2020-05-26
Brooke Strong
This service was livestreamed due to COVID-19 concerns.
Sermon Text
Scripture: John 17:1-11
As COVID-19 now seems to settle in for the long haul, says Lutheran minister Peter Marty, and most of us continue to hibernate at home, one consequence is “a lot more idleness than most of us are used to, [and] people are reporting new levels of sluggishness. ‘I’m starting to get a tan from the fridge light,’ says one internet meme. A New Yorker cartoon depicts a man fixed to his recliner and his wife talking on the phone nearby: ‘We’re making progress,’ she says. ‘He set off the motion detector this morning’” (The Christian Century, May 20, 2020, p. 3).
In so many ways life has changed. And at the same time so much of what is central and crucial remains the same. We’re still hungry, body and soul. We still crave companionship. We still want to know that we matter. We still want to sense that there is purpose in life and that we are contributing to the flourishing of the earth and its inhabitants. We still hope against hope that there is something beyond what we see and hear and touch and taste, and that this life is not all there is.
On the day before Jesus goes to his death, says the gospel of John, he gives a long talk to his followers in which he tells them what life will be like once he’s gone. At the heart of this discourse is the promise that after he leaves them, he will nevertheless return and will accompany them on their journey. As he nears the end of that speech, and just before he heads to the cross that will take his life, he prays. And the prayer is something of a fulcrum on which the whole story of John’s gospel turns.
From our perspective, it’s not an easy prayer to understand. It’s filled with language that is no longer current. At its heart, though, the prayer reminds us what matters most. And what matters is this: Jesus and God are one; God adores us; and Jesus’ fervent hope is that we’ll live out that oneness and intimacy with each other. That’s it. Simple, right?
Well, not exactly, as we know. At every level we struggle with those very issues. They are challenges we are not always able to meet. OK, God and Jesus are one. But God adores us? Really? Oneness and intimacy are ours? It’s sometimes so hard to see—in our families, our neighborhoods, our churches, our nation. Doesn’t matter, Jesus seems to say. No matter what it may look like, we have all been given what Jesus calls “eternal life” (John 17:2,3). When Jesus talks about eternal life here, he doesn’t mean endless life, as though it just goes on and on forever. That simple phrase is much more about quality than it is about quantity. Eternal life, for John’s Jesus, means life that is lived at its fullest, life—this earthly life—that is just what God intended it to be.
Picture the best moment you’ve ever had in your life. Maybe it was childbirth, or a mountaintop experience, or your wedding, or a birthday party. It’s a time you felt most fulfilled and most at peace and most joyful. If I had to guess, I would surmise that it was a moment of feeling connected—with nature or with other people—that it was a moment of oneness, a sense that all was right with the world, and that all was right with you. A moment like that is a gift of God, and it’s God’s way of saying, ‘This is what life was intended to be. A moment like that— a moment that you can’t create—is my way of showing you how incredibly special you are in my eyes.’ That’s eternal life, and it is a gift of God that is available to us at every moment. It’s the affirmation that assures us that that divine embrace never lets us go. Whether we believe it or not, God is holding us close always.
And too often we don’t believe it, do we. How often we struggle with our own sense that we haven’t done enough, that we’re not particularly worthy, that we have let God and each other down. Who am I, we may think, that God should love me that much, that God should make it a point to give me the gift of eternal life? That’s for others—for Jesus, certainly, and maybe for a select few spiritual stars—but hardly for me.
No, insists Jesus. That gift of eternal life is for you. And not in some distant future, but right here, right now. And it’s offered to us no matter how badly we may have misbehaved or failed to live out our gifts. Susan Pitchford, in her book The Sacred Gaze, says that no matter what we’ve done, or how we’ve failed and fallen short, Jesus looks at us not with anger and harsh judgment, but sees in us always a spark of grace. Pitchford likens the love Jesus has for us to the love she has for her dog, Abby.
“Abby the blessed, Abby the beloved, the late and much lamented, she was the embodiment of all that a golden retriever should be: a true lovehound. She wore her fur like a full-body halo, but she did have one bad habit: she liked to eat poop. Her poop, other dogs’ poop, cat poop—Abby was entirely undiscriminating. . . . a habit I did not admire. But it didn’t make me love her less, and if she hadn’t done it I wouldn’t have loved her more. She was just Abby, and I loved her. And Jesus [has] gently taught me that my [own] metaphorical poop-eating [comes] to much the same thing in his eyes. [Even though we’d have to] work on those things, . . . I could still be his beloved companion, as Abby had been mine” (p. 120). If eternal life means anything, it means that: that no matter what we do, we are God’s beloved companions, adored as we are.
And if we really take that in, if we really absorb the bottomless love God has for us, we come to adopt that same way of being. That love remakes us, and we become agents of that unbounded love in this world that is so desperate for its touch. When we ourselves are grasped by that love, what else is there for us to do but to share it?
Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock offers a vivid image of this sort of transforming love of God. “I’m onstage at a concert hall in Stockholm, Sweden, in the mid-1960s playing piano with the Miles Davis Quintet . . . The music is flowing, we’re connecting with the audience, and everything feels magical, like we’re weaving a spell.
“. . . The five of us have become one entity, shifting and flowing with the music. We’re playing one of Miles’s classics, ‘So What,’ and as we hurtle toward Miles’s solo it’s the peak of the evening; the whole audience is on the edge of their seats.
“Miles starts playing, building up to his solo, and just as he’s about to really let loose, he takes a breath. And right then I play a chord that is just so wrong. I don’t even know where it came from—it’s the wrong chord, in the wrong place, and now it’s hanging out there like a piece of rotten fruit. I think, O, [no]. It’s as if we’ve all been building this gorgeous house of sound, and I just accidentally put a match to it.
“Miles pauses for a fraction of a second, and then he plays some notes that somehow, miraculously, make my chord sound right. In that moment I believe my mouth actually fell open. What kind of alchemy was this? And then Miles just took off from there, unleashing a solo that took that song in a new direction” (The Christian Century, April 22, 2020, p. 23).
This is what God does with us! It’s a love that takes all our wrong notes and turns them for good—if we’ll let it, if we will open ourselves to it. The depths of eternal life come to fruition as we let ourselves be ripened by it, as we let ourselves be changed by it. As we take in the love God has for us, we become agents of that love, and everything we do comes to be guided and shaped by that same gracious self-giving.
That is not always easy—far from it. And it certainly isn’t always our first instinct. Times like these test us, and sometimes we resort to our worst instincts. And sometimes we default to something that is distinctly less than that love. We hoard rather than share. We’re harsh rather than tender. We lash out rather than listen. And we elevate lesser virtues to a pantheon they don’t deserve.
Two illustrative vignettes, both from TV news stories related to the opening of stores and restaurants this past week. In one episode, a man was told he had to put on a mask to enter a store that had recently opened. He got extremely angry with the clerk and said he wouldn’t wear one. And then he said something striking. In trying to justify his position, he said, loudly and with fury, “This country was founded on individualism. Without individualism, there is no America.”
A second scene. In a similar setting, a man, when told he had to wear a mask to enter a store, disgustedly refused. “When I woke up this morning,” he snarled, “this was a free country.”
There is, of course, a deep sense in which each individual’s value matters. And it should go without saying that freedom that counters personal and political tyranny is vital to human beings everywhere. That said, though, I couldn’t help but note how far away from Jesus the reactions of those two men seemed. If eternal life is about unrestrained love, if it’s about making the other person’s interests as important as my own, if it’s about putting my own desires on the back burner so that everyone’s health and well-being is honored, in what possible way would the reactions of those two men shed light on the sort of selfless and embracing love for which Jesus stands. Whether these two men would call themselves followers of Jesus, I have no idea. What I do know is that serious followers of Jesus seek always to honor the wholeness and integrity of those with whom we share this planet. If Jesus, anywhere in the gospels, said a single word about self-assertive individualism or the sort of freedom that is little more than a thinly disguised self-centeredness, I have no knowledge of it.
To live as followers of Jesus is undoubtedly not to live with our own narrow needs at the center. It’s not to live by that sort of pinched disregard of others. We are called, instead, by the risen Christ, to live into the gift of eternal life—to expand our horizons, to honor every other person, to find fullness of life not in amassing what we can for ourselves, but in giving ourselves away in love, in becoming one with each other (John 17:11, 21).
This pandemic time can seem like such a time of loss. So many possibilities have been taken away from us. We may grieve and yearn and hope for so much more. And, in our worst moments, we may be tempted to a possessive sort of self-seeking. Jesus’ words this morning remind us that there is so much more than that: through it all, we still have abundant opportunity to bask in the gift of eternal life and to become one with each other.
Just this week, a Federated member sent to my wife Mary a little piece written by the liturgical composer David Haas, a piece in which he lifts up the many possibilities we still have for fullness of life, for eternal life, for oneness in these moments:
Love has not been cancelled.
Mercy has not been cancelled.
Prayer has not been cancelled.
Attentiveness has not been cancelled.
Goodness has not been cancelled.
Thanksgiving has not been cancelled.
Loving relationships have not been cancelled.
Kindness has not been cancelled.
Music has not been cancelled.
Conversations have not been cancelled.
Learning has not been cancelled.
Poetry and storytelling [have] not been cancelled.
Courage has not been cancelled.
Meditation and contemplation have not been cancelled.
Painting and dancing [have] not been cancelled.
Families have not been cancelled.
Community and solidarity [have] not been cancelled.
Faith has not been cancelled.
Hope has not been cancelled.
And … God’s presence with us has not been cancelled.
Eternal life. It’s the gift of God. And it’s the call of God. God has wrapped us in arms that forgive all our shortcomings, arms that delight in us and will not ever let us go. And we are beckoned to live in, and to have our lives shaped by, that same love. Faith, hope, and love have not been cancelled. May we be wrapped in their grace. And may we be changed by them. May we make them our bywords, by the grace of the God in whom we live and move and have our being.