Note: This sermon was given at Christ Episcopal Church on Mother’s Day, 2024
Sustenance: Rooted in God
Where do you find your sustenance? Are you bound to the world and the promises of the world, or are you rooted in eternal reality, the promises of God, and your true nature? If you’re bound to the world and its promises, you may find yourself efforting your way through life, striving, and in a state of continual stress.
If, on the other hand, your delight is in the law or “way” of God, if your thoughts are on the joy of living in His love and presence, and if your sustenance comes solely from this living water, everything you do will prosper. Because your roots are planted near the streams of the water of God, God promises in His Word that you will bear fruit in “due season”, that is, according to God’s divine timing, and you will not wither. Instead of a life of striving and stress, your existence, filled with the continual awareness of God’s presence, will be one of peace and true joy.
Trusting God to Keep His Promises
What would you be willing to give up to experience constant peace that passes understanding and complete joy? Please pause to that think on that for a moment. These are promises of God and God is in the business of keeping His promises. If you aren’t living in peace and joy, what is keeping you from them? Chances are, you are missing out for one of two reasons. Either you don’t yet fully trust God and doubt that He can and will grant you these gifts, or you are unwilling to surrender your control to God, which might be a matter of pride, or another form of a lack of trust.
Now I know that this sounds harsh, but I’m putting the finger at myself as well. I too struggle from both pride lack of trust. I certainly think I know what is best for me most of the time, and trusting in a God whom I can’t touch or whose voice I can’t hear with my ears is hard. The icing on the cake it that God keeps refusing to submit plans to me weeks in advance for my approval.
Spur of the Moment Direction
Can you relate? God’s way is more of a spur of the moment directing. It is the wind that you feel moving though you cannot see it nor know where it will go next. It is that same Spirit that directed Philip to the Ethiopian and then whisked him away when his work in that place was finished. The Spirit can literally do the same with us, directing even the tiny details of our lives for His glory and our good.
My day job is a high school teacher. Sometimes following the Spirit’s leading means spending the planning period helping a student in crisis and then standing in front of a group of students without a lesson plan. That’s not comfortable. But I can cite multiple times that God has in miraculous ways given me the words to speak in moments like that. And I can’t cite a single one where He’s let me down. Still, trusting the Spirit to put brilliant ideas in my mind and words in my mouth is terrifying. Trust is hard.
Surrendering Our Will
In addition to the challenge of living life moment by moment without a plan, sometimes the ways God moves in our lives leave us second guessing. In the book of Genesis, Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers, and yet God uses this horrible act to save the entire geographic area from famine through Joseph’s hand. Joseph himself said “You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good.” (Genesis 50:20, NLV).
Twice in today’s readings we are reminded of Judas, whose act of betrayal fulfilled the scriptures and whose successor was hand-picked by the divine. This naturally gives me pause to think of my own life. Many times I have felt that everything was falling apart, only to look back and see that in the midst of that chaos God was at work. I can apply this thinking to my own failures as well. In order to remain in that state of perfect peace and joy, I must surrender my pride, forgive myself, and trust God to work good even through my mis-steps.
Working with God
Regardless of how you slice it, to have that peace and joy, we must surrender to God’s will. God will never force our hand. We are free to stay in the illusion that we are in charge and continue to try to effort our way against the Spirit’s flow. This is much like trying to steer a sailboat into the wind. It is a rather silly idea that involves much rowing and a great deal of fatigue.
The alternative is to release your control and move with the wind, to adjust your sails as the breeze shifts. You will have to pocket your compass and your schedule of ports of call, but I promise that the results are worth it. I am reminded of a line from the movie, Aladdin. Allow God’s wind to direct your life, and you will have Phenomenal cosmic power! But, for your ego? “itty bitty living space.”
Divine Protection
It’s scary to take God up on this offer, to pocket the compass and rip up that plan. Luckily, our Gospel reading today is designed to increase our trust.
At the last supper, Jesus prays, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me so that they may be one, as we are one.” As we hand over control of our lives to God, we are promised divine protection. Jesus asks us to rely on this protection–there’s that concept of trust again. We aren’t to do it on our own but rather become like little children, humbly reliant on a power greater than ourselves, unsure of what is to come, but completely confident that it is for our good. Jesus gives evidence of this through the protection He provided for His disciples.
This God protection came not through force–Jesus was not a military leader–but through a reliance on what was within Jesus and therefore also within them, the divine nature that unites us all. Jesus protected them “in God’s name” or nature. By opening his disciples eyes to what was within them, their true nature, Jesus protected them. He prays for their continued protection and says that he is praying this for them to hear so that “they may have Jesus’ joy made complete in themselves”. They, like us, need to be reminded of who they are in God, to be reminded that God has them so that they would feel safe to let go and trust.
Oneness-How God Keeps His Promises
Jesus prays for us to be one, as He and His Father are one. This is, I believe, that key transition from the promise of protection to explaining how we are protected. To offer a bit of explanation of what it means for us all to be one, as Jesus and God are one, I’ll tell you a mother’s day story.
I have had more mothers than I count. God brought the first into my life in the form of Louann, who carried my physical form in her body, nurtured me during my first several weeks, and after her passing, guided me from heaven through key moments in my life when no one on earth knew what I was going through. When she went to be with the Lord, God worked through Alta, my grandmother, who changed diapers, fed me, and cared for me for the next year or so.
As I grew, she taught me the value of having my hands in the Earth and the importance of family. By the time I was forming memories, the Spirit moved through Linda, the only woman I’ve called “mom”, who gave me my love for reading, taught me how to play piano, and accompanied me through the teenage heartbreak years. God then used Marie, my late husband’s mother, to walk me through the basics of infant care and, more recently, the Spirit called on Gail to accompany me on a journey to greater spiritual maturity.
No Perfect Mother
There is no such thing as a perfect human mom. Depending on any one woman to fulfill my mothering needs, or to have any particular expectations of any one individual would be folly. However, we are not asked to lean on the frailty of humans, including ourselves. We are to forgive the human shortcomings and look to the divine nature residing within all humans. It is through this that we are one, as Jesus and the Father are one. And it is through this that our divine mothering, fathering, friending etc. needs are met.
When I trust God, I can also trust my brothers and sisters, knowing that God has the deck stacked, which means, where there is a lack anywhere, God, in His perfect wisdom, fills it. Because of this, I chose to trust my brothers and sisters, who are one with me. I don’t trust in their humanity, but I do trust in the God within them. And I trust that God will provide all I need, just not always in the way I expect or from the people I expect it to come from.
God’s Hands and Feet
The point of all of this is not for our own benefit, though peace and joy and wonderful to have, but to allow God to work through us. As we continue to grow in our trust in God’s ways, in the divinity that unites all of us, the Spirit works through us to bless others. Going back to our Gospel reading again, Jesus asks His Father to “Sanctify [his disciples] in God’s truth”. They, and we, are to be sanctified, or set apart from the world by being deeply rooted in the divine nature of who we are. We are set apart from the world, and yet…God uses us in the world for service. We are set apart for the Spirit to live and move through us. We allow God to do any divine mothering, fathering, or friending He wills through us.
Abiding in Love
And so, we abide in the love of God, trusting God, not man, to provide all we need. We allow God’s love to come through any and all avenues, giving our gratitude to God for every instance. And finally, we get out of the way of God and allow Him to work through us in any way that He wills. We, like Jesus, strive to do only what we see our Father doing.
As we close today, I leave you with the promise from our reading from Acts that God knows our hearts. (Acts 1:24) God knows exactly how he will use you in the world, and he knows the hearts of the others he will bring into your life. He knows how to take even what looks like harm and use it for your good. And God has the deck stacked. If you miss an opportunity to trust in the Spirit and be used for service, there are other avenues for that Spirit to move and work, for we are One.
Finally, you cannot fail. God’s got you, no matter how hard you try to row against the wind. You just might end up in the belly of a big fish, because God loves you too much to let you suffer for long. However, he’d much rather not chase you down and have you trust Him instead, so He can bless you with that eternal peace and joy. So, why not pocket that compass, put on a smile, and let the wind of the Spirit fill your sails?