On Sportsman’s Paradise.com there is a web cam focused on the nest of a mother barn owl and her chicks.  Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day we can watch this family huddled together.  Not much happens until the father brings back a rat or rabbit to the nest, and then a feeding frenzy begins.  It is not for the weak-of-heart to watch, but it is how life really is for a barn owl raising her young.  The web cam coverage will continue until the mother kicks the fledglings out of the nest, sets them loose to live in the world.  That is something a good parent does – raise a child to the point of self-sufficiency and then setting her or him loose to live life freely, making decisions for oneself. 

Today is Mother’s Day.  Mother’s Day does not appear on the liturgical calendar of the Christian Church, but good friend and pastor Tom Cross, who grew up in Alabama, said, “Mother’s Day is so important in the South that Easter is known as the sixth Sunday before Mother’s Day.  Well, once we get past the flowers, candy, and brunch for mother today we realize that mothering is a function as much as a person. 

In England it is called “Mothering Sunday,” and it is not a commercial day as much as a time to recognize the one who has provided the nurturing and protective role in preparing us to be set loose in the real world.  And truthfully, that mothering may have been done by a father, or an aunt and uncle, grandparents, adoptive parents, to be sure, or an adult not a member of the family but essential to our development.  Someone has to raise us, protect us, and when the right time comes, set us loose, kick us out of the nest.

So it is in our reading from John’s gospel today, we have Jesus mothering the disciples.  It is time for him to set them loose.  “Do not worry,” he begins.  “I will not leave you orphaned.  But in a little while you will not see me.  It is okay because God will give you the Holy Spirit, who will guide you, protect you, teach you, and encourage you. Just remember to love one another as I have loved you, and in that you will find peace and courage to live without me hovering over you.”  Jesus sets the disciples loose to carry on the mission of sharing God’s love.  The work cannot be done staying behind the closed door of the upper room; the disciples must be on the streets of the cities and the roads of the countryside in order to be alive to their task.  That always has been the command to the Church.  “Get out from behind closed doors and into the world.  You exist for the world, not yourselves.  Remember that you are to serve, not be served.”  That is Mother God speaking a stern word of direction to us through the person of Jesus Christ. 

The Christian story does not conclude with Easter and the Resurrection.  It continues as we ask, “So, what happened after that?”  The new life of Easter that was embodied by Christ also was granted to the disciples.  They did come out from behind closed doors and began to spread the Good News.  That is what the book we call “The Acts of the Apostles” is all about, what happened after Easter, what the disciples did after they were set loose.  In Chapter 16 of Acts we join Paul on his way to Macedonia, that area situated at the northwestern corner of Greece, still a contested area today as it is situated on the passageway between Greece and the rest of Europe. 

Macedonia is a long way from Jerusalem, and there were many in the movement who wanted to stay close to home, to reach out only to those who were like themselves . . . the same language, the same food, the same race, the same values, the same history.  However, Paul discovered rather quickly that when he ventured out beyond these boundaries to share the Good News of new life in Jesus Christ, people from very different backgrounds responded to the promptings of the Holy Spirit.  Once he was set loose, the Holy Spirit was set loose, too.

So, Paul argued in Jerusalem that the disciples must be set loose to cross over into other cultures to do the work entrusted to them by Jesus when he freed them to venture out under the guiding protection of the Holy Spirit.  But when Paul goes, as we read in the verses just before our passage, he is not always successful.  There are places where he goes and has no effect.  Failure . . .failure is one certain result of going out from behind closed doors and crossing boundaries to engage others.  Let us hear that, Church.  If we are not ready to fail, then we are not ready to serve in Christ’s name.

On the other hand, Paul does succeed, too . . . Lydia, the dealer of purple cloth, sitting along the river bank outside the city gate with other women.  Why there?  Because women were relegated to the perimeter, on the outside looking in, Lydia, a businesswoman but not welcome in the central bazaar . . . Paul’s success often is with those on the margins.  Let us hear that, too, Church.  Success in ministry seldom is measured in terms of increased power and influence.

John Wesley found that out, as well.  Talk about someone who was set loose! Not just by Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit but also by the Bishop of Bristol by the power of the episcopacy.  Wesley himself was a conservative man, politically and ecclesiastically.  His faith was formed in the high Anglican tradition represented by the Lincoln College Chapel in Oxford.  Those of us who visited there last month saw the strict floor plan of monastic worship with two rows of benches facing each other for the antiphonal singing of evensong, no room for a congregation, and an ornate altar on a raised platform at the far end. 

But the theology Wesley developed over his early years in ministry, including an humiliating failure of leadership in the colony of Georgia, led him to be more inclusive than the established Church was willing to admit.  If Christ died for the sins of all, not just some, then the gospel must be made available to all, not just those few who could pay the price to rent a pew.  He saw 95% of his country’s population living without the benefit of hearing about God’s saving grace.

The bishop would not approve of Wesley’s expansive reading of the scripture and refused to assign him a parish.  That is when Wesley, turning a necessity into a virtue, proclaimed, “The world is my parish!”  Yes it was because he had no other. And so, for the next 50-plus years he traveled 250,000 miles on horseback on terrible roads and paths around England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland preaching wherever he could, in the vilest of places, he confessed – open pit mines, town squares, farmers’ fields, shop-owners’ doorways, wherever he could.  And often, at least in the first 30 years, he was met with derision, ridicule, and even physical violence. 

One of his very few benefactors, the Countess of Huntington, approached the Duchess of Buckingham for possible support for Wesley’s work.  The duchess responded to the countess, “I thank your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers.  Their doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors in perpetually endeavoring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. . . . It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth.”  Sometimes, if we follow the Spirit, we will disgust others.  Set loose . . .to fail, as well as succeed.

So, to the heart of the matter: what has God set us loose to do?  We cannot be faithful and stay cloistered behind these doors.  Yes, we gather in this sanctuary now to remember our roots, to restore our relationships, to reclaim our identity; this is sort of like a call home to mother today.  But, we cannot go home again.  Or more precisely put, our home of faith is not in here but out there.

I offer this example of how God already has set us loose in one direction, and how we have been effective beyond our wildest dreams.  In a few weeks thirty eighth graders will graduate from the Ruben Salazar Bi-Lingual Center.  We have been tutoring them for five years, focusing on their reading skills.  Some of you have been tutors, while many of our tutors have been non-members who work in the Loop.  That has been a major commitment, one-on-one week-after-week.  Others have donated books and backpacks.  Most of us have chipped in to pay for the bus transporting the kids to the Temple every Wednesday after school.

The results of the tutoring have shown up in the students’ test scores.  We can demonstrate the academic value of their experience here.  But beyond the test scores these young people also have had an additional “parent” in the person of the tutor mothering them.  And they have learned to claim the Loop as a place where they belong.

Five years ago we did not have a fully developed plan, but the principal of the school, Martha Miranda, a member of the Temple, asked for my help in reminding the school board that they had not fulfilled a ten-year promise to provide a bigger school building closer to the homes of most of the students.  I was of no use.  Ruben Salazar still is a cramped building neighborhoods away from the kids’ homes.  But when we left our nest and became connected to the world of public education the Spirit set us loose to serve the children.

We plan to start with a new group of fourth graders next year, thirty-seven of them.  If you want to tutor, if you want to contribute to supplies, if you want to help underwrite the $15,000 we estimate that we will need per year beyond the congregation’s operating budget, let us know.  But please know that once we have been set loose we cannot retreat.  A success.   

Now a failure, pretty much of my own doing.  For years we had an effective meal program for indigent people that we hosted Tuesdays at noon down in Pierce Hall.  Eventually, it got too big and unwieldy, and I contributed to the problem.  I have been vexed for the nine years I have been at the Temple why, with so many groups trying to help people who are homeless, we are not more effective.  The sum is less than the parts, even though even one is trying earnestly to help.

So, I invited a team of counselors to set up office hours on the second floor of the Temple on Tuesdays and Thursdays, thinking that bringing more the resources to where the needy were would help.  Good idea, but it did not work well.  We ended up attracting many more people than we could realistically help.  The counselors could help fifteen people a day, and forty others would sit in and around the church hoping for a “no-show” so that they might get in.  Good intentions all around, especially from those in need, but we could not provide the services or the space needed to be effective.

By moving the meal program to Saturday mornings at the request of those who need the meal (weekends are an especially desperate time for people on the streets), and moving it closer to the neediest population once the major shelter moved a few miles south, and reinvigorating our clothing distribution system, we are doing more good than before.  The counseling piece still resides with others, but we have become more faithful in our ministry.  A failure becomes a success with perseverance. 

God sets us loose in the care of the Holy Spirit to love others; sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail.  But there is no hiding in the nest. 

What next?  What is God setting us loose to do now?  Is there anything we learned from our Good Friday collaboration with the sign language choir that might lead us to a ministry with those who are hearing-impaired?  What do we know from the 65,000 college students in the Loop who have turned our neighborhood into a campus?  The thousands of empty-nesters all around the Loop, people who have no children at home, what would fulfill their sense of ministry, which missions to engage, what studies to pursue?  How do we use this extraordinary sanctuary to meet peoples’ deepest desires?  Sometimes for us “going out” really means “letting in” other people.

Those questions comprise our homework assignment for this summer.  Let us trust the Word of God that the Holy Spirit is leading us in new directions and that, in spite of our doubts and fears, once mother kicks us out of the nest we will discover once again that we have wings to fly.  Amen.