I'm So Glad He Prayed For Me

May 12, 2024

Rev. Mary Erickson

Hope Lutheran Church

John 17:6-19

I’m So Glad He Prayed for Me

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

Every Sunday morning our bulletin contains a section with the names of people we are asked to pray for during the week. Some of the names stay on the list for quite a while, and others appear for only that one Sunday. During our worship, then, we include them in our time of prayer.

People in our congregation show genuine concern for these folks. I’m asked how they’re progressing. There is rejoicing when they improve and genuine sorrow when they don’t.

We regularly pray for one another. We call it intercessory prayer. When we intercede for someone in prayer, it’s like we’re ushering them before the throne of God.

The gospel singer/songwriter Dorothy Norwood wrote a song about intercessory prayer. It’s called “Somebody Prayed for Me.” Each verse lifts up someone who prays for her: her mother, her preacher. The final verse of the song goes like this:

My Jesus prayed for me, had me on his mind,

Took the time and prayed for me.

I’m so glad he prayed, I’m so glad he prayed,

I’m so glad he prayed for me.

In this week’s gospel reading, Jesus prays on behalf of his disciples. Towards the end of his prayer, he specifies exactly who he’s praying for. And it’s not just for his disciples gathered with him on that evening. He tells God that he’s also praying for all those who will come to believe in him in the future. That means he’s praying for us as well! As Dorothy Norwood said in her song, I’m so glad he prayed for me.

Jesus taught his disciples how to pray. That prayer, which has endured through the ages is close to the heart of the church. We call it the Lord’s Prayer. But this prayer found in the 17th chapter of John is the “other” Lord’s prayer. It’s the prayer Jesus prays on behalf of his church.

In the section we hear today, there are three main things Jesus prays about. The first one is found in verse 11. He prays that we might be one, just as he and the Father are one. Jesus prays for our unity.

During children’s time we became familiar with the Kenyan proverb: sticks bundled together cannot be broken. There is strength in numbers. When we stand united, we support one another in times of challenge. We’re able to accomplish greater goals. We’re surrounded by caring souls.

This is the first item in Jesus’ prayer. It’s no small thing. Our unity is vital to our life in Christ. And maybe Jesus placed this petition at the top of his prayer because he knew just how many ways we would be able to fracture our fellowship. The devil loves to divide and conquer.

The church becomes divided when we place our unity in something other than Jesus and his healing love. The global expression of Christianity is so very wide and diverse. We come in different denominations. Our denominations have sub-denominations. We self-select according to musical tastes, traditional hymns or contemporary praise songs. We divide over whether God cares more about holy and right living or more about the pursuit of justice in the world. We segregate into camps over how literally or expansively we interpret the Bible. Then we throw in cultural and racial and political differences on top of these other things.

When any of these other categories more strongly define our understanding of what it is to be a Christian and a Christian community, we start to think in terms of Us and Them. We become suspect of Christians who worship differently or hold views contrary to our own. And what has been destroyed is our unity.

There’s an old Jewish story: A Rabbi once asked his students, “How do we know when the night has ended and the day has begun?” One of his students offered an answer: “When I look out at the fields and I can distinguish between my field and the field of my neighbor’s, that’s when the night has ended and day has begun.” A second student offered her answer: “When I look from the fields and I see a house and I can tell that it’s my house and not the house of my neighbor, that’s when the night has ended and the day has begun.” A third student offered an answer: “When I can distinguish the animals in the yard – and I can tell a cow from a horse – that’s when the night has ended.”

Each of these answers brought a sadder, more severe frown to the Rabbi’s face – until finally he shouted: “No! You don’t understand! You only know how to divide! You divide your house from the house of your neighbor, your field from your neighbor’s, one animal from another. Is that all that we can do – divide, separate, split the world into pieces? Isn’t the world broken enough - split into enough fragments?”