Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears

The Rev. Alissa Newton

Seventh Sunday of Easter

text: John 17:20-26 and Acts 16:16-34

The year was 1870, and a woman named Julia Ward Howe was fed up with war. The western world was dealing with the aftermath of two major wars that year. Here in the United States we were still mopping up from our civil war, and in Europe the Franco-Prussian war winding down. Julia, and women like her, were sick of it. So Ms. Howe wrote a call to action, later called the Mothers Day Proclamation. Here is an excerpt:

Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly : We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. … let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

Julia would later try to start an annual day of peace called Mothers Friendship Day, but she would not be successful. The world was not ready for women to be politically forceful in this way. The mother's day we know and which many of us celebrate today was started instead by Julia's daughter, Anna. Anna never had children. She started mother's day two years Julia’s death, to honor her. Anna was reportedly quite upset at the hallmark holiday that Mother’s Day became. She had pictured something less splashy – a quiet day of remembrance and solidarity for women. So, despite beginning Mother's Day, one of the most profitable retail holidays in our country, Anna died poor and alone at the age of 84.

"That they may all be one." This is the prayer that the gospel of John tells us Jesus lifted up for his disciples in his final discourse before his death. "That they may all be one." It sounds great, doesn't it? A unified vision of love and belonging for all people. Jesus in this passage is at the end of his final discourse, the last words he gives to his disciples before Holy Week and his death. Jesus has already shown them through his lived ministry what one-ness looks like. For those paying attention, this one-ness with God and each other looks like fisherman who leave their nets to follow a preacher and healer. It looks like eating with sinners, and touching the untouchable sick. Being one with God and each other looks like stepping between a woman accused of adultery and the men who want to stone her to death, and it looks like speaking truth to power, even in a temple, and it looks like weeping for a dead friend and then calling him back to life. Jesus has already shown them what being one with God and each other looks like through his life – and he is about to show them what it looks like in a different way, through his death. You see, unity like this is upsetting to powers that depend on disharmony and inequality. These powers won't allow oneness between God and people like the love lived out in Jesus. So they kill him, and as this is happening Jesus lives his prayer again by refusing to resist or destroy the people who come to resist and destroy him. Jesus won't allow his followers to fight violently for him. He doesn't resist his own execution. Jesus treats the people who want to hurt him as also his own. And, loving his own, he loves them to the end.

"That they may all be one." It sounds great, but one-ness is radically difficult in practice. It is impossible for our broken and unequal systems of power, culture, and politics to tolerate it. We like the idea of peace, we like the idea of reaching across or demolishing borders of all sorts in order to recognize the humanity and belovedness of each other, but we together as families and nations and as a world continually fail to practice this peace. So, this prayer from Jesus isn't meant to make us feel good, but to shake us up, to disrupt and destabilize some of the baseline assumptions we depend on to keep things the way they are. Conscious or not, assumptions each of us holds about who is inside and who is outside, who is worthy of care and life and love, and who isn't, who belongs to God, and who doesn't.

In our lesson from Acts this morning we see how disruptive this is, to move through the world and see every person as someone who belongs first to God. Identities both divisive and diverse are all over this story. Paul and Silas are in Macedonia – so they are Jews in a Roman colony. They are freemen who are stalked by a slave girl. They are prisoners who defer escape in order to save the life of their jailer. Paul and his company refuse to privilege these divisive identities – the identities of Roman and Jew, men and women, free and slaves, and even prisoner and jailer, over their identities as children of God. Instead they show us what it might mean to truly live into Jesus' prayer that they might all be one. They love and care and touch and respect all the people they come into contact with, even the ones who annoy or imprison them. And we can see how disruptive this is to the systems of power, politics, property, and culture that surround them. And just in case we can't see it – the story gives us a literal earthquake to further underline the point.

Yet even then – even when the ground is literally shaking underneath them – Paul and Silas, Christians who first see all people as belonging to God, don’t do the thing they are supposed to do. They are supposed to run – we all know this. When there is an earthquake and your jail falls down around you, the best thing to do is to leave. They stay. They stay because the walls don’t matter, but the people do. The same men who broke the law to heal a slave girl respect it to save their jailer, and in doing so baptize him and his entire family into an identity that sees all people as one in God, belonging first to God and each other – a reality that is deeper and more important than all the boundaries, norms, and politics that should be driving them apart.

So today is Mother’s Day. It’s not a religious holiday. You won’t find it in on the liturgical calendar or in our Book of Common Prayer. And Mother's Day hasn't turned out to be the pacifist day of feminist peace that Julia had envisioned. But her roots are there, roots that resonate with the message in our gospel this morning: one woman’s deep longing for our world to care more about the tears of mothers than about political borders and aggression. These days it can seem like even motherhood is a battleground. If we are not careful even this becomes another way to draw lines between insiders and outsiders, another way to judge each other and build walls. Today can be a painful day for those of us who have lost mothers, whose mothers were difficult or abusive, or for women who are not mothers, for mothers whose children are gone. But I hope we won’t judge each other, or build walls today. I hope we can listen to our gospel, and hear Jesus' prayer that we may all be one. I don’t know what that radical love of God will look like for you today. I don’t know what border you will be called to cross, which fight you’ll be called to lose, or which earthquake you will be called to ride out for the sake of love. But I do know this – today and every day we are called to this work of love and unity. Today and every day we are called to first belong to God and then to each other as human beings, and then to all the other identities of our lives. Today and everyday we are called to the reality that all of us and all of “them” (whoever stands across an identity line from you) are first children of God, and in God’s world there is no us and no them. In God’s world "whether your baptism be that of water or of tears," we are all beloved, and we all belong to each other.