Seventh Sunday of Easter
John 17:6-19
May 24, 2009
Joy
This is the season for commencement addresses. Seniors graduating from all sorts of institutions are being told to seize the day, to save the world, to go forth and grab the tiger of life by the tail. Remember your parents, they are being told. Remember your teachers. And remember to wear sunscreen.
Rather like sermons, people have to sit through these orations for convention’s sake, but listening is optional. I remember very little about the commencement address at my own college graduation, except that it was delivered by Robert Penn Warren and included a poem about setting fire to rattlesnakes. (I’m still working on that image.)
The long prayer in the 17th chapter of John is usually called Jesus’ high priestly prayer because it’s addressed to God on behalf of the church hours before Jesus offers himself as the Lamb of God on the altar of the cross.
When you think about it, however, today’s lection reads very much like a commencement address. It’s all about how the followers of Jesus are about make their way into the world without him, and how concerned he is about their welfare. It’s addressed to God, but John wants the church to overhear it. Hearing it today is like eavesdropping on the church’s commencement address.
We know that God loves the whole world. John tells us so in his Gospel, but in this prayer Jesus focuses on a more intimate group. "I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours," Jesus prays. He asks for at least three things: protection, unity, and joy.
First, Jesus prays that the church will be protected. The world has proved a dangerous place for Jesus, and it will be the same for his followers. The world hates the way Jesus stands for the dispossessed and downtrodden, the way he talks to fallen women at high noon in dusty, out-of-the way towns, and the way he disrupts business as usual in the temple. The politicians hate the way ordinary people are drawn to Jesus and the clergy hate his disregard for centuries of religious tradition. When Jesus dies and is raised to join the Father, the church will be left in that same world, and the church will be hated, too.
And so Jesus prays, "protect them in your name that you have given me." He seem concerned that, in the face of opposition from a hostile culture, his followers will forget who and whose they are.
Second, Jesus prays that the church will be unified. Calling God his Father, he prays that those whom the Father has chosen "may be one, as [you and I] are one."
Today we think of Christian unity as something to be achieved. In fact, it’s a given – always has been. The church is already one because it has one Head, Jesus Christ – because, as Paul put it, there is "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all." (Eph. 4:5).
Granted, through the centuries Christians have done a pretty effective job of obscuring that unity, but the fact is, the church is one, whether we like it or not. That unity is God’s gift, no matter how badly we’ve misused it.
The third thing that Jesus asks for his followers might come as a surprise for those of us who think of the Christian life as a long, hard slog toward heaven, a constant trail, a perpetual FCAT. Jesus doesn’t pray that his followers will have good grades and ever-rising incomes. Instead he prays that the church will have joy. And not just any kind of joy. Jesus prays that the church will have "my joy complete in themselves."
Despite the hatred of the world, despite the bitterness of the cup he is about to drink, despite the cross itself, Jesus is full of joy, and wants his followers to share in that joy.
Our "chief end," the reason we are put on this earth, says the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is "to glorify God and enjoy him forever." We’re made to give God glory -- made for joy in God and another. How easy it is to forget the source of genuine joy in a world that constantly pushes us to find our joy in things – not in God and not in one another.
One benefit of this otherwise painful economic crisis is the opportunity it presents us to recalibrate the metrics of joy.
I read about a stock broker in New York City who lost his job and found himself at home much of the day. He discovered something. There are two children living in his home, his son and his daughter. He supposes they must have been there for some time, but he had been too busy to notice. He’s finding joy in getting to know them.
Jesus asks God to grant the church joy, that same joy Jesus found in loving God and living for God. He hoped that some of that joy might somehow rub off on his followers. "I speak these things in the world that they might have my joy made complete in themselves."
Last Saturday Andra and I watched our son – your son – Adam receive his Master of Divinity Diploma from Columbia Theological Seminary. I wish you all could have been there because you all had a part in bringing Adam to that moment. You are the only congregational home Adam has known since he was two years old. When Adam thinks "church," the first faces that come to his mind are yours.
"You must be very proud," people keep saying to me, and of course I am. But it’s not pride I feel so much as it is joy. It’s a strange kind of joy because it’s mixed with anxiety and not a little fear for people called to ministry in a time like ours and within a denomination like ours.
Let’s face it: The Presbyterian Church (USA) is shrinking. It’s shrinking in numbers and it’s shrinking its capacity to shine the light of God’s love in the world. Membership is down. Overall giving is down. Energy is down. (Constantly fighting over sex really takes it out of you, doesn’t it? )
Half the congregations in our denomination have a hundred members or fewer. Many of the folks in those small churches are doing wonderful work, but many are so busy keeping the roof from leaking and the utility bills paid that they have little time to look around and see what God might be doing outside their walls.
These faithful Presbyterians want a pastor for their church, but they can’t afford to pay a salary large enough to keep body and soul together, much less enough to pay down the huge educational debt many would-be pastors have accumulated.
The focus in so many congregations is not on mission – on following God into the world and joining God at work – but on institutional survival. What can we do to get more members? How do we market the church to make it more appealing to persnickety consumers? How do we get people to come to church when so many people couldn’t care less about church?
I confess, I’m worried about the denomination into which Adam feels called. Already it has changed so much from the church I knew when Andra and I left seminary. Back then we young bucks were determined to reform the church, to make it more prophetic, to wake it from its slumbers, to nettle the sleeping giant. Institutional survival was the last thing on our minds.
Now Adam and his colleagues write blogs and text each other on their I-Phones. They talk of an "emergent" church that might have a building and might not, might sing hymns and might not, might gather on Sundays or might get together for sushi on Saturday nights.
They don’t seem worried that ordained ministry will not buy them status in the culture or that the church might not have a pension waiting for them when they retire. What’s a pension, anyway? And what’s retirement? These are concepts that go way back in history – all the way back to the 20th century.
That’s why I say that when I contemplate Adam’s future I’m filled with joy – not just any kind of joy, but the kind of joy that Jesus seems to have felt as he faced his own arrest, trial, and crucifixion. His joy rested in the knowledge that God had claimed him as his own Son, and would not let him go, no matter what. It’s the joy that comes from trusting God so thoroughly that even death cannot shake it.
You don’t generate that kind of joy on your own. It’s a gift, and it comes from living and learning and growing amidst a people who walk in the light, who work for the kingdom, who rejoice in being church.
God will protect God’s church. That doesn’t mean the church will retain its current structure. It means God won’t leave us in the lurch. God will also preserve the unity of church. For all I know, the death of denominations might well be part of God’s plan.
Pray with me, brothers and sisters – pray with Jesus – that in these changing times we do not lose the joy that comes with being church. As much as anything, that is the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.
Seek the joy. Savor the joy. It’s what Jesus wanted for you and me on his way to the cross, and it’s what he wants for us today.
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