Christ Our Mother (John 17:6-21)

"Jesus as a Mother Hen" © Maryanne Christiano-Mistretta

This sermon was originally preached on May 12, 2024 (Mother's Day) at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The livestream of our service may be viewed here (with the excerpted sermon at the end of this entry). Today's Gospel text is John 17:6-12 .

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“Feminine face of the Holy One, you are known by many names, but all of them mean Mother.”✧ Hold us now in your tender care.

Good morning, Gethsemane, and blessed Mothers Day to all of you here, whether you come in celebration or sadness, closeness or estrangement, grief or joy in relation to your own mother or to motherhood. I know that as often as this day is full of joy and gratitude for the mothers among us, it can also be fraught with much complexity, heartache, and loss. And so I offer that opening invocation from Mirabai Starr, even as I honor all the ways you enter worship on this particular day, and invite you into the comforting warmth of the Great Mother, Birther of All Creation, from whose eternal womb all that is has its being, in whose care all find comfort, and who comes to us this day in the prayer and passion of Jesus the Christ.

I offer all this as one in need of it, because, in truth, I am tired, overwhelmed, and depleted of energy by deep grief over the escalating genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; by my profound joy over my son who just entered teenagehood (God bless me); and by general exhaustion from the busyness of life within a capitalist economy that says our worth is not intrinsic, but depends on how hard we work and for how many hours and dollars we do it -- which puts stay at home moms in an undervalued, unappreciated category, and those of us who work in the center of the particular tension between whatever it means to be a good, unpaid mom, or a paid-but-not-present-enough one. It’s difficult not to feel strained and depleted in an economy that worships and depends on labor for its own sake, and views rest as laziness. 

And what’s more, our deeply anti-rest culture clashes fiercely against my own deep knowing that we are made for rest, for ease, for work that is driven by purpose -- and not for toiling under the curse of meaningless work for corporate profit. And when I reckon my whole-body exhaustion with the standard of Sabbath modeled by God at the close of creation and commended to God’s people in the fourth commandment; and remember that Scripture tells me my life depends on keeping this Sacred Practice of Ceasing holy, I find myself failing. Like a lot of us probably are. And I do not judge us -- I don’t even judge myself for it; I’m just sad about it. We cannot work without ceasing because we will literally work ourselves to death; and yet for so many, to cease work is to die anyway -- whether by starvation or homelessness or by some other preventable death by capitalism. How tiresome it all is. Especially when so much of it happens to us, and on a screen.

I find myself too often exhausted by the demand of tasks both big and small, and distracted, when I do take breaks, from all that does give me life and joy abundant. Yesterday, in fact, I broke down in tears because I missed the beauty of the Aurora Borealis -- and why? Because I thought the bright lights of the cities would make them invisible, and so I doomscrolled through Instagram instead. I was mad at myself for missing the beauty that is literally right outside my door so I cried, and so I took myself outside, barefoot in work clothes, and I sat on the grass planting jade clippings in new soil, preparing jade leaves for budding, and repotting overgrown plants and seeding new ones in the ground. What I’m saying is that I reconnected with Mother, gathering her skin beneath my fingernails and setting my body in her lap, and She gave me the peace I needed to come back to this sermon and bring you what I found, which is Her own divine breath moving through all of today’s Gospel text. 

For here we read a Jesus who prays not the throw-away prayers of one who wishes to see his team win the playoffs -- Go Timberwolves -- but the exhausted, depleted, guttural prayers of a Mother who knows she is about to die and is desperate for the peace and protection of Her children who will soon be orphaned. 

This particular prayer is the culmination and reiteration of all Jesus has just said to his disciples in their last supper, which began in John 13, where Jesus models a Love that is foremost self-giving; reminds them that the potency and power of Love do not depend on its object and cannot be stunted by betrayal, because Love’s source is Divine and eternal, and will be with them always, even unto the end of the age, as their fierce Advocate, and Breath itself. Jesus prays after imploring them over and over, in so many ways and words, to be reckless and radical and unrestrained in their Love for each other, because this Love -- HIS Love for them which originates in the Father and now flows to and through them and all creation --  is not only their umbilical cord to God, the Divine Source of Life, but also to the Unspeakable Joy and Unsurpassable Peace which they’ll need in excess to resist the persecution that is sure to come. He promises that they will, surely, face so much trouble from the world, but says to take heart because He has conquered it.

And, having spent three years deep in the muck with these disciples, he knows all the particularities of all their personalities and conflicts, their individual pride and collective hard-headedness, and how challenging it will be for them to hold fast, especially in the face of persecution. 

And so he prays to the Father the way the Mothers of Palestine have been praying since 1948, the way Mothers of Israeli Hostages have been praying for the last 218 days, the way all of us pray when our children’s lives hang in the balance: With ferocity. Grief. Some Fear. And the kind of Desperate Hope that comes out more like a demand than a timid or general request. 

First, Knowing how deeply they will need connection to Mother and to each other in the time to come, Jesus prays that God will guard and protect them in God’s own Name, against the powers of this world which thrive by tearing them apart and pitting them against one another. The word Jesus chooses here and later, tereson, literally means “to keep them intact” -- That God will bind them together as One in purpose if not in personality; Unified in Body if not uniform in Belief; As one Organism, belonging to the Word God gave them who became flesh and dwelt among them, the way muscle and sinew belong to the body. He prays God protects them from dismemberment.

Then, knowing that collective, intentional joy is THE life-force of resistance to imperial power and persecution, Jesus prays like a Mother who longs for her children’s happiness amidst jaded, joyless cynicism: That God will sustain them with such indefatigable delight that they will be full to overflowing with Joy. Which is to underscore in bold italics that joy. matters. especially when all the world is falling apart; and that it is a discipline which flows and fills not from any external circumstances but from the endless well of Life Herself in which they are One. 

Again, knowing how diametrically opposed Empire is to the gospel they carry, and that the world will, at times, wear them down, Jesus prays like a mother in a warzone: Not for his disciples to be taken from life in this world, but that they will live safe and whole lives in it. Don’t miss this one, Friends, because it is so, so important, especially in a culture where Christians so often cry out, “Lord, come quickly,” and pray not for the healing of all creation but instead for their own extraction to heaven: Jesus here is praying the opposite! That we who are born of and marked by God’s other-worldly love, joy, and Oneness, will remain in this world as bringers of God’s kin-dom to this world and so replace hostile powers by the renewal of all creation. 

This goes back to what Jesus makes clear at the beginning of this prayer in verses 2-6: That we are not made for some “afterlife” or for “immortality” but for eternal life which happens in this one, right now, in what commentators Gloria O’Day and Susan Hylan call a “God-infused reality taking shape in the present.” Eternal life isn’t something we look forward to; it is how we live this one: Through Vine-to-Branch belonging to God, who glorified and was glorified in Jesus, and to each other the Spirit Breath we share in Joy as one body.

And finally, Jesus prays like a mother for her kids, that his disciples will resist the gravity of hopelessness in a world that will persecute, and instead be sanctified -- set apart and made safe -- within the Truth of the Word they were given, the Word who prays for them now, the Word who will, in time, baptize them in Spirit and sustain them in Baptismal Hope. And this Hope, dear friends? As some guy named Matthew said on the internet, This hope is not a “delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider’s webs.” This hope “has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.” Against a world that wages war, this sanctified Hope wages Love, over and over and over again. 

It is into this same Motherly Love of Christ and Oneness of God that Jesus invites us at the last, when he prays for those who will receive the Word given to the apostles and handed down through millennia to we who gather on this very day. 

It’s the eternity I’m always talking about: A Oneness with all who’ve gone before and will come after; Oneness that is not confined to linear time or geographical space, or “achieved” through any effort of our own, but simply ALWAYS IS for we who remain connected, with each other, to the One Source of All Life -- The way each vein and spike of this 4,800 year old bristlecone pine is one with the ancient tree herself; the way the newest leaves on the highest branches of this “Gran Abuelo” is one with the Mother seed that took root more than 5,000 years ago; the way each and every tree in this sprawling grove of 47,000 Aspens is one living organism through the 80,000 year old root system they share and are. We, like they, are made of God: Of Ancient Waters, Spirit Wind, of eternity. There is no separation. 

THIS is where, and how my weary self found rest, in the joy of creation, despite all the aching of this world; it is where WE find rest and wholeness: In the One who holds us together; who fills our cup with joy; who guards us from the world’s evil so that we may truly LIVE this life in the Sanctum of She who is our hope. 

In closing, as in opening, I offer a prayer of Mirabai Starr ✧✧

Mother of Mercy, 
The cries of the world
Keep me awake at night…
And my heart is shattered
By the sheer intensity of suffering…
Let me dip my fingers into the dew of 
your compassion and scatter it now
Over the fevered brow of this world.

Amen.

✧ From Mirabai Starr's poem "Our Lady of Kazan" -- included in Christ Our Black Mother Speaks © Dr. Cristena Cleveland
✧ ✧ Ibid.