Are you a sheep, listening for the voice of Jesus, or not? Are you a mother, or the child of a mother? On this Sunday, known as Good Shepherd Sunday, has the shepherd been good to you? Or perhaps more specific to the day, was your mother good? If you are a parent, is your own parenting good enough?
Today’s Gospel lesson raises hard questions for many of us, and I don’t want to gloss over or avoid them. John’s Gospel, beautifully wrought though it is, occasionally reveals Jesus as a binary sort of teacher, pointing to who is in and who is out. Which is tough teaching in a culture that has suffered from the constraints of the binary. You know what they are for us: who is black, who is white. Who is straight, who is gay. Who is male, who is female. Who speaks Spanish, and who speaks English. We might even ask ourselves, on this Mother’s Day, who has birthed or raised children, and who has not? Have you felt divided into a camp by these kinds of identity questions? I know that I have.
Before we dive into the hard questions about who is what, and who’s in or out, remember that John was preaching to a largely Jewish community, from whom nobody could actually be excluded once they were born into it. Although… God’s people certainly could choose not to listen to the word of God, then as now! But as the movement of Jesus followers expanded to include Gentiles—those not born Jewish—listen to how carefully Paul worked to include all equally in his letter to the church in Galatia. “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
You are all children… you are all one. Hang on to those words. I myself have hung onto those words for dear life. They’ve been literal salvation to me at times. In no small part because I grew up in a household with mental illness.
My mother was a borderline personality, something that I likely would not be sharing with anyone other than my therapist if either she or my father were living. But death and the new life that follows brings a measure of freedom, as we learn from Easter, year after year. Things don’t have to remain as they were, and indeed they probably won’t return to what they were. That’s sometimes cause for freedom and joy, sometimes for loss and grief, and sometimes both at once. But however our experiences of being parented may have been, this truth will never change: we are all children, and we are all one in Christ Jesus.
In my childhood home, someone was always in and someone was out. That’s a characteristic behavior of borderline personalities—for you psychologically-inclined, that’s called splitting—and my sister was always out. She was the bad sheep, in my mother’s perception of our domestic sheepfold. It was a tragedy for my sister, because she was also cognitively disabled and had few resources with which to make sense of her situation. But in paradoxical way, it was also a tragedy for me, because nobody wants to be inside the fold at the expense of another sheep you love. Even as a young child, I knew something within my family was terribly wrong. I was aching to hear words like “there is no longer a good sister or a bad one, for ‘all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’” And thanks be to God, the Shepherd spoke them to me. I heard the loving voice of our Lord, who calls us by name.
You hear his voice too. Lest there be any doubt in your mind, let me reassure you of that. If you showed up at church this morning, confident that God loves you without reservation, you’ve heard his voice, and you are his. If you showed up this morning, weighed down with regrets or shame, but wanting to know that God still loves you, you’ve heard his call and his voice, and you are his. If you showed up this morning full of doubts and questions but hungry for greater clarity, you’ve heard his voice too, and you are his.The Good Shepherd never ever tires of calling us, not matter who or how or where we are. If you are here—online or in person—you are called, and you belong. Full stop.
Of course just because God calls us just where and how we are doesn’t mean that God leaves us where or how she found us. Like a good mother, God expects us to grow in wisdom, love and understanding. She expects us to forgive others, as we ourselves have been forgiven. Because the good mother’s concern is always for the wellbeing of her children, just as the Shepherd’s concern is for the sheep. And—as well I know—there are also mothers that are not so good, as well as mothers that are good enough. I hope I’m in the latter group. But for my own children—and now my granddaughter—I give thanks for the Shepherd who always loves them far better than I would ever be able to.
“The father and I are one,” said Jesus. In the context of this passage, however, it would be equally legitimate to say that Jesus is one with God the mother. Because parenting is not defined by gender, and good parents and good parenting always reflects the love of God. Who, as the Bible teaches us—and as my friend Debie Thomas points out—”loves her children wildly and without restraint. She has a long memory; she holds the stories of her babies. He resists complacency and insists on courage, growth, and risk-taking. She does so with wisdom; she hovers, launches, supports, and guides. He longs to give and receive affection and aches when his children refuse his embrace. She groans in labor, giving herself over to shattering pain to bring new life into the world. He keeps house, honoring the diversity of his children by preparing not one room but many rooms for his children to return to and call home.”
Every time I look at these varied Biblical images of God as parent, I am reminded that parenting is not an exercise in perfection as much as it is an exercise in setting aside power. Lord knows, whatever I thought I knew how to do well died on the day I become a parent. From my awkward stumbles over baby care and feeding, to my bewilderment at teenage angst and acting out, my love for my children was both strong and fierce, and also left me feeling weak and vulnerable.
Is God’s parenting similar? Perhaps you were taught that God the Father is strong and fierce, all-knowing, all-powerful. But all of us who are mothers, and equally those of us who have mothers, know better. It’s not possible to grow up with parents or to be a parent without experiencing risk, weakness, pain, and transformation. It is not possible to drop a child off at school for the first time, to entrust them to the influence of other immature humans, or to honor their individuation without embracing vulnerability as a way of life. If Jesus is one with his father, and God is anything like any good parent, then God is in the business of risking God’s heart for the sake of love. Every day.
But this is not news to us in the Easter season. We walked through Lent with the God who gave up all power for the sake of love. An early Christian hymn described Jesus as “not regard[ing] equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” Like a child being born, like a mother birthing, like a father guiding: God knows what it is to be vulnerable to the imperfection of human love, and perfects us—all of us—through the call to love one another, and the risk of loving one another. Indeed, on this Mother’s Day, let all of us who are children give thanks that we are here: by the labors of our mothers and the love of God the Father. And remember also that there is no longer parent nor childless, father nor child, good mother nor bad, “for all of us are one in Christ Jesus.”
