(In the Gospel of John, on the night he is to be betrayed to the authorities and arrested, Jesus washes his disciples' feet, shares a final Passover meal with them, and prepares them for his leaving and their continuing mission in the power of Spirit. He also prays for them -- thanking God for giving him these followers, recalling that he has made them distinctive and strong in the world by what he has shown them of God's true nature and way, and praying that they will remain strong in the community, the mission, the theology and the joy into which he has led them.)
From Jesus’s prayer
for us on the last night of his life, in the language of the Contemporary
English Version:
Heavenly
Father,
you
have given me some followers from this world,
and
I have shown them what you are like …
While
I was with them,
I
kept them safe by keeping them focused
on
what you really are like, and how you work in the world.
Or as it says in the
New Revised Standard Version:
I
have made your name known
to
those whom you gave me from the world.
While
I was with them,
I
protected them in your name that you have given me.
This week I
traded a few emails with Kathy Cushnie because this prayer that Jesus has for
us reminded me of something I heard years ago about Jean Jones, Kathy’s
mom. When I began ministry here in the
summer of 2001, Jean was already in the hospital – the 2B Ward of West Lincoln
Memorial. She died not long later, and I
am very glad to have got to know her even that little bit. She was a woman of considerable culture, education,
civility and strength, and one thing I heard from a number of her family after
her passing was what she would say to them whenever they would leave the house
to go out into the world: “Remember, you
are a Jones … and your mother’s child.”
Kathy says, “Oh,
the memories that brings back. It was
said quite sternly. I guess she was aware of the pitfalls out there but
knew she couldn't shelter us. We had to
find our own way.”
Remember your
name, and who you come from.
And haven’t all
our families and all our mothers – all our birth and adoptive and surrogate and
spiritual and substitute mothers said that same thing to us in some way as we
have grown up, gone out and found our ways into the world?
And what it is –
what it means in each of our cases, is usually something quite simple. What each of our family names reminds us of,
and what nobility and goodness, what human and divine thing, what part of the
image of God in the world our sense of origin calls us to live out, is not
complicated.
When I first married
and moved away from my parents’ home to the far-away, big, bad city of Toronto,
and my first wife and I moved from a student-housing apartment into a real house
in a real neighbourhood, the first and only question my mom asked was, “Is
there a grocery store nearby?”
She had grown up
with poverty and not always much food on the table or in reserve. Her mom had worked hard to put food on the
table each day. When my mom became a mom
herself, she also worked hard to be sure we were fed and fed well. So even from 2,000 kilometres away she helped
me remember that one of the things that makes a house a home, and makes life
good is that no one ever need go hungry.
As a mom, one of
Japhia’s proudest stories about her daughter, is when Tiffany was in public school
and pointing out a new friend to her in a group of them in a park. She said he was that one, the one doing such
and such, the one right over there, the one in the green shorts. Never once did Tiffany think to mention he
was black – the only black kid there, in fact.
It didn’t cross her mind that the colour of his skin was
noteworthy. To Japhia, at least one
thing her family name means is that all are welcome. And it makes her feel good that in her
children’s homes and lives no one is excluded or separated out by prejudice or
pride of any kind.
Remember your
name, and whose child you are.
The Buddhist
teacher Chuang Tzu says:
When
you realize where you come from,
you
naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused,
kind-hearted
as a grandmother, dignified as a king.
Immersed
in wonder of the tao,
you
can deal with whatever life brings you.
Jesus says:
I have made your name known
to those who you gave me from the world.
They were yours, and you gave them to me ...
Now they know who they are --
that they are yours, as I am yours.
Holy One, protect them in your name --
in your way of being and working in the world,
so that they may be one, as we are one.
All humanity really
is God’s family – God’s sons and daughters, God’s children, the spirit and
image of God in the world. And this
never goes away. This is a given of our life
on Earth and in the cosmos.
But does everyone
remember? Does everyone recall their
holy birth, and whose child they really and ultimately are?
Which is why
Jesus came. To help us remember. And to draw us together in the world as an
intentional family of remembrance within the larger family of forgetfulness, a
family that lives true to its deepest name and takes pains to live out what
simple, uncomplicated thing it is to be real children of God.
Father Richard
Rohr puts it this way:
“God’s basic
method of communicating God’s self and of saving the world is not the ‘saved’
individual, the rightly informed believer, or even a person with a career in
ministry, but the journey and bonding process that God initiates in community:
in marriages, families, tribes, nations, events, scientists, and churches who
are seeking to participate in God’s love, maybe without even consciously
knowing it, [by living out from their heart what they breathe in, in the life of
the family God helps them to be.]”
Remember your
name, and who you come from.
"Building such
communities in contrast to the surrounding society [he goes on to say] … was
precisely the early church’s missionary strategy. Small communities of Jesus’ followers would make
the message believable: Jesus is Lord (rather
than Caesar is Lord); sharing abundance and living in simplicity (rather than
hoarding wealth); non-violence and suffering (rather than aligning with power) …
because corporate evil can only be confronted or overcome with corporate good …
And it’s hard in any age to imagine a future for the world with
counter-cultural, God-shaped communities like that."
So what is our family
name? What way of living have we learned
through Jesus that saves us from the evil one today? And that will help to save the world?
And how do we put
ourselves often enough and deeply enough into the life of this family, to
really breathe in the name and the way of being that is its essence?
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