7th Sunday of Easter (Year
B) – Sunday, May 20, 2012
Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church,
Lancaster, PA
Text: John 17:6-21
This
past Wednesday, I spent a lot of time in the car. I was running some
errands, coming back and forth from the church. I usually take Vine
Street to and from our apartment on the East Side. When I went past
in the morning, I saw about 3 or 4 police cars in front of one of the
houses on the left hand side. I wondered what was going on. By the
afternoon, it was 5 or 6 cars, a big van, and a police truck with the
words, “mobile forensics unit” painted on the side. Tragic
possibilities arose in my mind. I checked the news when I got home,
and my suspicions were confirmed. Last Wednesday morning, two blocks
away from where we now sit, a neighbor of ours down the street walked
into the home of an 83-year-old woman named Erma Kaylor, and found
her dead, probably murdered. It was the day she received $80 in cash
from her Social Security.
I am
so very good at ignoring news of such things. We all are, I suspect.
And to a certain extent we have to be able to separate ourselves
emotionally from the tragedies that go on around us. As human
beings, we simply cannot take all the grief, all the mourning of all
the unspeakably terrible things that go on even in this community,
much less in our city or state, in our nation, or in the whole world.
In order to live our lives, we can't mourn for them all. It's the
ones that come close that wound our hearts so that we must grieve.
And I suppose that hearing of this tragedy, that someone probably
murdered an 83-year-old woman in her home, perhaps for $80 in cash,
and that this woman was a neighbor and her assailant still is a
neighbor, that they are people who we might even have served dinner,
people we want to reach with our ministry, makes this one hard to
ignore.
And it
makes it hard to ignore that this world God made is a tough place. A
hard place. God didn't make it that way, but it has fallen quite far
from the Eden God made it to be. When we say that sin is running
rampant in the world, and that we are captive to it, as we say every
Sunday morning, this is what we mean. But you don't need me to tell
you it's a broken world. We can't mourn for everyone else because we
have enough to face in our own lives. I pray you are not facing such
a tragedy as what we've witnessed in our neighborhood this week, but
whether you mourn for a loved one, or face mistakes or problems that
seem too big to handle, whether you have no idea what God is saying
to you, whether you are struggling to provide for a family or just
keep your own head above water in a world taken captive by the sin of
greed, you have experienced the painful reality of this fallen world.
Today
we get to listen in on Jesus, God the Son, praying to the Father. He
prays for a lot of things, and I don't know about you but I lose him
in all he says at times. It catches my attention, though, when he
prays, “I am not asking you to take them out of the world.” And
you might wonder, “what? Isn't that what this Christian thing is
all about? Taking us out of this crazy world?” That's how it's
often portrayed in popular Christian thinking and speaking. Believe
in Christ, and you'll get out of all this mess. You'll escape this
sinful, fleshly existence and make your way to the brilliant and
dazzling heavenly paradise. Or, do this one thing, or believe this
about Christ, and God will help you be rich, or prosperous, or at
least, people will look up to you!
That
sounds pretty great except for one little detail – that's not what
God did in Jesus Christ. It might seem that because the world hates
God's people, as Jesus says in his prayer, that God opposes the
world. If that were the case, then it would make sense for God to
remove the followers of Christ from the world which opposes Christ,
and bring them up into heaven or to a more spiritual level of
existence. In John's gospel, the word “world,” does refer to
everything that opposes God. But the feeling is not mutual. God
does not return the world's hatred. You might remember in John the
blessed words of Jesus, “for God so loved the world that he gave
his only Son.” And after that Jesus continued, “indeed, God did
not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order
that the world might be saved through him.” God came down in Jesus
Christ to embrace the world that did not recognize him and still does
not accept his radical grace. God's solution to the brokenness of
the world was not to fight or destroy the world, not to give up on
the world and pick out some faithful people to take with him as he
high-tails it out of here. No, God committed fully to the world by
showing up among us, proclaiming the kingdom, teaching, feeding, and
healing us. He faced what we face, he took whatever we take, and he
faced death just as we surely will.
God
doesn't run away from the mess we've made. God doesn't flee from the
sinking ship that is the world, that often is our lives. Rather, he
sinks with it. He stays. He dies. And in baptism, we sink with him
into the water where we are washed clean of our sin, and raised up a
new creation with Christ. Today we heard Jesus refer to us as “those
whom [the Father] gave me from the world.” The Father has given
you to Christ. In your baptism you were named and claimed by Christ
and you belong to him alone. As you walk around in this world God
made, know that the world, that is, all the forces of evil that
oppose God, have no claim on you. You do not belong to them. You've
been freed from their control. You don't belong to greed and
materialism – you are not what you wear or what you drive or what's
in your bank account. You don't belong to racism or intolerance –
your value doesn't depend on your skin color or where your parents
were born. You don't belong to ignorance, fear, or irrational hatred
– your status doesn't depend on scapegoating or putting down people
different from you. You are a child of God, a child resting in the
arms of Christ the protector, the shepherd, the savior. We're about
to witness Christ picking up Dominic into his arms, claiming him just
as you have been claimed. This cannot be taken from you, it cannot
be taken from Dominic, because it depends on God's grace alone.
Christ
embraces you so that you, the baptized, may become a part of his
embrace to the world.
Jesus
says to us, “I am no longer in the world, but they are in the
world, and I am coming to you.” Jesus no longer walks the streets.
In a sense, we're all left behind in this world with all its
sinfulness. But Christ is here – he is here in you and me who bear
his cross on our foreheads. As Jesus said, we are in the world, but
we do not belong to the world. We are not here to escape this world.
We're here to embrace it as the Body of Christ, which is what we
are. And so it's simply true
that God doesn't take us away from the problems we face or from the
tragedies that occur just a few blocks away. But we do have a God in
Christ who faces these problems with us, and prays for us.
You
have a Savior, Jesus Christ, who has been praying for you who have
come to believe through the word of his disciples, from the
beginning. And he will keep praying for you until the end. So I ask
you to consider, what do you need Jesus to pray for? Consider the
crosses you are bearing now, and then consider that Christ is with
you in your baptism, and he is praying now specifically for that
need. As you consider what it feels like to be prayed for, be a part
of Jesus' prayer by praying for your sisters and brothers, even with
them in their presence. Consider that the Father's answer to
Christ's prayer was and is to send the Holy Spirit to his people, as
we will celebrate next week during Pentecost, and that the Spirit's
work is to breathe God's Word into us who are the Church. As the
Church, we are the answer to Jesus' prayer for his beloved and
beleaguered people, and the Spirit is equipping us to be that answer
in a multitude of ways. And perhaps part of the answer we provide is
to be a place of welcome, of grace and forgiveness, for this
neighborhood that needs it now more than ever. In the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment