Vital Signs: God-Given Unity Richmond s First Baptist Church, May 28, 2017 The Seventh Sunday of Easter John 17:1-11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. Have you ever had to say goodbye to someone you didn t want to say goodbye to? Of course you have. Whether it s a child saying goodbye to grandparents after a long visit, or a girl saying goodbye to her sweetheart, going off to war, or a father saying goodbye to his daughter, going off to college, or a wife saying goodbye to her husband for the very last time, it s hard. I ve had some experience with it myself. Back in 1994 my friend Jim Eastin called and asked if I wanted to go to the Holy Land. He was the Methodist minister in my little town, and someone had told him about a familiarization tour sponsored by a company called Educational Opportunities. The idea was to take a group of ministers to the Holy Land at a discounted price so they could experience it for themselves, go back to their churches and share their enthusiasm, and eventually round up a group for another tour. The price that Jim quoted to me started with a four, as in four-hundred-and-ninety-nine dollars to go to Israel for a week (this was 1994, remember). I couldn t believe it, but I also couldn t resist. I had always wanted to travel but hadn t been able to afford it until that very moment. So I said yes, immediately, hung up the phone and started packing my suitcase. And that s when my daughter Ellie, who was six at the time, asked me what I was doing. I m going to the Holy Land! I said. 1
What s the Holy Land? It s where Jesus lived, in Israel. Is it far away? Yes! It s halfway around the world! How will you get there? On a big airplane. Can I come? Well, no, not this time. But maybe if I go again. She got quiet after that. In fact, my whole family got quiet: Ellie, who was six; Catherine, who was three; and Christy, who would have to stay at home with the girls while I went gallivanting around the globe. Not only that, but I had never been that far away before, and never for that long. And the Middle East wasn t exactly the safest place to visit. Why couldn t I take a familiarization tour to Canada instead? I didn t take Ellie to school the next day. I don t know what she said to her first-grade classmates, but in my imagination it went something like this: My daddy s leaving. Where is he going? To be with Jesus. And where is that? Far, far away. How will he get there? He has to go up in the sky. When will he be back? 2
I don t know. Because all that other stuff? About a week-long familiarization tour with a company called Educational Opportunities to give ministers a chance to experience the Holy Land for themselves so they could come back and talk it up in their churches and recruit people for another trip? That kind of went over her head. All she really knew was that her daddy was leaving. I think the same thing may have been true for the disciples. On the night he was betrayed Jesus may have told them exactly what was about to happen. But when John tried to write about it later all he could remember was that Jesus told them he was leaving. He said something about going to his Father s house. He told them not to let their hearts be troubled. He said he would ask the Father to send someone to take care of them. And in the end, before he left, he prayed for them. But all that other stuff? It kind of went over his head. I have to be honest with you: these five chapters of John s Gospel from 13 through 17 often go over my head. This is some of the most abstract language in the New Testament. Scholars call it the Farewell Discourse, but that may be the only thing they agree on: that Jesus is saying goodbye to his disciples and saying it in a really wordy way. Here s an example from today s reading: I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And then, a few verses later: the glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one. 3
Do you know the word tautological? It s a contraction of two Greek words: tautos, meaning the same, and logos, meaning word. Tautological means the same words, or, saying the same things over and over again, and that s how the Farewell Discourse sounds to me, as if Jesus were saying the same things over and over again, in the hope that his disciples would remember something, anything. Well, they did: they remembered that he was leaving, that he was going to his Father s house, and that he didn t want their hearts to be troubled. He promised he would ask the Father to send someone to take care of them, and in the end he prayed for them. And what he prayed for, above everything else, was that they might be one. And that s interesting, isn t it? I spent some time thinking about that last week and at first I thought it might be because the world is a dangerous place and the disciples would have to watch each other s backs. Just before Jesus prays for them he tells them, In the world you will face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world! American Christians don t know all that much about persecution, but some Christians do. Those early Christians did, and in some parts of the world today Christians face regular persecution. They have to stand together; they have to watch each other s backs. But even in this country we are beginning to get a taste of it. A culture that used to be entirely supportive of Christianity has become more and more indifferent. When I speak at Westminster Canterbury these days, a retirement community established by Presbyterians and Episcopalians, I tell them, We Christians have to stick together. If we don t learn to speak with one voice soon we will have no voice in this culture. So, Jesus might be praying for the unity of his disciples because he knows they 4
are going to need each other, and even in this church it might be helpful to remember that. We all get along pretty well, but we have our differences, don t we? We have our doctrinal differences: we don t all believe the same things in exactly the same way. Inside the family those differences can often seem huge, but outside the family? Not so much. It was like that when I was growing up. My brothers and I fought about lots of things at home, but out there in public we stuck together. If anyone picked on one of us the rest of us would come running, because we were brothers. I think that s probably true for us in this church, as well. We may not agree on everything but if anyone starts picking on one of us the rest of us will come running, won t we? Because we re family. We re members of the same church. And it probably wouldn t hurt the church in America to suffer some antagonism from time to time, so that instead of dividing ourselves over doctrinal differences we might come together, remembering (as I sometimes say) that, If God is our Father we are members of the same family, and if Jesus is our Lord we are members of the same church. But the Lord Jesus wants even more than that, and in our Gospel reading for today he is praying for more than that. In the final words of verse 11 he prays that his disciples may be one as he and the Father are one, and that s a whole different level of unity. At weddings we sometimes talk about two people becoming one flesh, referring to that story from the Book of Genesis where God caused the man he had made from dust to fall into a deep sleep, and then took a rib from his side, and made it into a woman, and brought her to the man. When the man saw her he said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. The writer of Genesis says, Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. 5
The best marriages I know have that quality about them, where the husband cares for his wife as if he were caring for himself, and where she cares for him in the same way. But as I said to someone last week, The relationship between Jesus and his Father was literally a one-flesh relationship: the only flesh they had belonged to Jesus. I was only half-serious when I said it, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed true. As Jesus says in John 14:10, I am in the Father and the Father is in me. And somehow, he wants his disciples to share that kind of unity. I remember speaking at one of our marriage enrichment events about the circle of love, and I held up my wedding ring as a symbol. When you ask someone to marry you, I said, you invite that other person inside the circle of your love, and you make a promise that you will never push that other person out. I know it doesn t always work out that way. Sometimes the circle gets broken. Sometimes somebody steps out of it. But this is the promise of marriage: that two people could live out the rest of their lives inside the circle of their love. And when children are born or adopted, they are born or adopted into that same circle. It gets bigger to make room for them. They grow up inside that circle. And though they may someday leave their parents home, they will never leave the circle of their love. I think that s what Jesus is saying to his disciples: that he is inside the circle of his Father s love, and he has brought them inside that same circle, which helps to explain an otherwise difficult part of today s passage. In verse 4 Jesus says to the Father, I glorified you on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. He says it in the past tense, as if it were already finished, but he says it at the Last Supper, before he has been crucified, which makes me think that the work the Father gave him to do was not the 6
work of dying, or at least, not only the work of dying. When I look back to the prologue of the Gospel in chapter one there are at least two other options: one is in verse 12, where it says, But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God. Maybe that was his work: to give us power to become children of God. But another option is in verse 18 where it says, No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father s heart, who has made him known. Maybe that was his work: to reveal the Father, to make him known. When I look at Jesus prayer for his disciples in that light it begins to make more sense. He says to his father, You have given [the Son] authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God. He says, I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. Later in this same prayer he says, I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. Can you hear Jesus, telling his disciples about the Father, telling them how much he loves them, inviting them inside the circle of his love? Can you see how he is both revealing the heart of the Father and giving them power to become children of God? On the night he was betrayed Jesus prayed that his disciples would remain inside the circle of God s love no matter what came next. That s a different kind of unity than doctrinal unity. It doesn t necessarily mean that they all believed the same things in the 7
same way. It only means that they were are all loved with the same love. And so are we. Maybe we could remember that the next time we encounter a Christian from another denomination. Maybe instead of saying, You don t believe the same things we believe, we could say, You are loved with the same love. I can t remember the prayer I said with my family before I left on that trip to Israel, but I m pretty sure I said one. I probably prayed that they would be safe while I was away, that they would take good care of each other, and that they wouldn t worry about me too much. And then I went outside, got in my car, and drove away. I didn t forget them while I was gone. I think I may have even called them once from my hotel collect, long-distance just to let them know I was OK. But when I got home a week later I realized I had forgotten to take a house key. So I rang the back doorbell and stood there, holding my suitcase. The door opened, and there was Ellie, and the look on her face told me she hadn t been completely sure she would ever see me again. I dropped my suitcase, squatted down and hugged her and for the longest time she just held on with her little arms around my neck. Daddy! she said, as if she couldn t believe I was really there. She had said goodbye to someone she hadn t wanted to say goodbye to, and she had been secretly afraid that it might be forever. I can t remember what I said to her in that moment, but I know that I wanted to reassure her. I wanted to say, Sweetheart, I have been away. I have been far, far away. But the circle of my love has stretched from here to Israel, And you have never been outside that circle. Jim Somerville 2017 8