May 24, 2020
Hope Lutheran Church
Rev. Mary Erickson
John 17:1-11
The Prayer of the Divine
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
Last Thursday was Ascension Day. 40 days after Easter, the risen Jesus meets with his disciples on a hillside outside of Jerusalem. He instructs them to stay in Jerusalem until they’ve been empowered by the Holy Spirit. And then, he ascends upwards.
All the disciples can do now is wait. They return to Jerusalem and shelter in place within their upper room. Ten days later, on the Jewish festival of Pentecost, they’re clothed with power from on high. The Holy Spirit falls upon them.
But that happens next Sunday. Today is the “Sunday in the gap.” It falls between Jesus’ departure and the Spirit’s arrival. The disciples are all alone.
When children are young they need constant supervision by their parents or some other adult. But as children mature, parents reach a point where they can leave their child home alone. At first, it’s for just a short time. “I’m going to pick up your brother from basketball. I’ll be right back!”
It’s okay to leave them alone for a brief span of time. They won’t burn down the house. It’s short enough that they won’t panic.
With time that length apart widens. I remember when I was a senior in high school my mother had to go somewhere over night, and she left me home alone. My father had died a few years earlier, and my sister was away in college, so that left just me at home all by myself. I was a bit nervous at the prospect of being home alone, but also encouraged that my mother trusted my capabilities to be self-reliant.
Many of this year’s high school seniors will be leaving home in the near future. This fall, some might go away to school. They might be launching into a career or venturing out on their own to live independently. As their children make this passage into independence, parents are filled with concerns as they let their children go. One of the things they do is pray. They pray for their children. Parents spend a lot of time on their knees in prayer.
This kind of caring concern was exactly what was happening to Jesus at the end of his ministry. Our text today from John 17 comes from the night of Jesus’ arrest. He knows what’s coming. Very soon he’ll be arrested, and the ensuing events will unfold to their bitter conclusion.
Jesus knows he’ll no longer be with his disciples. And so he prays for them. Chapter 17 of John is known as Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer.
The first thing he prays for is that his purpose be fulfilled. He came into this world to die on a cross. He came to reconcile a broken humanity with God. He came to absorb and defeat the sin of the world. And so he prays that all this will be so.
And then he prays for his followers. As he will no longer be with them, he prays for their protection. He asks that they be protected “so that they may be ONE.”
His chief prayer for us is that we may be one. Jesus prays for our unity.
• He prays that we may walk in singularity of purpose.
• He petitions that collectively, our hearts may be tightly knit together.
• He asks that our communion and community with one other be indivisible and inseparable.
• To sum up, Jesus prays that our life together as his faithful people may be blessed with the same unified bond as Jesus has shared with God.
He prays thus because he knows the forces working to rend us apart. Simply put, the problem is sin. Sin works to divide. Sin alienates one from another.
It has always been thus. The book of Genesis presents a sweeping view of sin’s ability to alienate. After Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree, every relationship imaginable is affected. They hide from God. They blame one another. They blame the serpent.
Sin happens, and the result is utter division. There’s alienation from God, division with one another, and separation from the created order. And the wages of all this sin happening in the world is the greatest alienation of all, death. Death is the ultimate separation. Divide and conquer, that’s what Satan has in mind.
Division is the enemy. Jesus himself is about to be divided from his disciples. And so he prays for them in his absence. He prays for their protection.
Jesus fully entered fully into our sinful reality, East of Eden. But even so, Jesus remained completely one with the Father. In this perfect unity, he prays the prayer of the divine. He prays that they may not be divided; he prays that they may remain one. He prays that nothing may get between them. He asks that they might be fully one with another, even as the incarnate Jesus is one with the Heavenly Father.
When Jesus prays that we might be one, he’s not praying that we might be identical. Unity doesn’t mean sameness. We’re not united because all that we do and think line up perfectly. The unity Christ prays for is not sameness.
A Lutheran from Minnesota and another Lutheran from Wisconsin both go on fishing trips to Canada. One morning, they end up in the same bait shop. The one guy noticed a pin on the other man’s jacket. It was the familiar Luther seal.
“Hey, are you a Lutheran?” he asked
“Yeah, I am!” said the other guy.
“Well, me too!”
“Well, howdy, friend! I’m a member of the ELCA.”
“Me too! Wow, what a coincidence that we should meet here in this bait shop! ...So, before the ELCA merger in 1988, were you in the ALC, LCA, or AELC?”
“I was ALC.”
“Wow! Me too! Now, back before the ALC merger in 1960 my family was ELC.”
“No way! So was my family! So that makes you Norwegian?”
“Guilty!”
“Me too! Wow! ... okay, so this is very nerdy. Leading into the formation of the ELC, was your family a member of the old Norwegian Synod, or were you Hauge?”
“Oh, we were Norwegian Synod, all the way.”
“SO WERE WE!!! And during the Predestination Controversy of 1880, was your family affiliated with the First Form of Election, or the Second Form?”
“Oh, First Form, naturally.”
Gasp. “You...HERETIC!!!”
Unity is not sameness. Unity is derived in something much greater.
Our unity is not found within ourselves. We’re not one because of our practices or our opinions. If we ground our unity on anything within ourselves, on any of our human traditions, what we build on will surely crumble into pieces. When we center ourselves on anything earthly, our unity is doomed. That’s because we are fully sinful, and sin will only end in division. No, our unity is forged in something much greater.
I’d like to take a little detour here and speak a bit on a division I see eroding us here in the United States. On this Memorial Day weekend, we lift up the lives of our military personnel who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our nation. The success of the military depends on their unity of spirit. When the Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, they acted as a united front. An Army company looks after each member of their group. No man is left behind. They work together as a unit. On board a naval ship, all of the sailors work together as a single, dynamic, coordinated group, all the way from the engine room, to the radar operator, to the captain. They are one.
Their survivability and their efficacy are determined and empowered by their unity. Our country, too, was formed on our oneness. We’ve come here from a wide variety of foreign nations, under numerous circumstances. Some people chose to come. Others arrived in chains and against their will.
But our diversity is precisely what has made us stronger. We’ve taken our varying heritages and perspectives, and we’ve forged them together into a wider body, into our country.
E pluribus unum. Out of the many, one. Our unity through diversity has been the defining mark of our nation. It’s provided us with resiliency and strength. But I’m sure I’m not alone in sensing an increasing and malignant fissure that threatens to divide our unity.
We’ve been bombarded by increasing and persistent waves of tribalism. The voices in these undercurrents urge us to divide ourselves into opposing camps. We’re becoming increasingly divided:
• Blue and Red
• Urban and Rural
• White Collar and Blue Collar
• Caucasian and Colored
• Progressive and Conservative
I’m old enough to remember a time when people would have their differences, but they still treated one another with respect. Politicians debated one another during the day, but at night they could share a beer together. People respected that their neighbors might hold differing views. But nowadays, the climate in our nation has become charged by our divisions. We sense an increasing tension in the fibers that once knit us together. There’s been an erosion of our civility to others. It’s disturbing. Will the people of our nation remain indivisible?
And I wonder: Can we as people of faith work to be part of a solution? Can we be instruments of peace? Can we breathe a healing wind into a land divided? Can we build a bridge over our troubled waters?
I think we can. The way we need to begin is by starting with our own actions. Look first to our own house. What kind of messaging do we place on social media? Are we adding to the divide? Are we stoking the fires of discord with those who see the world differently than we do?
Where our words add to the societal level of disrespect, friends, we can dial back our tone. We can resist the urge to be snide and rude. Jesus said to the raging tempest on the Sea of Galilee, “Peace! Be still!” When we feel the desire to make a snarky comment on Facebook, we can ask for Jesus to calm the storm within our breasts. And in its place, we can foster a new spirit of respect for all. We can pray that we might be facilitators of human kindness and decency.
Our faith uniquely shapes our view of our neighbor. The secular mind corrals people into camps. It separates us into Republicans and Democrats; citizen and immigrant; straight and gay; college educated and non-college educated; pro-gun and pro-gun regulation. Just name the category of your choice. The secular mind categorizes and divides.
But faith endows us with the mind of Christ. So when we look at our neighbor, we don’t see them primarily in terms of these human designated camps; we see them first and foremost as Christ sees them: One for whom He went to the cross. One for whom He took on flesh to dwell with us. One for whom He rose from the dead victorious. He sees each one as a soul worth priceless value.
As followers of the Prince of Peace, may we be a particle of his peace in our land. May we breathe fresh winds of acceptance into surroundings made stale by ill will and suspicion. May our words and our actions spin filaments of brotherhood binding us closer to one another.
Jesus prayed that his disciples may be one. He prayed that we may dwell in the same unity of spirit that Jesus enjoyed with God. As people of faith, that shared unity can only be found through keeping our eyes on the light of Christ.
When together we look to Christ, then our eyes, our vision is united. When we listen to the words of Christ, when we heed his call to love God and love our neighbors, our focus is united. And when we follow Christ, then our steps and our direction are united.
We are the people of God. We are the disciples of Christ. To be one, to be one in such a way that the alienation of sin cannot rip us apart, we must center ourselves on the only One who has overcome sin. Only with Christ as our center can we be one.
And when we dwell in Christ, can anything separate us from the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord? Can anything separate us from our brothers and sisters in Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, peril or sword? No! In all these things we remain one. In Christ and through his healing reconciliation we shall be one.
