Loving God, you continue to work in our world by the power of your Spirit, drawing your people to you.  Help us to continue to grow in love and in our relationship with you, that others might see you in us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

    I remember hearing from a pastor years ago that the Christian faith is really all about relationships, and to a large extent, this is true.  To be sure, our faith has to do with our relationship with God, but it has just as much to do with our relationships with others and even our relationship with ourselves.  All of these relationships are interconnected, and all are in need of reconciliation and forgiveness.

    Of course, Mother’s Day also has to do with relationships – and particularly those relationships between mothers and children.  It is a day when we really celebrate and give thanks for the good things in those relationships, and it is a day when broken relationships cause pain and sadness.  It is also a day when those who no longer have their mothers with them feel that loss and wish for the time when they can be reunited once again.

    Actually, in any of the relationships that have been mentioned, there is pain when they are broken, and God’s desire for us is always for reconciliation and for healing.  In fact, today’s gospel presents a picture of the closeness and the intimacy that are there both with God and with others when we are in a right relationship with God – and it all starts with Jesus.  It is Jesus who shows us the ultimate close relationship with God, and it is also Jesus who makes it possible for us to have any relationship with God.

    The gospel of John, however, uses some very interesting language (17:21-23).  As Jesus prays, he says that God the Father is in him, and he is in the Father.  He also asks that those who believe in him may also be in God and in Jesus, and then Jesus talks about being in us, just as God is in him.

    For some of us, when we hear this kind of language, our minds are going to go straight to images of sexual intimacy.  In fact, some of the female mystics from the earlier centuries of the church pictured their relationship with God in just such a way.  Physically speaking, they were celibate, but they imagined themselves as brides of Christ, giving themselves wholly and unreservedly to God and to the church.

    However, that’s not the only way to think about it when you consider being “in” God or “in” Christ.  Martin Luther, back in the sixteenth century, wrote about being in the womb of God.  He was reflecting on the passage in Isaiah where God is speaking and says:

Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?  Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you (Isa. 49:15).

In thinking about this passage, Luther reflected on the care and concern that a mother has for the child in her womb and on how comforting it is to know that God has the same care and concern for us.

    Luther then goes on to put some words in God’s mouth, as God says to us, “Leave your cares, which look for ways of escape and other places of refuge.  Come to Me, I will carry you in My womb” (in For All the Saints).  He then goes on to talk about the divine Word as the uterus and womb of God and how “we shall have God as a mother who feeds us and carries us and frees us from all evils.”

    I find it truly amazing that Luther would write in this way, given the time and the culture in which he lived.  In doing so, he is acknowledging the fullness of who God is according to the Scriptures.  God is, indeed, our heavenly Father, and undoubtedly this is how Luther would address God in prayer.  Yet, at the same time, both male and female are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), and so we should not find it surprising that sometimes feminine descriptions are also used in the Scriptures – like the mother hen, or the mother eagle.  Ultimately, God is God, and defies our attempts to describe God in human terms.  However, sometimes these different images are helpful as we continue to grow in our relationship with God and picture what that relationship looks like.

    One other picture that is used to help us understand what it means to be “in” Christ is the vine and the branches – how the branches need to remain rooted in the vine and nourished by the vine in order to continue living and growing and producing fruit.  However, no matter which image we use to picture it, there is a closeness and an intimacy that is desirable for our relationship with God that is patterned after the relationship that Jesus himself had with God his Father.

    And so, when we see Jesus spending time in prayer, and regularly going to the synagogue, and his intimate knowledge of the Scriptures, all of these things are clues as to how we are to nurture our relationship with God.  In our case, this relationship begins with God giving us a gift.  God gives us the gift of healing and reconciliation through Jesus Christ, calling us to repentance and to faith.  That is where the relationship begins, and then, just like any other relationship, it becomes stronger through spending time with one another.

    Another thing that Jesus did was to connect our relationship with God to the other relationships in our lives.  The important commandments that he pointed to were not only to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, but also to love our neighbours as ourselves.  As the apostle John later points out, you cannot love God and hate other people at the same time (1 Jn. 4:20).  The two simply don’t go together.  It is also important to recognize that you cannot love God and hate yourself.  Since God created each one of us in his image and has loved us with an everlasting love, to hate ourselves is to hate what God has made.

    However, as most of us have discovered, relationships with other people can cause all kinds of difficulties.  Unlike God, human beings do things that hurt others and treat each other terribly.  In fact, this is where most of us still have a lot of learning and growing to do.  The challenge for all of us is to have the same attitude toward other people as God has toward us.

    And so, just as God stands ready to forgive us, we are challenged to stand ready to forgive others.  Just as God loves us, we are challenged to love others -- even our enemies.  Just as Jesus poured himself out in service to all humanity, we are challenged to give ourselves in service to others.  Ultimately, we are challenged to see both ourselves and others as God does – as frail and broken and sinful people who are in need of love and forgiveness and mercy.

    The very last part of Jesus’ prayer as we have it in today’s gospel highlights what is needed the most in order to heal all of our relationships.  Jesus prays not only that he would be in us, but that the love of God would be in us (Jn. 17:26).  This love also comes to us as a gift, and changes our perspective on everything.

    May the Spirit of God continue to work among us, drawing us closer to God and to one another and filling us with God’s love.  For it is then that others will know that Jesus is alive and continues to be active in our world.  Amen.

Easter 7(C)                                    John 17:20-26
May 12, 2013
St. Luke’s Zion Lutheran Church
Pastor Lynne Hutchison

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