With all the controversy over our southern border and the wave of illegal immigrants, we hardly hear a word about legal immigration. But last year 136,000 people arrived here with the proper documentation from the State Department. Another 125,000 came here as refugees. And although there’s considerable disagreement on how many illegal immigrants arrived during 2022, NBC reported that it’s almost 3 million. And each one has to adjust to a new reality. For most new arrivals, culture shock is too mild a term.
Throughout America’s history, people from all over the world have endured quite amazing hardships in order to get here, because of their vision of what life could be like, here in the promised land. Some even came as indentured servants - that is, they paid for their passage by selling their labor after arrival for 8 to 10 years. And later, during the great pioneer trek westward, people did the same thing - packed up whatever they could carry, left the rest behind, and struck out for the unknown. And not very many people returned to wherever it was they had started from.
But some few did go back. I don’t have any statistics, but I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the people who went back did so because the terms and conditions of the adventure got radically changed midstream. For instance, if the vast acres and wealthy estate turned out to be a leaky cabin in the middle of a swamp, or the wonderful business opportunity turned out to be a rundown second-hand store, or the leader of the expedition died and no-one else knew where they were supposed to be going. I’d go back, wouldn’t you? If you could?
I’m not suggesting that by the time of the Last Supper any of the twelve (except for Judas, of course, who had his own agenda) was contemplating jumping ship. But they certainly weren’t where they thought they were going to be when the joined up. After three years of following Jesus around Galilee, here they were at last in the capital Jerusalem, for the greatest festival of the year. What better time to announce that the longed-for Messiah had come! All the old dreams of power and plenty and privilege were ready to be dusted off and readied for fulfillment, just as soon as the Master said the word.
But the word the Master said wasn’t the one they had been waiting for. They had arrived at their goal - only to find that what they had thought was their final destination was really the embarkation point for a journey they had never expected to take.
Jesus has washed their feet. He has blessed the bread and given it to them with the strange words, “This is my body, broken for you,” and blessed the wine with equally strange words, about the blood of a new covenant sealed in his blood. He has told them one of them would betray him, and received Simon Peter’s indignant denial.
And then he tells them he is leaving them.
They are upset. Wouldn’t you be? But they’re more than upset. They’re scared. What are they going to do now? They’ve left their families, let their businesses gather dust, and probably earned the reputation of being religious fanatics to boot. And Jesus is bugging out, leaving them to face the music alone? There must be some mistake! This can’t be what it was all about!
So Jesus says to them, soothingly, “Don’t let this throw you. You trust God, don’t you? Trust me, too. There is plenty of room in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m going to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live. And you already know the road I’m taking.” [Jn 14:1-4, The Message, Eugene Peterson]
Well, this time Thomas speaks up. “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?” Jesus answers him, “I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life; no one gets to the Father apart from me.” [Jn 14:8, The Message]
Well, it takes them a while, and they still really don’t get it. But eventually - after the events of that terrible Friday, and that wonderful Sunday, the twelve finally figure out that Jesus was talking about going on ahead of them to take up residence in a heavenly kingdom, not the earthly one they had earlier so confidently expected. And of course by that time they do believe him, and they do trust him, and they all live the rest of their lives in the confident expectation that Jesus would do just as he had said:
Go ahead of them, prepare a place for them, and come back to get them so that they could live there with him.
But it took a lot longer than they expected.
As a matter of fact, most of that first generation of Jesus’ followers believed that Jesus would return quite soon and take them all with him, that the second coming would be within their lifetime. They expected to arrive at their final destination any minute, and that colored all the choices that they made. The picture of the 1st century church in the beginning of the book of Acts shows that belief, with people selling everything they had, putting it into a single common pot, and spending their days listening to the twelve talk about Jesus and praising God and praying and looking up to heaven wondering when Jesus was going to arrive. It was the spiritual equivalent of a refugee camp, temporary accommodations on the way to a better home.
But the longer he took, the more complicated things got. There were financial problems, and logistical problems, and personality clashes, and factions sprang up. It wasn’t as easy as they perhaps had expected it to be. And pretty soon the leaders of this new commnity realized that they were going to have to spend some thought on the practical aspects of living in this new reality. You remember what happened: Peter and James appointed seven deacons to see to the proper distribution of food, and the rest is history. Elders and deacons, bishops and pastors and priests, synods and councils and presbyteries and all the rest of the apparatus of church government stems from that same basic need to organize ourselves into some kind of working order.
Have you ever been at an airport that was snowed in for two or three days? There are all these people milling about, with nothing on them but what they needed for the trip, some with most of their luggage already checked. Babies are crying, people are getting short-tempered with each other and the ticketing agents, etc., etc. The worst I was ever at was the ice storms in the Pacific Northwest in 1996. I had managed to get there before everything shut down, but getting out was another matter. And I was lucky, at that. I only had to wait for about 18 hours for a flight. Some people had been there for days, and they were beginning to settle in, to make little temporary homes in their corner of the waiting area.
That’s sort of what was going on there, in the first century church. What they thought was temporary turned out to be a way of life, and they had to work out a system. And I suspect that a few were mighty put out that they hadn’t been told what to expect, that Jesus hadn’t given then clearer instructions, prepared them better for what was coming.
It was probably something kind of like the problems the UN and other international charitable organizations have during the first couple of weeks after a war breaks out or a natural disaster strikes, scrambling to get tent cities set up for the refugees that come pouring over the borders or to other hopefully safe venues. If they’d known what was going to happen they would done what the call “pre-positioning” of supplies. But they only know, in a general sense, that something bad is going to happen. Somewhere.
It’s all very well that Jesus went ahead to prepare a place, but what were they supposed to do in the meantime? They knew where they were going, but what were they supposed to do until Jesus came back? How were they supposed to live?
That’s what the second part of chapter 14 is all about.
“If you love me,” Jesus said, “show it by doing what I’ve told you. I will talk to the Father, and he’ll provide you with another Companion so that you will always have someone with you. This Companion is the Spirit of Truth. The godless world can’t take him in because it doesn’t have eyes to see him, doesn’t know what to look for. But... he will even be in you.” [Jn 14:15-17a]
It is the Holy Spirit, of course, that Jesus is talking about. As I hpe you already know, the Holy Spirit is the one who enables us, the followers of Jesus, to become the church. He does this by living in our hearts and teaching us how to love each other in a way the world cannot. He also forms us into the church by opening our eyes to the truths of Scripture, and enables us to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord. That covers all three key parts: Heart, Mind, and Will. What more could we ask? If we follow Jesus Christ, and study Scripture, and love each other, whatever kind of structure we decide upon will be the church. Jesus gave us everything we need to build the church, it just took the disciples a little time to sort out the details.
And if we do all these things, Jesus will be with us, plainly visible among us, and God the Father will love us as he loves Jesus and as Jesus loves us. Jesus says quite plainly, “I will not leave you orphaned.” What more could we ask?
Silly question.
We have a Friend. We have Brothers and Sisters. We have a Father. What we need, obviously, is a Mother.
Now I know it is fashionable in some parts of American Christianity to emphasize the motherhood of God equally with the fatherhood of God. And it is quite true that God the first person of the Trinity is both male and female, or rather neither male nor female, and there are many maternal images of our Creator God in the Bible. But God most frequently chooses to present himself as a father, or a husband, and Jesus always calls him father. And there are differences between father roles and mother roles, although of course there’s quite a lot of overlap. And the church throughout its history has emphasized God in the traditional fatherly roles of lawgiver and protector, of discipliner and challenger, the one who urges us to grow up and take our place beside him in the family business, out in the rough and tumble of the world, taking our lumps and diving back in again.
But we still need a mother, to do the traditional mother things of comforting and nurturing, of washing off the day’s dirt and putting on the Band-Aids and getting the clothes ready for another foray out into the world the next day, basically making sure you’re well and strong enough to go out there and taking care that there’s always someone to come home to when we’re worn out. And that role is filled by the church.
Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in. That’s us. We are the church, and the church is our mother. Here we come to be accepted for exactly who we are, and yet encouraged to be better than we thought we could be. Here we are welcomed and fed and comforted and loved. Here the world cannot touch us. St. Cyprian, back in the 3rd century, said “He cannot have God for his father who has not the Church for his mother.” It’s still true.
Because it’s the church as mother who makes this often uncomfortable tent city and refugee camp, stuck indefinitely between two worlds, into a home. Without the church we who are pilgrims and exiles couldn’t possibly maintain our focus on the as-yet-unseen promised land; our attention would inevitably drift back to an idealized memory of the world we once gladly left. It is our mother church who keeps us faithful in a faithless world, and secure in a dangerous one.
So on this day when we thank all the mothers and aunts, grandmothers and godmothers, teachers and nurses and care-givers of all kinds, let us give special honor to the Bride of Christ, she who mothers us all, the church herself.
