![The steeple of the Memorial Church](/sites/g/files/omnuum7126/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-02/160725ChurchCalArt4.jpg?itok=rG9ZvXzh) # Mother’s Day Sunday Sermon May 11, 2026 - [ Blog ](/news-categories/blog) *By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13* *Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity* *Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church* *(The following is a transcript of the service audio, May 10, 2026)* May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us this day and always. Amen. Happy Mother's Day, again. Happy Mother's Day. If you're a mom, or if you have a mom, or if somebody loves you like a mom, or if you love somebody like a mom. I hope whoever that person is, I hope that you have the chance to talk to them today, either in person or maybe on the phone or maybe in your heart and in your memory. Blessings to all of you. This Mother's Day also is the sixth Sunday of Easter. We're coming to the end of the Easter season, only a couple of more weeks, also coming to the end of another academic year and another term. And interestingly, maybe appropriately because we're coming to the end of an academic year and a term and to the end of Easter, Easter sixth, the sixth Sunday of Easter, the lesson is always from this chapter of the Gospel of John, and it's always from this passage in John called the farewell address, this long goodbye that Jesus gives the night before he dies. And so even though we're in the Easter season, we're back to Holy Week, we're back to Jesus's farewell from the Gospel of John. And there's a reason for that. We think about Easter, Easter morning is the end of a story, and it is kind of the end of a story if you think about the journey towards Jerusalem and the way that the arc of the Gospels. After Jesus dies, he's raised, and this is the end of that story. But also Easter's a tumultuous time for these disciples. If you just think what has happened to them in the last six weeks, they saw Jesus die, and then they all ran away, and then they were all hiding, and then he appeared to them and then he disappeared and then he appeared again and he disappeared and he appeared again, and he disappeared and he keeps appearing and disappearing. And 40 days after Easter, we're told he makes his final departure. That's this Thursday, the feast of the Ascension. So this Thursday is 40 days after Easter when Jesus, we're told by the Gospels, lifted up into the clouds, and after which the spirit comes. Jesus refers to this in our lesson. I will send you a comforter. I'll send you this advocate. I'll say more about that in a minute. And that spirit will come on the 50th day after Easter, Pentecost, which will actually be our last Sunday together this term. And the spirit arrives as sort of a replacement for Jesus. We hear in the farewell address today, Jesus says, "I will not leave you orphaned. Don't worry, somebody else is coming. I'm going to leave, and then someone else will come. Don't worry too much." And that's the dynamic. That's what's happening. This Thursday is Ascension. There's this sense of departure, impending departure. And so the Gospel, our churches turn back to Jesus's farewell address from the night before he died to hear his goodbye instructions. Harvard Memorial Church · The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts Ph.D. '13 - May 10, 2026 | Sunday Sermon (Mother's Day) Though it's read as a return, though Easter is read as a return, the Easter season is kind of a long goodbye. And that's why this sixth Sunday of Easter, just as we're coming to the close of it, right on the eve of Jesus's departure on Ascension Day, we turn back. To the farewell address. We turn back to the moments before Jesus's death. Now, the farewell address in the Gospel of John is long. Jesus is very wordy the night before he dies, at least in John's version of things. It's about a quarter of the Gospel. About a quarter of the Gospel of John by chapter is Jesus's farewell instructions to his disciples. And he has a lot to say, but he's also pretty repetitive, and basically it boils down to two things. Over five chapters, a quarter of the Gospel of John, it boils down to two things. Remember what I told you to do and do it. Also, what I told you to do is to love each other. Love each other. Remember what I told you. Love each other. Do that. And number two, don't worry. I'm leaving, but you won't be alone. And our passage today captures both those things. If you keep my commandments, if you love one another, I am with you and you are in me just as I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Do that. And also, I will not leave you. And this unique phrase here, "I will not leave you orphaned." For hundreds of years in the King James version of this translation, the King James version translated this Greek word as comfortless. I will not leave you comfortless. And that captures the sense, but what Jesus says is orphaned. I will not leave you orphaned. And especially thinking about Elizabeth's prayers this morning, thinking about grief this Mother's Day, thinking about Mother's Day, the orphaned word landed with me. My mom died three and a half years ago. I'm anything but orphaned. My dad is alive and well. He's doing great. He's probably watching right now. I'm grateful for him. But when I hear Jesus talking about being orphaned on Mother's Day, you can imagine where my thoughts go. Before she died, my mom asked me to do three things. The first thing she asked me to do was a couple months before she died and then I'll tell you that thing first. My mom had kind of a long goodbye too. She was very sick with cancer and we knew she was dying. And so we talked about funeral planning. We talked about how we would plan her funeral. And I was sitting with her at her house and she said to me, she said, "Matthew, I want you to do my funeral. I want you to preside at my funeral." She said, "Do my funeral. I want you to do my funeral." And I kind of took a deep breath and I said, "Well, you know, mom, that's going to be hard for me. I'm your son. On that day, when all these people gather to say goodbye to you, I'm going to want someone to minister to me. I don't know if I'm going to have it in me to be a pastor to all these people or to be the one that presides and that stewards you and your memory that day." And she looked at me as she looked at me so many times from her life with the kind of warm understanding that maybe only a mother can offer. And she reached out and she took my hand and she said to me, "Matthew, I told you I want you to do my funeral." And so I did my mom's funeral. That was a couple of months. The hours before she died, we knew she was dying, and the hours before she died, when I had another moment alone with her, my mom asked me to do two more things. She said, "Matthew, take care of Daddy. I don't want him to be all alone." And she said, "Make sure you and your brothers visit each other." And she said, "I'm not going to be there to take care of you. You, you brothers, and to take care of Dad. So you have to do it. I need you to do it for me." Jesus's farewell to his disciples, it's long and complicated, grammatically, theologically, very complicated. It's repetitive, but it's also just kind of basically human. Jesus is saying goodbye. And he loves these people. He loves them more than he can say, more than he can describe to them. He loves them. And so he's saying, before he goes, he just says to them what maybe someone has said to you in your life or memory, and what someone said to me, "I love you. I love you all. Please love each other. Please take care of each other. Things are going to get hard. The world is going to fall apart." And it did in the years after Jesus's death. And Jesus says, "I'm not going to be there. I'm not going to be there to calm the storm or feed the thousands or heal the crowds or welcome the stranger or love the enemy. I'm not going to be there to show love to all the people in this world that I love, some of whom maybe you don't love very much at all. So you got to do it. I need you to do it for me." "But when you do that," he says, "When you do that, I will be with you. That is what I came here to do. That's the reason God sent me. And so when you do it, my spirit will be in you, and you'll know it. You'll understand it in a way that maybe no one else understands it, that I am in you just as you are in me and just as we are in the Father." This is what the Spirit means in the Gospel of John. In other places in scripture, the Spirit takes different forms, tongues of flame and an ethereal dove that appears. We'll talk about that in a couple weeks, and all those things can be Spirit. They are all Spirit. But that's not the way John talks about Spirit in this morning's Gospel or in his Gospel at large. And I think when we see the tongues of flame and when we see the Spirit descending like a dove, we think that maybe the way Jesus is talking now is kind of like junior varsity Spirit, right? Like, oh, I remember Jesus, and I'm acting in Jesus's name, and that's kind of Spirit, but not like the fiery dove. Again, nothing against that. We'll talk about that in a couple of weeks. But for John and in John's Gospel, this is what the Spirit is, and it's made absolutely concrete and literal and literal in this Gospel because Jesus says," I will give you an advocate." It's a word that only John uses to describe the Spirit, and the word advocate, the Greek word here, just means the one who comes alongside you. The one who accompanies you, the one who walks with you, the one who stands up for you and speaks for you. That's all it means. And what's so important in the Gospel of John is that this promise, which Jesus makes the night before he dies, "Don't worry, someone will come next to you and care for you." It happens in the next chapter of the Gospel of John, when Jesus dies. Because Jesus is on the cross dying in John's Gospel, and from the cross he looks down, and he sees his mother. They're holding the disciple he loves the most and being held by that disciple. Now there's this only this unnamed disciple in the Gospel of John. Some scholars think that's because they want us to see ourselves in that person. Jesus looks down from the cross. The day before he's promised, he's like, "I am leaving, but you're going to have somebody there next to you to take care of you." And then this day, less than 24 hours later, Jesus is dying, and he sees the disciple he loves and the woman who gave him birth next to each other, holding each other, and he says to them, "Woman, there is your son. Son, there is your mother. You belong to one another now. The way you loved me, love each other. The way I love you, love each other that way. You who are lonely and bereft and abused and suffering, you belong to one another now. So love each other." Who is the Spirit? What is the Spirit in the Gospel of John? It's us. Or maybe a better way to put it is where is the Spirit of Christ? Where is Jesus's Spirit? It's in us. We are the replacement. We are the ones Jesus calls to stand alongside one another and walk with one another and stand up for one another and care for one another. I'm trained as a theologian and I can tell you that there are volumes written, volumes and volumes through the history of Christian theology and the church, volumes written on the mystery of the union between Jesus and God, on the mystery of the union between Christ and Christ church on the mystery of the movement, the mysterious movements of the Spirit in our lives and in our world. And the movements of the Spirit are mysterious and complicated, and they're all worthwhile books. In many ways, the movements of the Spirit are very mysterious indeed, but in at least one way, the movement of the Spirit is quite simple and quite straightforward. I am in you. So love one another. Take care of each other. The Spirit of Christ moves in us when we love as he loved us. And we have done a very good job, in the churches, of complicating this fairly straightforward reminder, this fairly straightforward command, with a whole lot of doctrine. And it's not wrong that we have all that writing and all that argumentation and all that complexification because it can be really complicated. Not everything we think is love is actually loving the way Christ loved us. And those that do choose to love like Christ loved us will face risks and bear consequences and those must be weighed to carefully, in complicated ways. So it's not to say it's not difficult. It's not to say it's not hard. It's just to say that in the Gospel of John, it could not be more clear. Love one another as I have loved you. It is easy in this world to feel bereft, to feel orphaned. It is easy in this world to feel beset by loss. And I don't just mean if you've lost someone, although I mean that too. But sometimes the absence of God, the absence of Christ's Spirit in our world, feels more global, more pervasive, more acute. And we look around, we see death and war and famine. We see violence and injustice. We see the work of justice accomplished 60 years ago pulled apart in our world today, the sacrifices of civil rights workers, heroes of our history, that work is dismantled in the present. And when I look upon those things, and when I feel that sense of loss, when I feel orphaned, the farewell of Jesus rings so loudly in my ears. Sometimes in certain times, maybe in times like these, we don't know where in this world to look for a sign of God's grace. But the truth is, it's actually never far. It's not up in the heavens or riding away on clouds. The presence of God, the Spirit of God, might be right next to us. Even while we're being crucified, it might be right in front of us. Even when our own hearts are breaking as they often are, Jesus is only ever as far away as another breaking human heart. Jesus is only ever as far away as another person that he came to this world to save. Woman, there is your son. Son, there is your mother. Happy Mother's Day. ## Full Sunday Service ## See also:- [ Sunday Service ](/archive/sunday-service) - [ Sermon ](/archive/sermons) - [ Matthew Ichihashi Potts ](/media-archive/matthew-ichihashi-potts) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)