Seventh Sunday in Easter (C)
June 2, 2019

O God of purpose and possibility, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

In our Church calendar, we have entered into the commemoration of a period of time after Jesus’ death, in between when his friends stopped having powerful external experiences of his presence and started internalizing his presence. After they watched Jesus work and before they started feeling brave enough and inspired enough to make his work their own. In the Church calendar, the commemoration is nine days – a novena – a period of special devotion, a period of prayerful waiting for a spirit of holiness to deliver some grace in a circumstance of peril or need. Of course, any churchy observance or season might feel mismatched with what we’re experiencing or feeling. You might already be filled with inspiration – like our newly ordained deacon Sarah. You might be feeling dazed and confused by the sorrows of your life or the sorrows of the world. Either way, the Church invites you to be in a time of prayer about what’s next.

In the Bible, nine is a symbolic number that has to do with discernment and judgment. There are nine gifts of the spirit of holiness, according to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. They are: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, speaking in tongues, and interpretation of tongues. There are nine fruits or produce of the spirit of holiness according to Paul’s letter to the Galatians: love, joy, peace, magnanimity, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and temperance. What I love about these lists is the inherent acknowledgement that different people and communities have different gifts, and various kinds of fruit are grown for the mixed salad that we call Christianity. (Let’s be clear that unity doesn’t mean that all the fruits are blended into a smoothie.) 

During our novena for prayerful discernment and judgment, we hear that fantastic story from the Acts of the Apostles, of Paul and Silas, who were on their way back down to the river to pray, with the gathering – the congregation of women in Philippi. They encountered a slave girl – she was not only enslaved by her owners but she was possessed by a demon and exploited by her owners. For many days she kept shouting out that Paul and Silas were slaves to the Most High God and finally Paul got so annoyed by her that he ordered the spirit possessing her to come out of her. I note that Paul didn’t seem to care that she was possessed at first – but after a while, she started getting on his nerves. He freed her from the demon but not from slavery.

Were her free owners free enough to celebrate her healing? No, not at all. The free owners responded to the slave girl’s freedom from possession by calling for imprisoning Paul and Silas. Their source of income had been taken away. The charges had something to do with disturbing the peace, being foreigners, and furthermore, not following Roman customs for religious reasons. Ironically, when Paul and Silas were beaten and then shackled in the innermost cell of the jail, they were strangely free to sing. It was some powerfully fine singing that they were doing in the middle of the night, in the pitch darkness, in the most secure part of the prison. It’s such a great scene. Paul and Silas were getting freer themselves and they were freeing all the prisoners who were listening to them. It reminds me of this great love ballad that is sung by Lucinda Williams about the walls that separate two lovers are only made of concrete and barbed wire. That’s all. In other words, the concrete and barbed wire might look formidable, but really they are flimsy compared with the power of love. 

When the Love of God shakes a prison, it is as if the walls crumble and the chains fall away. (I’ve seen it happen in my 22 years of prison ministry.) I wonder if you noticed Paul’s answer to the jailer’s question about how he himself might be freed. You might have thought it was a typo. Paul says, “believe on the Lord Jesus.” It’s not a typo. The preposition used here (epi) is upon, or toward, or into. It’s about placing one’s trust on, or leaning on the everlasting arms, as we sang last week. It’s not about thinking anything; it’s about building confidence that the work of Jesus is worth making one’s own. And what is the work of Jesus? Offering food, water, compassion, healing touch, clothing, shelter, freedom, companionship, consolation and conversation to one another to the honor and glory of the Holy One, the “Being Beyond Comprehension.” In Revelations, John the Divine cites the work of Jesus, referring to the prophet Isaiah’s invitation: “And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” Everyone! Anyone! Take it! It’s a gift! Share it! It’s a gift!

Now, you might have gotten tripped up in the first part of the reading from the Revelation to John when John reports hearing the voice of Jesus Christ saying, “my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work.” I understand why that might cause some heart-burn, but I want to remind you of Jesus’ teaching about the workers in the vineyard who all get the same wage, no matter how many hours they worked. As far as I can tell, the bar is very low and the gates are open very wide. The image of runners slowing down to carry other runners they don’t even know over the finish line at the Boston Marathon is the image I want you to have in your minds.

That’s the image for the Gospel of John’s conclusion to the longest prayer – a marathon of a prayer that Jesus prays before his arrest. Although, I recently heard it fittingly described as “bafflegab,” I think the best way to understand the Gospel of John is as a love song. Like any timeless, classic love song, John’s poetry blurs the lines between the lyricist and the singer and the hearers, between cosmic and eternal, between particular and temporal. John’s love song starts out being about before time, long ago, and it ends up being about this very moment and about forever – about a way forward just when it looks like there is no way. I often say that it’s not a song about us loving God so much, as it is a song about God loving us so much, whether we believe it or not. In this part of John’s Gospel, Jesus is anticipating saying goodbye, and praying that his followers will remember that they have been loved by God since the beginning, from “before the foundation of the world” – that they can choose to be aware of that well-spring. He is reminding them (and us) of the covenant of Divine Love that is already present and available, no matter what. I love that in the Gospel of John, to “be one” is defined as being “in one another.” So, to “become completely one” would mean to become “completely in one another.”

I have a very nerdy thing to share with you about the language of this passage from the Gospel of John (well, nerdier than usual). The English word “that” is used to translate two different Greek words here, each used multiple times. The word “hina” means so that, or in order that. It specifies purpose or design. The word “hoti” is a word used to present the object of hope or possibility. [1]  What’s interesting to me is that in this passage, the purpose or design has to do with all being one, Jesus and the Holy One and the people being together, and the love of the Holy One in the people like it was in Jesus. Those are all statements of purpose or design. The hope or the possibility that Jesus repeats three times has to do with his followers having confidence that Jesus was sent by God, and that Jesus was loved by God. I imagine that it was hard to have confidence that Jesus was sent by God and loved by God in the face of the crucifixion. Yet, that is the hope that is being expressed here in Jesus’ prayer: that his beloved will trust that he was sent by God and loved by God. The divine purpose or design is that we are all one in the love of God. The possibility or hope is that we might have confidence that Jesus was doing God’s loving bidding, and that we might do God’s loving bidding too, following Jesus’ lead.

I want to offer you a poem for your contemplation during this novena between Ascencion and Pentecost. It’s a poem by Hafiz, from a collection entitled, The Gift, by Daniel Ladinsky. [2]  You might know that Hafiz was a 14th century Persian poet, a spiritual rebel, who came to be regarded as being in sacred union with the Divine. Hafiz means guardian or keeper. Listen to what Hafiz has to say to us this morning:

Now is the time to know

That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider

A lasting truth with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand

That all your ideas of right and wrong

Were just a child’s training wheels

To be laid aside

When you can finally live

With veracity

And love.

Hafiz is a divine envoy

Whom the Beloved

Has written a holy message upon.

My dear, please tell me,

Why do you still

Throw sticks at your heart

And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside

That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know

That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time

For you to deeply compute the impossibility

That there is anything

But Grace.

Now is the season to know

That everything you do

Is sacred.

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