Scripture: John 17:15-19; Psalm 1:1-6; John 16:7; Judges 5:1-2; Proverbs 9:10; Matthew 19:12 Series: Easter
Preached on Ascension Sunday coinciding with Mother’s Day, this sermon asks ‘Where did Jesus go?’ and answers that Christ ascended to the Father so the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, could come and sanctify believers in truth. Wilson links the self-giving of the ascension to motherhood as always referring to others, drawing on Anna Jarvis’s Methodist founding of Mother’s Day and Deborah’s song of peace in Judges. He argues that truth is not a set of rules or a political position but a person, Jesus the crucified carpenter, and that being sanctified in truth means receiving a love (per Herbert McCabe) that may lead to a death like Christ’s yet conquers death. The sermon closes with the call to let go in faith, to remember one’s mother whether the relationship was good or hard, and to receive the grace and Spirit Christ sent.
Illustrations: anna-jarvis-mothers-day, deborah-song-long-hair, dostoevsky-idiot-myshkin, father-damien-lepers, pascal-seek-and-found, mccabe-crucifixion-love, easter-equinox-full-moon
May 12
Mother’s Day
Ascension Sunday
Psalm 1
John 17:15-19
Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked or take the path that sinners tread or sit in the seat of scoffers, but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper. The wicked are not so but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous, for the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
- Psalm 1
I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth. - John 17:15-19
Jesus walked among us in a different way after the resurrection than he did before the resurrection. After the resurrection, he was hard to recognize. As we know in the story of the walk to Emmaus, the people who had followed him during his ministry on earth did not recognize him after the resurrection. He had wounds in his side and his hand that someone could put their hand inside of, but it did not hurt. As well, after the resurrection, Jesus could eat. He wasn’t a ghost. Jesus saw the disciples in Jerusalem, and then he went up north to Capernaum near the Sea of Galilee. Jesus didn’t teach in the same way he had before; he saved that for his disciples, as we will get to next week. These resurrection days of Jesus Christ are important for us. These Easter days point to a different way of seeing life. They point to the fullest kind of life. A superlative life. The superlative life looks different from this life. The superlative life looks different than the one that Jesus had while he walked before the resurrection. Today is Ascension Sunday. Ascension Sunday happens the Sunday before Pentecost every year. It is the last Sunday of the Easter Season. It is when Jesus says goodbye to his disciples for the last time. When he first appeared to them after Easter, they probably thought that life would just continue as it had been. They were ecstatic. They were thrilled. In the gospel of John, which I read from you earlier, Jesus describes elegantly why he must go, so that the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Paraclete can come and be with the people. Jesus describes how he must go away so that we can be more than we were, so that we can be more than we could be without the Spirit.
But that leaves us with a compelling question: where did Jesus go?
Usually, Ascension Sunday is later in the month of May, just as Pentecost is usually later in the month of May, just as Easter is usually later than March 30th, but it is one of those years when Easter is early. So Ascension Sunday is early. Remember, Easter isn’t just randomly chosen. It is the first Sunday after the first full moon, after the spring Equinox. If the first full moon after March 21st takes place pretty early in March, we have an early Easter, and thus we have an early Ascension Sunday. This Ascension Sunday also falls on Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is a secular holiday that came about honestly because of the Methodist Church. It came about because a Methodist lay woman in West Virginia, Anna Jarvis, wanted to honor her mother who had cared for her and her siblings after her husband had died during the Civil War. Mother’s Day took place in a worship service even before Hallmark got wind of it. The thing about Mother’s Day that is always important to remember, is that it’s never about an individual. It is never about you. It always refers to another. The woman who started Mother’s Day and campaigned around the country for it to be adopted, she did not want to be appreciated. She did not feel overlooked. She wanted to appreciate her own mother. She wanted to defer and car. Mother’s Day, we must say, is not a church Holiday. It is not on the church calendar. Ascension Sunday supersedes it, But it is fitting for us to think about the way that in Jesus giving of himself and going away, we can reflect on motherhood. It is always referring to others. And in that way, I think Mother’s Day is one of the closest holidays to Christianity that we have. It is always about another person.
Earlier, the choir sang Deborah’s song. It’s the start of passage in Judges six that sounds strange when you first hear it. When hair is long in Israel, when people offer themselves to God, praise the Lord. Deborah was a judge, a figure of significant importance to the people of Israel in the earliest times of their home in the Promised Land. Deborah was a voice of God, a voice of reason, a voice of authority. Deborah saw Barack as a chosen of God and told him to go and fight for God. And Barack said, “I can’t do that. I am not ready to do that. Come with me, Deborah.”And Deborah said, “if I come, you’re going to get less honor. I’m trying to have you be honored by the people,” but he refused. And so they went together and the people won a great victory that day. And Deborah sang a song that starts with this surprising phrase, when hair is long in Israel. Now, when I was growing up, when many of you were growing up, or especially when my grandmother was growing up, this was not a text often preached on Sunday morning, praising the day when hair is long. My grandmother would think that this hair is long for me let alone when hair is long in Israel. Deborah isn’t longing for a time when Hippies rule the land. She isn’t predicting the musical Hair. She is referring the reality that when your hair is long, it is difficult to fit your hair into a helmet. We’re talking about men here. She’s talking about men here, not just women. Long hair is harder to fit it into a helmet for battle. So you grow hair in times of peace. You grow your hair out when you didn’t have to think about war and violence; when you can rest in the peace of God. When people honor God, praise the Lord. Deborah was singing and praising and longing for a time of peace and protection for her children and all the children of Israel. Deborah did not seek to be a judge. Deborah did not seek to receive honor for her position of authority. She deferred and yet was still honored. As Christians, we read Judges and believe that Deborah was longing for the peace of Christ. The peace that finally came not with the birth or death of Jesus, but with his ascension.
Jesus had to go so that we could receive something greater. Every mother at some point has to let go. Children are not puppets or robots. And our greatest flourishing is found in our own agency, not in repeating the choices of our parents. It is an act of faith to let go of the ones you love. It is an act of faith to let go, knowing that they could fall right back down. It is an act of faith to let go knowing they could die, because you believe more in God’s promise of life and the truth of Christ’s resurrection than in the physical manifestations of death.
But when Jesus let go of his disciples to be with the Father, he did not leave them alone. Jesus has not left us alone. He left an advocate with us, the Holy Spirit, who is sent to us by Jesus to sanctify us in truth to make us holy in truth, to set us apart in truth, a deep truth.
Where did Jesus Go?
Jesus went to the side of the Father so that we would have a deeper faith. As Jesus says in John 16:7
“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” John 16:7 ESV
Some of us may be tempted from time to time, to wish that Jesus still walked the earth. Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot, is premised on this very idea. Prince Myshkin is innocent crushed by Russian society. But we don’t want Jesus to walk for his innocence. Nor for his example of holiness. There are others who have shown the true holiness of Jesus. Father Damien, the Belgian missionary who ministered to the Lepers in Hawaii.
No, I think we want Jesus to walk with us to give us certainty. To answer the critics of the faith and say, “See! See!” He is true. You are wrong.” At its worst, the desire to have Jesus walk is to tell other people that they are wrong. It wouldn’t make us better. It would only make us worse.
Jesus knew that, which is why he went away.
The challenge of faith is that it is always beyond our physical grasp. We believe in something we do not see. But that belief is more powerful because it pulls us towards the place we need to be. It shapes us into the people we need to be. In the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus tells us to let our light shine, it is for others, not for ourself. The light is not for us. The Spirit in us is not for us. By the fact that it is not for us can we truly receive it and be who we were made to be for others. Faith offers us this space to expand because the Holy Spirit is with us. And Jesus gives the Holy Spirit this command: Sanctify them in truth. A lot of this turns on what we think truth is, how we understand truth. In philosophy, the study of what is true is called epistemology. How we understand things, how we know things, what is knowledge. In Proverbs chapter 9, Solomon writes that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge. I think a better translation is the reverence of the Lord. Yirah is the Hebrew word used here. It’s used 41 times in the Old Testament, each of them connected to God. Yirah is not fear in the Greek sense of fear fright running from battle, fear of the enemy, fear of the unknown. Instead, it is the posture we take to God. That posture is the beginning of wisdom. To be sanctified in truth is to receive from God the posture we must have in order to continually receive from God. As Pascal wrote, Console yourselves: you would not seek me if you had not already found me. The Spirit is the consolation we receive that inspires us to seek and seek again.
The truth in which we are sanctified is not a book or a set of rules. The truth is not what your parents taught you or what you learned at college. The truth is not conservative or progressive. The truth is not democrat or republican. The truth is not what we like or don’t like. The truth is not an idea but a person. The truth is who Jesus is. The second person of the trinity, the word made flesh. He is neither a nice idea nor a notion but a crucified carpenter who loved us and died for it. He was crucified, as we say in the creed. The truth is not an easy pill to swallow. It is impossible apart from faith. It is not a scam someone can email you. The love of Jesus is not a surface idea that can fit on a hallmark card. As Herbert McCabe said,
the kind of love that Jesus offers inevitably results in his being crucified, the same kind of thing is going to be true of those who receive his love and are liberated in their turn and able to pass it on to others. Crucifixion in some way is the destiny of every Christian. It does not have to be public execution. That only occurs when the love of Christ takes forms that are recognized as immediately dangerous by the ruling class. But for every Christian his or her death is to be a death that expresses the love of Christ, the Holy Spirit. There are just two kinds of death, the death that, like Christ’s death, is the operation of the Spirit, or the death that simply means the organism has ceased to function. To die as Christ did filled with the Holy Spirit is to conquer death”
As McCabe also says, the Gospels show us if you don’t love, you won’t truly be alive. And if you do, they’ll kill you for it. We see this in Jesus. This is the truth in which we must remain. Because when we remain in him, he remains in us. Even if it leads us to a death like is. Sanctify us to be made holy, to be set apart, to be made holy in this truth that God is for us. This is the gift we receive at the Ascension: that God is for us in the midst of the brokenness of this world. We see that in the scriptures. We see that in witnesses to the faith in our own lives. Reminders that God is for us. Physical manifestations of the spiritual reality of the Holy Spirit that God is for us. That we are not alone. For me, a reminder of this has been Father Damien, who left Belgium as a young man, to minister in Hawaii. There, he did not turn back from serving lepers. He loved them and died of lepracy. He lived for a time beyond the brokenness and he did not fear death because he was sanctified in truth.
This is what Deborah was singing for. When hair is long in Israel, when people offer their praises, thank the Lord. When peace has spread, when hearts have turned to God, thank the Lord. This is what Jesus call us to do. This is who Jesus is calling us to be.
We can give thanks for great mothers like Deborah today.
And not everybody has had a great mother. When not that I have any experience, but when you become a mother, you don’t suddenly become a good person. There’s not this magical flip that happens after giving birth. No. The point that Anna Jarvis was trying to make is not that every woman who is a mother is good and every woman who is not a mother is is bad. This is the opposite. Jesus is fairly clear in the gospels that we are not saved by marriage. The parable of the seven husbands tells us that. We are not saved by procreation. The Great Commission tells us this. Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful. Jesus tells us to make disciples. Eunuchs are even praised by Jesus in Matthew 19 as examples to follow. Motherhood is not the only state called for. But what Anna Jarvis pointed to is something that Jesus does as well. We can look back to where we have come from and see God’s presence, and we should give thanks for that. We should give thanks that Jesus ascended to the Father so that the Holy Spirit could be with us. The Advocate, the Comforter could comfort us in truth through the holy people in our lives.
And today, we especially remember that through our mothers. If you’re a mother, I want you to remember your mother. If you are not a mother, I want you to remember your mother. This is how it can be a holistic practice. Everyone is included. If you have a hard relationship with your mother, give space for grace to enter between you and her. Mercy is not about justifying abuse, but about believing more in God than in the abuser. Receive the Spirit that Christ sent that day. Receive that mercy. Receive that grace. Be sanctified in truth. The truth of Jesus Christ and his love for you. Be set apart by the Spirit for a deep love that could result in your death, but will result in your life.
Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, On this Ascension Sunday, may be grateful for your Son, Jesus, who ascended so that the Spirit could descend and be with us to our corps. Help us in those times we feel far from Jesus, from the Spirit, from it all. Help us to remember in our loneliness that Christ is the for us. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.