Seventh Sunday of Easter

May 24, 2009

Sermon by Pastor John Marboe

The Holy Gospel according to St. John. (John 17:6-19)

[Jesus, on the eve of his death, prayed:] “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you, for 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. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. 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. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they may also be sanctified in truth.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Jesus prayed for his disciples his final prayer before his death, and he prayed, “Father, make them one, just as you and I are one.” Notice that this was a prayer, not a commandment. He did not say to his disciples, “Make yourselves one.” “Be one.” He speaks instead to God: “Father, make them one.” The unity that Jesus prays for for his followers is a unity that only God can give.

You know, the simple truths in life are often the hardest ones, and this is one of them: that unity, true unity, is not something that we achieve or accomplish. It is rather something that we receive from God. But it is something that we resist, as often as not, because of our fears, because of our prejudices, because of our ignorance. And this is very hard to deal with and to acknowledge. We resist accepting our oneness for a lot of reasons. We resist accepting the oneness that comes from God, and in so doing we resist the very oneness of God. What do I mean? Three texts, to elaborate.

The first is Jesus’ teaching in The Sermon on the Mount, where he says, “You heard it said ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ but I tell you, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, do good to those who hate you, love your enemies.” Love your enemies, and pray for them, be good to them. Why? Why should we love our enemies? Why should we love our enemies? Do we love our enemies because this in the end will defeat them; that we will triumph over them; that through love we will overcome their hatred? Not necessarily. Not necessarily. It doesn’t always work that way. But why should we love our enemies? Because then we can feel all self-righteous and smug about how much better we are than they are? I don’t think Jesus had that in mind.

So why should we love our enemies—because then eventually they will love us back and become our friends? Not necessarily. Why should we love our enemies? Because our enemies belong to us. Enemies are a very unpleasant gift. When we look at those we call enemies, whether that’s an individual or a group of people, when we look at people we call enemies, we tend only to see the difference between them and us. But if we are given the grace, the painful grace, to see the similarities between us, then we come to see the aspects of ourselves that we despise.

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with The Onion newspaper, a college newspaper that was originally published in Madison, Wisconsin. Now it’s moved to New York and has become rather popular. I understand they have made a movie called “The Onion” now. I haven’t seen it yet. But it pokes fun; it’s a newspaper that’s tongue-in-cheek and pokes fun at anything and everything. Nobody, no subject is sacred from the writers of The Onion. Well, apparently in this movie that they have made—and I haven’t seen it yet, but somebody was telling me about it—they interview a professional athlete after a game. And this athlete is angry with God because they lost. He goes on a tirade against God, about how God let them down, how God just absolutely failed, and how he shouldn’t even believe in God anymore. He should just do it on his own; he would probably do better as an athlete if he just did it himself. Well, of course, they’re poking fun at something that really does happen. When athletes win, often enough you hear their thanksgiving to God, “To God belongs all the glory” for the victory. It’s poking fun at the notion that God is on my side; that God cares more about the Buffalo Bills than about the other team; that God cares more about our side than their side. Of course, when you think about it—and you think about the fact that God is one—then you realize that God cannot possibly be on my side as opposed to your side; that our enemies are still our neighbors and children of God.

Another passage from the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians, Chapter 12, where he talks in metaphorical language about how that we are one body, we are like a body, and each of us individually members of that body, the body of Christ. He elaborates about how it is that we’re a body, and we need to understand that we’re a body, that we belong to one another. That one part of the body can’t say to another part of the body, “I don’t need you.” You can’t say that. “I have no part in you.” You can’t say that. But, of course, we do that all the time.

I got a phone call from a person who was my pastor years ago, now he’s retired, but he gave a call. It brought to my mind a story that he told about the parish he served in Michigan for many, many years, and how they decided to do something about the old carpet in the sanctuary. And you will never believe this, but the people couldn’t agree on what to do about it. No, it’s really true. Believe it or not, Christians sometimes disagree over such things as carpeting, and it can even lead to strife! Go figure! One side that wanted to replace the red carpet with red carpet, and there was another side that wanted to replace the red carpet with blue carpet. It actually split the church; it got mean, it got nasty, it got personal. Of course, as my pastor friend, wise pastor that he was, said, “It wasn’t about the carpet at all.”

We do this all the time. We let disagreements become more important than our belonging to one another.

Now, here’s the amazing part: Paul continues, “Those parts of the body that we deem less presentable we treat with greater honor.” “Those parts that are less presentable to us we treat with greater honor.” I have always understood that to mean something like this: those with more visibility and respect in the body should treat those who are less visible and less respected with special honor. And I think that’s true; I think that should happen.

But what if, what if those less presentable parts of the body are our wounds? What if the less presentable parts are our wounds? We don’t find our woundedness presentable, do we? We cover them as much as possible. We hide our woundedness. We don’t like to look at our woundedness. We don’t want others to see. We don’t like to think about our woundedness. Our wounds are ugly. It’s out of our wounds that we wound others. That’s what we do.

A long-time peace activist and Vietnamese man, Thich Nhat Hanh—who lived in Vietnam through the war—one time was asked, was he from the north or from the south? He would say, “I’m from the middle, we live underneath the bombs.” Thich Nhat Hanh speaks eloquently about peace and the need for peace in our world, but always insists that peace begins in the individual human heart and mind, that if we don’t have peace within ourselves, we cannot create peace anywhere outside ourselves. Here’s what he said one time:

“When we speak, we want to say something sweet, but we don’t say something sweet because something is ordering us from deep down to say something unkind. We want to open our hearts to people, but we can’t do it, because we are being ordered around by the sufferings we have concealed deep in our consciousness.”

From our woundedness, we wound.

Let me be clear, none of this means that we ought not distance ourselves from those who mean us harm. Nor that society shouldn’t restrain harmful behaviors. It simply means that wounds and woundedness are part of every body, and that they only heal with acknowledgment and compassion.

We come to our text today. “Father, make them one, as you and I are one,” Jesus prays. “Make them make them one, as you and I are one.” Jesus did not say, “Become one.” He prayed to God to give it as a gift to us. The problem is not that we are disunified and that we need to become one. The problem is that we already are one, and we don’t want to be one, much of the time. We don’t want to be one with everyone. We want unity with those who love us. We want unity with people who make us feel good and comfortable. People who look like us and act like us, who share our values and our beliefs, people who are cool and funny, and interesting, and generous, and nice, and healthy and well-rounded, and on time and respectable, we want to be one with them. We do not want to be one, to have to identify with those who, well, that we prefer not to.

We cannot claim the Gospel as our own. The Gospel that God’s love is boundless and unconditional, we cannot claim that Gospel as our own. That Gospel that there is no reason or cause of our own that makes us beloved children of God; The Gospel that God loves us simply because; The Gospel that God is Love; We cannot claim that Gospel as our own, and at the same time hate a neighbor, for then that Gospel does not live in us.

We are one. We don’t always wish to see it that way, but it is the truth. God is in you, God is in them, as much as God is in me. And that’s true globally as well as individually. Peace starts from that realization.

Amen.