catches us off guard. The comfortable world of "we"s and "they"s begins to collapse. The people who before we had been able to identify as lousy shepherds are now just other potential sheep like us. They are in need of someone who will shepherd them. We are approached by someone who does not affirm us in our identity, but by someone who allows our identity to collapse so that a new "we" may be born, a "we" not over against any one at all, but a we that is being called into being.

The texts about the evil shepherds no longer cause us to fixate on any real people, for we no longer need to fixate. On the contrary, the texts have become part of our education in how to become "we" so that we can learn to avoid our own temptations to divide a world between us and them-for that is, after all, what bad shepherds do.⁶

In other words, when we divide the world between "us" and "them," we fall into the same trap that, for instance, Southern slave owners fell into when they divided the world between black and white, slave and free, or that Northern Abolitionists fell into when they divided the world between righteous Yankees and unrighteous Southerners. We fall into the trap of those who before 1920 divided the world between voting men and non-voting women, those who since September 11th have divided the world between Muslims and Christians, terrorists and allies, cowards and patriots.

But Jesus does not recognize these divisions; in fact, he outright rejects them, and he calls us to move beyond them: "I am the good shepherd. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd." The Good Shepherd has already paid the price.

In embracing peace and reconciliation, did Julia Ward Howe give up the belief that slavery was a horrendous evil or that women did not deserve to be treated as equals or accorded the same rights as men? Of course not. Mrs. Howe never made peace with oppression, and we should never make peace with tyranny. But it is clear that this mother came to a point in her life when she realized that the battle lines were not quite as clearly drawn as she had once thought, and that after all their sons had been buried, the cost of vengeance was a price paid primarily by mothers.

On my drive back from Solomon's Island last weekend following Diocesan Convention, I passed a large hand-painted sign pitched next to the road. It was put up in support of our troops in Iraq, and I was reminded thereby to pray for their safety and to ask that their presence there would truly be a mission of peace-keeping, as they try to restore order after the looting and unrest in Baghdad and elsewhere that followed the toppling of a repressive regime. But I was deeply disturbed by the three largest words on that sign, which seemed to make no distinctions between the leader and the led, between justice and revenge, painted one on top of the other in jagged black lettering: MAKE THEM PAY.

Make them pay. I don't know who painted that sign, but I'd be willing to wager it was not a mother.