Seventh Sunday in Easter, Year A
May 24, 2020

O sovereign of glory, 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.

This is the day, in our church calendar, when we mark the time between the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Pentecost – a sort of liturgical limbo. It lines up well with the limbo we are experiencing in the Church, between pre-isolation and post-isolation due to the covid-19 pandemic. There’s a lot of buzz about opening the churches, and I want to say that Emmanuel hasn’t closed. The Emmanuel Church building has stayed open to serve those who desperately need shelter and food and other necessities, like loving-kindness, and to allow other essential activities to take place. It never closed. Is Emmanuel Church open for worship? Well the physical pews are not full of people, the chancel is not full with a choir and orchestra, but we have not stopped worshiping together as a community. Nevertheless, we are in a sort of limbo, having left what we have held dear, not knowing when and how a new normal will be. I think it’s safe to say that many of us are feeling bereft and disillusioned, mixed with varying amounts of anxiety, anger, and despair. We are warned that we are still in the early days.

In our First Testament, the stories of journeys through various wildernesses come to my mind, stories of people on the run and dreams of stars in the heavens, messengers of God ascending and descending, strong desires for building a city of peace with justice for a home. In our Second Testament narrative, Jesus has demonstrated that love is more powerful, more palpable, than even the most shameful, gruesome death. According to Luke, Jesus has ascended to his heavenly throne, but the comfort and the inspiration, the clarifying flame of the Holy Spirit that he promised to send has not yet arrived. The wonder is that this in-between season lasts for such a short time – because in my experience, the time between great distress and loss, and comfort and clarity is usually much longer than nine days! Then I remember that our liturgical calendar days rarely line up with God’s time.

The thing is, Luke’s stories of Ascension and Pentecost don’t synch at all with John’s stories, in which, Jesus gave the spirit of holiness to his disciples in their locked room on the very same day that he rose from the dead. He didn’t wait 50 days. There is no Pentecost story in John, or in Matthew or Mark, for that matter. So for our Gospel reading in this in-between time we hear a part of Jesus’ prayer for his closest colleagues just before his arrest. The passage from the Gospel of John actually gives us only half a prayer – stopping right in the middle of an idea. I won’t read the part of Jesus’ prayer in John that got cut off, but it includes Jesus’ prayer that they are made holy in truth, and that his love, and the love of God, be in them. I don’t know about you, but I find it profoundly moving to listen to someone pray for me, and for my community in that way.

When you read the whole prayer, you may wonder about Jesus praying for the church universal before he was even arrested and then executed, and perhaps why he is referring to himself in the third person – and you should wonder that! This was written by, in, and for the early church, at least three generations after Jesus’ death, and the author was imagining what Jesus would have been praying had he known, imagining that Jesus did, in fact know that his followers were going to be harassed and scattered. This is Jesus, assuming the posture of prayer, praying to God, saying, “I glorified you by finishing the work you gave me to do. Now glorify me with your own presence, with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.” This is Jesus, praying for the protection for his followers: that they may have eternal life. “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, God our Maker…and know Jesus Christ.” This is eternal life. John’s definition of eternal life has everything to do with knowing God and knowing Jesus as the Christ, or the Messiah of God. Can eternal life get any simpler (or any more difficult) than that?

What does it mean to glorify? What does it mean to refer to the Divine, as we do in our collect for today, as the King of Glory? Glory and glorify are not words we use much in every-day speech. Glory as a noun means great beauty and magnificence, as well as esteem, honor, respect, admiration, great dignity. The verb glorify is to hold in high esteem, to honor, respect, admire, elevate in importance, dignify greatly, and it has overtones of beauty as well. The striking thing here, in John, is that the glorification is intensely mutual – Father and Son and disciples are one: God in creation, Jesus Christ in compassion, and Jesus’ friends in courage. Jesus says to God, “all mine are yours and yours are mine and they have glorified me in themselves and kept your word and I have completed the work you gave me to do and now they are doing the work.” This is deeply relational with great reciprocity and great dignity and great beauty.

It is worth noting, though, that if Jesus is praying that God will protect them so that they may be one, it actually indicates that they are not one…there are already divisions among them in the earliest Christian church. If something is being asked for in prayer or commanded in scripture, it’s because it’s not happening. This is Jesus, praying that they may have his joy made complete in themselves [which means, they’re not feeling particularly complete in their joy]. This is Jesus, praying that they may be saved from the power of evil to destroy. Does this ring any bells in you? Divisions among Christians? Incomplete joy in ourselves as Christians? Do you feel the power of evil in our lives – that keeps us afraid rather than brave because of the power of our mutual love? This prayer, which John has placed in the mouth of Jesus, is as necessary today as it ever was. This prayer is Jesus’ prayer for us.

So the part of Jesus’ prayer for God’s protection is interesting to me – because the Greek word that here gets translated “protect,” is usually translated “keep” – both as in keeping or holding dear the commandments, but also as in guarding, keeping in close custody as to prevent running away! “Dear God,” Jesus is saying, “watch them closely so they don’t run away! I’ve brought them this far, but they’re going to want to run away from the utter shame, the scandal of the cross, and the conflicts that will come their way. They’re going to want to run away from the suffering they will endure if they challenge the power of fear and hatred with my message of redeeming love and God’s preferential option for those who are oppressed. Please God, don’t let them run away.” The prayer of Jesus, here, is not theoretical or hypothetical. The lives and loves of Jesus’ followers were at stake. His words ring true to my own prayer these days that you all will be protected while we are apart. 

What we have in this time of limbo, available to us in the meantime, is the mutual, beautiful loving kindness – the chesed – of the Holy One. Listen to what Arab-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye has to teach us about kindness:

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

 

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

 

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

 

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and send you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

 

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