John 10:24-30

“Mothers and the Father”

Today, I would like to share a few things I have learned about faith from some “spiritual mothers” in the church. But first, we’re going to take a detour and talk about The Father. Earlier, I mentioned that Jesus didn’t speak in plain language to the people. Jesus seemed to speak in poetry. He had a way of capturing an image beyond words. And just as we recognize today on Mother’s Day that not all mothers are the same yet there are cultural values associated with motherhood– love, resilience, support, compassion– Jesus used the word “Father” to convey something important about His relationship to God.

Trinitarian language can be tricky, but I believe it is important to understanding our Christian faith. Jesus identified Himself in close proximity to the Father, even saying they were one, completely inseparable. A father in first century Palestine was associated with strength, security, and authority. Of course, today we can think of many people who exhibit these strengths– both men and women. But Jesus was appealing to the authority of the Father– the God who is named in metaphors and whose name could not be spoken.

Jesus’s promises would mean nothing if an ordinary person had spoken them. But they could be trustworthy because of the God who sent Him– the One whom Jesus called Abba, Father. The one who gives Jesus, not us, the authority to judge and save.

And Jesus says that The Father has given Him the greatest gift of all, a gift that cannot be stolen. This gift is you and me. Jesus is entrusted with Creation and life and salvation, the caretaking of all of the sheep. And the good shepherd laid down His life for the sheep. All of the sheep.

Now I want to tell you a few stories from the lives of real women which exemplify God’s work as a good shepherd, who is searching for the lost sheep and bringing in sheep from other pastures.

First, there’s Monica. She was a Christian woman who lived in North Africa during the fourth century, and she had a son who wanted nothing to do with the church. Monica was a deeply spiritual woman, and it broke her heart that her son didn’t share her faith. She trusted in the promises of Jesus, and she prayed for her son for 17 years. For 17 years, Monica had the audacity of a mother to believe that her prayer could make a difference. And she believed that just because her son hadn’t heard the voice of the shepherd didn’t mean that the shepherd wasn’t calling him. One day, her son heard a voice in his spirit, and he opened a bible and encountered a passage in scripture that opened his ears, and he believed. This story is remembered as the conversion of St. Augustine, but it is just as much the story of a mother’s love, resilience, and trust in God. In a time when so many families are divided by differences in beliefs and perspectives, Monica’s story shows us the virtue of perseverance and patience in prayer. It is a reminder that God is not done with us yet.

The second story I want to share with you is a more contemporary one. Last week, I shared that Rachel Held Evans passed away at age 37. She was a progressive Christian leader and writer with roots in the evangelical church. She inspired countless people by sharing her faith, but she also had her own faith challenged and transformed through her encounter with The Other.

In 2016, Rachel wrote this: “I thought I was called to challenge atheists, but the atheists ended up challenging me. I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead, God used gay people to show me how to be Christian. I thought the world needed my answers, but as it turns out, I needed the world’s questions. I needed to learn how to doubt well, listen better, and be humbled by how little I know. I needed to discover that evangelicalism is just one table in Christ’s banquet hall, the Great Cloud of Witnesses far more sprawling and diverse than I’d ever imagined.”

Rachel’s story shows us the freedom that we experience when we leave the judgment to God and follow the command “Feed my sheep”. We begin to realize we were hungry, too. The gospel denies us the right to discriminate. But it frees us to receive God’s love.

Finally, the third woman I want to talk with you about is my own grandmother. This story is obviously more personal for me. For as long as I have known my grandmother, she has professed that she does not believe in God. But in her youth, she almost joined a Catholic convent. She studied the bible, and I imagine she must have felt at home in the church at one point in her life. But her life has had real hardships. She lost a daughter. She had a stroke. She went through a divorce. She had to learn how to live with a new kind of normal. I have always loved my grandmother deeply. And through our relationship, God taught me that love is unconditional.

As Christians, we will fail if we believe our call is only to love other Christians. We will fail if we believe our call is to love people in order to get them to believe in God. Our call is to love. And in the mystery of faith, our call is to trust that God is not done with us yet. Jesus said, I have sheep from other pastures. We do not know the depth of faith in one another.

Here is my prayer for all of us today: May we each come to hear the voice of the shepherd, loving and protective. May we never forget that God’s love is expansive, inclusive, and transformative. And may we be moved by God’s Spirit to share this love with everyone we meet in our lives. Amen.