Easter 7, 05/04/2008

Sermon on John 17:1-11, by David Zersen

1After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: "Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. 2For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. 3Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. 5And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

Jesus Prays for His Disciples

6"I have revealed youto those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. 7Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. 8For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. 9I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. 10All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them. 11I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name-the name you gave me-so that they may be one as we are one. (RSV)

HERE AND NOW UNITY

Perhaps it's in nature of political campaigns that chaos occasionally raises its ugly head as people take opposing sides on every imaginable issue. The media has a feeding frenzy when it comes to these campaigns, every newspaper and newscast trying to outdo another with a breaking story, whether about Obama's bowling score, Hillary's comment's about obliterating Iran, or McCain's proposal to cut gas prices by offering a bargain for travelers in the summer. All of these issues have nothing to do with the campaign (McCain won't be in office to implement such ideas this summer, for example), but the media easily loses its focus and the general public follows wherever the media leads.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in this week's frenzy about comments made by Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor and mentor. Grabbing odd little soundbites out of the pastor's sermons, sometimes from 20 years ago, everybody was being encouraged to take a stand on them. I read an article on the subject in the New York Times and noted that 554 people had responded to the article within hours-so many, in fact, that the Times stopped accepting comments. I read through many of the comments and acknowledged that they were all over the place. Some made sense and some made nonsense, but in our democratic, free speech environment, people can say whatever they want to say. Given that, it is very difficult, no matter how decisive one's own point of view may be, to be conclusive in any matter if one wants to give all of these perspectives a fair hearing.

Many of these comments deal with theological issues from the black community, from people who know nothing about Christianity, from those who read their Bible daily, and from men and women of the cloth. How is it possible, within the Christian community, this very incident encourages us to ask, to reach consensus or unity on any subject at all? We are so diverse, so disparate. How can we make a show of oneness to the world?

Building oneness in a relationship with Jesus

It's worth pondering, although it might be a bit bizarre, whether a religion could seek to be known for its diversity, rather than its unity. It could become an objective to try to encourage everyone to be as different and distinct from others as possible. And although one aspect of such uniqueness could be creative expression, another might be the distaste and disgruntlement that results from failure to reach a common focus on anything. It might be a good subject for a novel or a film, if anyone out there is listening.

Christianity, however, from the onset began with the notion that there was sense and sensibility in reaching consensus on certain issues, on pulling together so that at least in some areas there was common ground. Jesus speaks out clearly in today's Gospel lesson on this matter, calling his followers to experience a oneness, which comes from identification with the name of Jesus (v.11). It is in our relationship with Jesus that we achieve unity, more than in any other way.

Jesus puts this in another way in the prayer that is Chapter 17. We achieve common ground when we know that eternal life is not just something that comes after death, but it results from knowing, here and now, the true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (v.3). This is a significant focus for us as Christians. We may differ and disagree about many issues, but when it comes to what it is that forms our center, we remember that it has to do with the way in which Jesus makes us unique in our relationships with him and with each other.

In the First Lesson for today, we are reminded that what kept the disciples together was a life in the Spirit, being devoted to prayer, to personal and lasting relationship with the one who had gone ahead but who remained their leader and Lord (Acts 1:14). As long as Christians maintain this personal and prayerful relationship with Jesus, they are bound to him in his spirit of love and forgiveness. Despite their differences in many areas, Christians can claim an eternal life that begins now, a life with Jesus that binds them forever.

Building oneness in a relationship with others

In our Christian communities, the churches in which we live out our lives, we often lose focus as competing interests and opinions draw us off target and invite disagreements and fights. Some of these we have to accept as part of the process of fashioning consensus on everything from building appropriate facilities to carrying out social action programs to calling a pastor. All too often, as in a political campaign, individuals who lose focus get us to join them and suddenly all of us have forgotten why we are members of the church in the first place.

A recent movie starring Ryan Gosling, titled "Lars and the Real Girl" is a kind of parable that helps us understand this problem. Lars is a recluse who lives in his brother's garage and doesn't want much to do with anyone. His brother laments the fact that he left home after their mother died, surrendering Lars to his grieving and sullen father. Lars becomes socially dysfunctional, as a result, and, in the peculiar imagery of the parable, accepts an inflatable plastic girl as his companion. Initially, people think it might be best to simply write him off as a nut. But gradually, the church community sort of adopts her, because they really love Lars. They take her on shopping trips, they elect her to the school board, and she sits in her wheel chair on Sunday morning with a hymnal in her hands.

Gradually, Lars comes to appreciate that the love and attention of the community is more real than the artificial relationship with a plastic companion and he acknowledges that his girlfriend is dead. This leads to new and positive relations with a "real girl," with his family and friends at work and at church.

The film does what parables intend to do, point us beyond a story, which in-itself might be rather odd, to the potential that can be achieved when redemptive forces are at work. In this case, the church members so loved Lars that were willing to accept his insularity and craziness, or to say it more theologically, to affirm him as a person in his own right. In the process of keeping focus on the very thing at which they were experts, namely loving people as much as Jesus loved them, they healed Lars and helped him to become a whole and responsive person.

We can wonder what it might take for us, in the midst of all the squabbles that we as Christians sometimes become involved in in church and society, to keep focus on what we are potentially called to best at. What if we understood our major task to be people who achieve unity by remembering that there is only one thing that makes us different and unique from all other people: our relationship with Jesus.

What might we do to keep that focus here in our church?

What would it take to make us one in the matter of loving each other into becoming fully and functionally human?

How might we best express the here-and-now version of eternal life we have learned to know in Jesus?

Prof. Dr. Dr., President Emeritus David Zersen
Concordia University Texas
Austin, Texas

E-Mail: Djzersen@aol.com

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