Overhearing Jesus' Prayer

7^th Sunday of Easter 2017

John 17:1-11; 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11

Sometimes, things we say are meant to be overheard by others. 
 

I think of the times when my children were small, and I would walk into a room and begin talking not to my child, but with the full expectation and intention that they would overhear me:

·         “Where is Billy? I can’t find him anywhere – he must have left the house! We had better send a search party to find him!” I knew of course that Billy was hiding safely behind the drapes, the toes of his sneakers poking out from beneath the fabric. I meant for him to hear me. Another example from those days:

·         “I think I heard noise coming from upstairs, but I am sure that can’t be any of our children! Because they know what’s good for them, so I know that when I go up there right now, I am going to find everyone sound asleep in their beds!” Again I spoke, intending for them to hear me, and hoping they got the message!

In our gospel lesson today, it is Jesus himself who speaks, intending his followers to overhear what he says and what he prays – to get the message.

As the time grows close for Jesus to be arrested and taken away, Jesus appeals to God on behalf of all those who will follow him, who will carry on in his name after he is gone. And so, on the occasion of Jesus’s last evening with his disciples, Jesus engages in what has been called a “heavenly family conversation” between himself and God.

We only hear one-half of this conversation between the Father and the Son, a conversation in which Jesus repeats what he has already told his disciples – that he will soon be leaving them; that he will be returning to his father in heaven; yet he will continue to love these whom he leaves behind, and he will not leave them either unprepared nor alone.

  His meant-to-be-overheard communication with God is a message full of hope, love, promise and truth for his followers. Jesus reveals those things that are closest to his heart – his care and concern for them, his love for them, and his determination that they continue to be united in belief and purpose. Not only united with one another but most assuredly, united with him.

Despite what they will soon witness and endure, through this prayer, Jesus wants his disciples to believe that God will be with them, working on their behalf.

Jesus repeats what he has already told them, just as a good parent repeats ad nauseum the messages their children need to remember for a good life or for safety: you are loved; you are worthy; work hard; tell the truth; be honest in all your doings; wear your seat

belt.

Jesus will soon be leaving his disciples, but they will never be left alone, because God has ensured that after Jesus has been “glorified on the cross” and returns to his father in heaven, an advocate, his own Holy Spirit, will continue to protect, teach, guide, strengthen and inspire them.

So on this pivotal night, Jesus, who has so often modeled prayer for his disciples gives them this gift of overheard prayer.

His previous prayers to God have often been for guidance or strength for himself, but here is a wonderful example of intercessory prayer: Jesus prays for them, for us, for all who will follow.  

Despite all the other things that must have been taking up head-space for Jesus that night, his thoughts and concerns were for those he was leaving behind: “I am asking on their behalf,” he says. “I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me because they are yours.” What a beautiful gift!

Intercessory prayer is powerful. It is pure gift and blessing for those who pray and for those being prayed for. How often have you heard someone say that knowing someone was praying for them helped them through a difficult situation? It happens all the time. Maybe it’s even been your own experience.

It is not unusual when I visit with someone who has been going through a difficult time of illness or loss, and tell them that the congregation has been praying for them and in fact we had prayed for them together, aloud, during worship, the response I receive is that in some way the person felt the prayer, and that it made all the difference.

So, what does it feel like, today, to know that Jesus is praying for you? What difference does it make in your life that not only are you being prayed for, but that our Lord Jesus is one who is doing the praying, and that the Holy spirit prays for you, in sighs too deep for words? How does it feel to know that no matter what your circumstance, Jesus knows it well and intercedes for you? How does it impact the work that we do in the name of Our Lord, to overhear this prayer and know that Jesus prays for this community?

There are many things for which Jesus prays on our behalf. Jesus prays for peace. On that night, Jesus prayed that people might continue to know God through knowing him, even after he would be gone from their sight.

Jesus prays for the healing of the world. And in today’s gospel text, Jesus prays specifically that these brothers and sisters, who believe in God and have become disciples of Jesus, will continue in relationship with the God and with one another, following the way of Christ.

Finally, Jesus prays for the unity of those who believe in him. He prays for those who will continue in his ministry, the ones who will share his name as he himself shares in the name of God. Jesus prays that we will be one.  

At the beginning of worship this morning, we remembered and gave thanks for Baptism. In a few moments, as we receive new members into our congregation, we once again recall and affirm that we believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and that this faith, a gift given to us, binds us together and makes us one.

We will confess how, through water and the Word, through prayer and meal, the Holy Spirit draws us together, the Body of Christ in the Priesthood of all believers, and those for whom Jesus prays this prayer.

As Jesus brings us together he blesses us with different gifts, and joins us as one despite our different backgrounds and varied stories.  At the table, Jesus feeds us as disciples and apostles, joined together through the grace of God, and trusting more in the power of the Holy Spirit than in human willpower. “Protect them,” Jesus prays, so that they may be one as we are one.”

Think of all the significant and silly differences we experience in our life together – debates about war and peace, human sexuality, economic justice, the color of the carpet in the chancel, whether we worship God in one service or two. In every age, people have chosen to remove themselves from community over these and other matters. But Jesus prays for us – “may they be one as we are one.”

Think of all the not-so-silly struggles and challenges that the followers of Jesus face. The letter from 1 Peter is a reminder that there are many struggles that we will encounter. The apostle in fact calls this the fiery ordeal that confronts us coming from the world within and around us.

This week once again in very stark circumstances, Christians in Egypt were targeted for violence and death. We look around and we fear death of another kind may one day face our community as we see shrinking numbers in worship and experience a loss of cultural support and respect for religion.

In the prayer of the day today, we expressed the same kind of yearning reflected in Jesus’ prayer: “Unite us with Christ and each other in suffering and in joy, that all the world may be drawn into your bountiful presence.”

How powerful it is to know that Jesus has prayed to God on our behalf! There is no one for whom Jesus did not pray on that last night. Like the prayer of a parent overheard by the child for whom one intercedes, what this prayer reveals, is Jesus’ deep love for us all.

The great prayer contained in this gospel text today evokes longing in us to be fully “one” with Jesus, in the mystical communion of prayer so that his prayer of love for us becomes not a farewell but rather a homecoming.

Jesus prays that his followers, as diverse as we are will be one, not that they will all be the same. Unity is not the same as uniformity.

Our diversity of background and thought brings beauty to the tapestry of our faith communities. Finally, Jesus demonstrates, through this overheard message, what it means to cast all our concerns on God, because God indeed cares for us.

So here is the thing, and I look to the second reading for this where, the seventh verse reads, “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.” I think that along with the assurance that he himself cares and is constantly advocating for us, this is part of Jesus’ message to us as well.

When Jesus was troubled, what did you do? Pray. When Jesus was thankful, what did he do? Pray. When Jesus was weary, or frightened, or tired, he prayed. And when Jesus was preparing to leave his disciples to go to the cross, he showed them what it meant to cast all his concerns, all his anxiety, all his desires on God, knowing how much God cares for us all.

It’s a good message for the disciples. It is an essential message to us today. Whatever troubles you, whatever gives you joy, whatever it is that you need to be united as one with God’s purpose and in God’s love, trust the faithfulness of God, who loved us into being, to love you with the power that is God’s alone.

Amen.

The Heart Condition

Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Readings: Joel 2:1-2,12-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6,16-21 

You may not be able to tell this by looking at me, but the truth of the matter is, I have a heart condition. It’s a serious condition, though there is not cardiologist in the world who can do a whit about it. There is no surgeon who has the skill to open up my heart and fix what is broken.

The fact of the matter is, I’ve never even seen a doctor about my heart condition. I know that there is nothing that any one of them can do despite all the medical knowledge amassed over the centuries; there is no research that has come up with a cure, nor could there ever be; and the development of ever-more delicate and intricate procedures, medications and treatments to correct the imperfections of our bodies fail to produce an answer to what ails me.

In a sense, my condition is hereditary and here’s the clincher – I’m afraid that I share this condition with all of you. We’ve all inherited the same heart condition, along with our DNA and all that goes into making us who we are. It is congenital; we were each born with it. As members of a fallen race, there is nothing that our mothers could have done to have prevented it. Here we are, each one of us suffering from the same condition, each with our own set of symptoms and maladies that go along with it. And as I’m sure you’ve surmised by now, this condition is closely related to, in fact is caused by that thing that is undeniably a part of who we are - sin.

Here at the beginning of this season of Lent, it occurs to me that much of the work of Lent is truly about the heart. Our lessons today would certainly lead us to believe that this is true. In them we read words like, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me,” and, “Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart,” and, “rend your hearts not your clothing,” then finally, in the gospel text from Matthew, we are left with these final words, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

So if Lent is a lot about heart, what do we do about this heart condition of ours?

We often talk about Lent being a journey; after all, we are describing something that isn’t over in a flash but takes more than forty long days to unfold. Yet for most of us, it’s not really our journey, but Christ’s journey that we are after. After all it is Jesus who is on his way to Jerusalem. It is Jesus who is literally and figuratively following a road that will lead him to his passion and his death. We are less travelers along this journey with Jesus than we are spectators, bystanders lined up along the roadside, observing the events taking place and marking the signposts along the way.

Those signposts include the gospel images of Jesus’ temptation in the desert, and his encounter with Nicodemus and later, with the Samaritan woman at the well. During Lent we hear from our gospel texts about the man who was born blind and was healed by Christ, and about Lazarus being raised from the dead. Then, finally we arrive at the gates of Jerusalem where Jesus is met by a jubilant crowd bearing royal banners in his honor and waving palm branches in exultation, followed in short order by Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, his being handed over to the authorities under whose watch he will suffer his passion and death.

So, with all of this happening to Jesus, how do we enter this Lenten journey? And why would we even want to? What might we hope to take away from this holy season? How does Jesus’ journey become our journey?

I think the answers to all of these questions lead us back to our heart condition and to these impossibly broken hearts and the sin that we cling to. I think we come looking for a cure. We look for the reassurance that our heart condition will not be fatal. We seek ways to closer union with God, so that our hearts might be created anew and strengthened. My friends, we come to this journey because we desperately need our hearts to be healed and we know deep down inside that our only hope for these diseased, corrupted, and faulty hearts of ours is to be found through Jesus, most powerfully at the foot of his cross.

In Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth, a church in conflict with itself, suffering divisions and distractions to the mission of the church, with many of the members at odds with each other and many under the influence of false apostles, Paul talks about the reconciliation of relationships.  Paul makes it clear that it is through the cross, that God’s reconciling sacrifice and God’s love bring a cross-shaped reality to the disciples of Christ. It is God’s healing work on the cross that makes it possible for us to be reconciled and healed in two directions – healed in relationship with God, and healed in relationship with one another. It is through this reconciliation with God that God is able to take our hearts that have been torn apart by sin and brokenness, and create them anew…making possible reconciliation with others and restoring the relationships that reflect the love of God and the mercy and grace of Jesus Christ.

Disciples of Christ, living out the reality of the cross in daily life and ministry, live with a new reality – that God’s reconciling, loving embrace of us, with all of our raw edges and imperfections, with these heart conditions that rule our lives and our interactions, is not only able to change us but save us and bring us to new life. And God uses the cross to do it. Christ invites us into ministry and life shaped by that very same cross.

Our Lenten journey, not surprisingly is also shaped by the cross of Christ, not only on Good Friday but every day; … it’s why the ashes we mark today are in the sign of a cross. While Paul describes reconciliation that is cruciform – it will include the work of opening our hearts to and for God, and opening our lives and hearts to and for one another. It is only through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that this kind of reconciliation and new life is possible. 

Opening hearts to God comes in many different forms – Lenten practices like fasting, praying, exercising patience and compassion and generosity through almsgiving all draw us into the Lenten journey, drawing us closer to God. The reality is that although spiritual practices are needed in order for us to distance ourselves from all that distracts and divides us, it is God who makes all this possible.

Like the people in the encounters with Jesus that we will witness through the biblical texts in the coming weeks, our own encounters with Jesus will be transformative.  God’s heart-work of changing lives, forgiving sins, healing broken bodies and souls and raising the dead to new life, calls us to engage in this journey called Lent that we might experience God’s reconciling reality for all. Therefore, as we begin this season of Lent, let us rend our hearts to the great physician, engaging in those tried and true Christian practices that engage our body, mind, and spirit. And may the peace, love and reconciling grace of God be with you throughout these forty days.

Let us pray. O Lord our God, we come to you with hearts broken by sin. Have mercy on us O Lord, and through our journey with Christ this Lent bring us the healing and wholeness we so desperately need. Make our hearts clean and our spirits, focused on the cross, that our relationships with you and our neighbor might be restored for the sake of your kingdom. In Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen.