Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA
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If I had to guess, I’d say that most of us walked in here this morning already tired from a conversation we’ve been having for a very long time with people who aren’t even in the room.
You know... The one that loops in the background while you’re trying to fall asleep. Or rehearsing what you shoulda said, bracing for what someone might think, or scrolling through a feed and feeling more diminished when you put the phone down than when you picked it up.
This is a natural result of any conversation, internal or external, with... (drumroll, please) bad shepherds.
And today, of all days, that conversation gets louder for some of us. Mother’s Day (like Father’s Day) is a complicated holy day. It’s a little gratitude mixed with at least a little grief, or longing, or the frustration of a relationship we can’t seem to patch up.
I invite you to hold all of this gently this morning knowing the love of God is wide enough for all of it.
Ezekiel knew the bad shepherds. Twenty-six hundred years ago, he stood in exile and called out the leaders who fed on the very people they were supposed to feed.
You have not nursed the weak. You have not bandaged the injured. You have not gone looking for the lost.
The shepherds ate the sheep. The sheep scattered. And the most heartbreaking line is probably this one: not a single shepherd went looking for them.
Again, 2600 years ago... This is a tale as old as time.
What’s NEW is that it’s been monetized and optimized. Ezekiel was complaining about a handful of kings. Which is bad enough... But nowadays, we have a whole cast of kings (or bad shepherds) (thousands of them) in our pockets.
And the worst of them have moved off our screens entirely. They live in our heads now: the voice of the parent who couldn’t see you, the teacher who shamed you, the friend who ghosted you, the inner critic who sounds suspiciously like someone you knew in the sixth grade...
We’ve internalized the bad shepherds, and they’re running the night shift in our minds.
But here’s what we need to understand...
The bad shepherds are only the symptom. The real wound is older and more subtle.
Underneath every voice we cannot stop listening to, underneath every performance and every spiral and every 3 a.m. replays that make Sportscenter jealous, is the fear every child has a visceral experience of in the dark: Am I alone? Will anyone come for me? Does anyone even notice or care that I’m alone?
We listen to the bad shepherds because we’re afraid of being neglected. We perform for them because we’re afraid of being unloved. We let them feed on us because on a certain level, we are still the scattered sheep of Ezekiel 34, drifting on every hill, hoping someone (anyone!) will come.
This is the wound the gospel meets this morning. Hear how directly Jesus names it. On the night before he was betrayed by his terrified friends and the world about to come apart, he looked at them and said: I will not leave you orphans.
He didn’t just say, “I won’t leave you sad,” or, “confused.”
Orphaned.
He named the deepest fear of the human heart by its actual name, and then made this promise: I will come to you. The Spirit will be in you. I am holding you.
Which is why Peter can write what he writes. Don’t be afraid of what they fear. Don’t be intimidated. Peter is preaching to people who’ve already been found, and inviting them to finally live like it.
The hope that is in you is the hope of the un-orphaned: the hope of those who know (or at least remember, from time to time), all the way down, that the Shepherd came looking. And finding. You.
And then Peter says the wildest, most wonderful thing in the whole letter. Christ, after his death, went and preached to the spirits in prison. AKA ‘hell.’
The early church called this the Harrowing of Hell. I make sure to leave the word ‘hell’ in when we say the Apostles’ Creed (“He descended to hell” instead of “He descended to the dead”)...
On Holy Saturday, Jesus... Descended. He went DOWN. He broke into every dark place, every locked room, every underworld of the human experience, and spoke his life-giving voice into it. He waited for nothing. He waited for no one to qualify or improve their way out of their own hell. He went, and he spoke the voice of life into it, and he set the captives free.
And as some of you know... Hell doesn’t wait for us to die. A lot of us pop in and out from time to time throughout our waking lives. And it’s only God who can get us out.
The prisons Christ entered are also the prisons inside us. The grief you’ve set aside. The shame you’ve locked in a back room. The place where one, if not THE, very first question of your life was asked — am I held? am I safe? will someone come? — and wherever the question was unanswered, Christ has gone there. Every orphaned corner of your own soul is, by design, attuned to this Word like a child’s ear is attuned to her mother’s voice.
Yes... On this Mother’s Day, I want to say something the tradition has always known and sometimes been embarrassed to say out loud.
The voice of God we hear in Christ is, yes, the voice of a Father. But it is also — and maybe first — the voice of a Mother.
Hear it in Ezekiel’s verbs: nurse the weak, bandage the injured, gather the scattered, bring the strays home.
These are not the verbs of a king. These are the verbs of someone who has held a sick child to her breast through the night.
Hear it in what Jesus says: I will not leave you orphans.
In the ancient world, an orphan was the child without a mother; without the one who holds you, covers you, comes when you cry.
Hear it in the Spirit. Ruach, in Hebrew, is feminine. She hovered over the waters at the beginning of the world, brooding the way a mother bird broods over her nest.
1700 years ago, The Syriac fathers called the Holy Spirit Mother. She is the one who comes alongside you, dwells within you, refuses to leave. Pinches your cheeks, hangs up your horrible artwork on the fridge, brags about you on social media, and laughs at your awful jokes.
The Christ who descends into hell to bring forth the captive is doing the most ancient maternal work there is: laboring in the dark, drawing life out of the deep. This is mothering work.
Julian of Norwich said it plainly 700 years ago: “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.” Today we lean hard on that second clause.
So whatever your relationship is like to the mothers of your life today — present, absent, complicated, beloved, painful — hear this: you are mothered. You always have been. The voice that has been looking for you is the voice of a Mother who will not be swayed from her mission.
The bad shepherds WILL keep talking. The voices in your head WILL keep their schedule. The world WILL keep charging you for the ache it created. But know this...
They are not your shepherd. Never were. The Liberating King has taken her seat at the center of your soul, and from that center, you can stop defending yourself. You can stop performing for a peanut gallery of bad shepherds you never gave permission to in the first place.
The Spirit has been given to you. Christ indwells you.
So go from here lighter than you came. Let the bad shepherds keep talking. It’s just what they do. But YOU have been given a love you did not earn, and from that love... you can finally let yourself be mothered to the fullest.
Amen.