Seventh Sunday in Easter: ...that they may be one...

 5/29

Memorial Day Weekend at Good Shepherd-Faith

On this holiday weekend, I am live and in person  at Good Shepherd Faith Church near Lincoln Center,  At GSF, covid is still an issue .  People are masked and sitting socially distant. My friend Chris who was going to translate my sermon into Korean for me has now been hit by Covid and will not be with me. In fact, the congregation is nearly all Korean today.  I will depend on the Spirit for getting us through...here's what I had to say.....

It’s good to be with you on this Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start to summer.  And this seventh Sunday in Easter, our seven week journey through Eastertide almost complete and Pentecost Sunday, just over the horizon next Sunday. It’s good to  be here.

It’s been a hard week. Not sure why it hit me so hard this time. I mean, according to the Washington Post there’s been 229  school shootings since Colombine.  185 people killed, 369 injured.  Over 311,000 children have experienced mass shootings at their schools. But still….something about Uvalde really got to me. 19 elementary school students.  19 elementary school students. Two young teachers. One’s husband dies of a heart attack when he heard the news. The New York Times printed all their pictures. And their stories. To remind us of the uniqueness of each, that each was a person with a present and a future, a future taken away, not to  be lived. 

And despite our outcries, our thoughts and prayers, these shootings have become an accepted, almost expected part of our life.  Guns are now the largest cause of death for children according to the CDC. In 2020, over 4500 alone..  

Just a week to so ago I was angry over another domestic terrorist shooting  in Buffalo.  

Through all of this, our politicians seem powerless to do anything to stop the madness. The particularly American form of madness  that almost declares occasional massacres of children is an acceptable  price to pay for our freedom to carry automatic weapons around.

As George Carlin once said, as long as you’re in the womb, we’ll keep you safe, but once you’re out, you’re by God on your own. 

So here we are. We’ve had these last seven weeks to reflect on the life of the risen Jesus with us.  And now a few weeks getting prepared for his physical absence.  Already, Thursday was Ascension Day, what we used to, remembering the Girls Scouts, jokingly refer to as Fly Up Day. And might I add  parenthetically that I found  it interesting  that in modern secular European societies like Denmark and Germany, Ascension Day, or in German, Himmelfahrt, heaven journey….is  still a national  holiday.

But our lesson today, from. John 20: 17-26, actually comes from Jesus’ farewell discourse at the last supper. He has just predicted his betrayal.  And now, in language that is almost hard to follow, that sounds strangely like 

I am he as you are he as you are me

And we are all together

I am the egg man

They are the egg men

I am the walrus

(Goo goo g’joob)

Jesus prepares us for his leaving. It’s part of his prayer for his disciples. At the very center is the desire that we all may be one. Glory comes back again. And although he has previously said, Where I am going, you cannot go, this time he prays that the disciples may be with him where he is….where the love of God flows through Jesus to the disciples and through them to the world….

As we look at this, here on the cusp of  Pentecost, Jesus takes us into three time zones at the same time:  

*the past, where he is the preexistent “Word” of John 1

• the present, where the historical Jesus is breaking bread  with his closest friends, the disciples
• And the future, where he will abide with the community that seeks to follow him, namely US

His deepest and most passionate desire for us is UNITY.  So strange and ironic when nothing can be further from the world we live in now. Since the Civil War, this country has never been more painfully divided. Our world is once again broken into camps. We had been living in one world, but not now.

Jesus is calling us into the deepest experience of unity, dwelling in the very heart of God. It is something mysterious…and powerful…

That’s what he wants from his followers…like Paul and Silas in prison, remember?  Like the motto of the United Church of Christ, that all may be one….But yet, is it even possible? How can we Christians preach reconciliation when even the church itself has no unity?  Even those who have the name Presbyterian are broken into different fragments. And oh how I yearned over orthodox Easter that Orthodox Russians and Ukrainians would stop killing one another…

For years the PCUSA tried to be a “big tent” but ultimately, the center would not hold. LGBTQ inclusion was too much for some. The tension between ecclesiastical unity and prophetic witness was too much.

But Jesus’ demand remains. To be part of Christ is to be ONE. In agreement or not.  And in that there is Glory. In Hebrew the word is k’vod, or heavy…glory is as we used to say, heavy…and in Greek it’s doxa, openness, judgment, honor in reputation….there is glory in oneness…

A note…in this passage, Jesus uses the word Father six times..this is about intimacy, relationship, not gender…

But still….oneness?  My senior year s Yale, I was part of an urban core program. 12 of us had inner city church jobs. We would meet for 4 hours every Monday. One hour of a “case study” form our work. One hour of a reflection paper on a reading. One hour of group process. And one hour of worship. At the beginning of the year, there were several in the group I just didn’t like. Found them annoying. At best. But every week I had to pray for them. Yes, specifically. And by the end of the year, you know what, well, I still didn’t like them…but I had come to love them…

So …who can you not be one with? Can you imagine praying  for them?

Jesus wants us  to be with him where he is. Getting there may take you places you don’t want to go. Places of anger, torture, even death…but that’s where we get to the glory..

Look….Jesus has a bottom line  here. In Christianity, there are no lone rangers. We can only do this with each other. It is a basic understanding…we are in this together..

And it works like this…we see God through Christ and the world sees Jesus through his followers…we reveal Christ and through him, God, to the world. 

I sometimes fall into wandering down the quora rabbit hole..,not even sure where that comes  from…but often my feed deals with arguments between Christian believers and atheists. Invariably, atheists have come to that perspective through their experiences with believers…

It’s pretty simple…like the song says, they’ll know we are Christians by our love…or not…I came that they might be one …let those with ears to hear, hear….Amen

Gospel John 17:20-26

20"I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21that 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. 22The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

25"Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. 26I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."