It’s About You, Too
John 17:1-11; Acts 1:6-14
Seventh Sunday in Easter
John 17:1-11
After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, 2 since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3 And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. 4 I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. 5 So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
6 ”I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7 Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; 8 for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. 9 I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10 All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.
11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
Acts 1:6-14
{6} So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” {7} He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. {8} But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." {9} When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.
{10} While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. {11} They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." {12} Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day's journey away. {13} When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. {14} All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.
The Sermon
The silence breaks into morning.
That One Star lights the world.
The lily springs to life and
not even Solomon...
Let it begin with singing
and never end!
Oh, angels, quit your lamenting!
Oh, pilgrims,
upon your knees in tearful prayer,
rise up
and take your hearts
and run!
We who were no people
are named anew
God’s people,
for he who was no more
is forevermore.
(Ann Weems, “And the Glory,” from Kneeling in Jerusalem. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992.)
Today is the seventh and last Sunday of the Easter season, and somehow Easter Sunday already feels like forever ago.
But here on the last Sunday of Easter, it seems like a good time to talk about what’s great about being a disciple.
First, being a disciple means you are intimately involved in the most important story in the universe, maybe the only important story in the universe.
You are on a first-name basis with the One who created all that is. Think about that for a minute. Can that possibly fit into a 21st century mind? God knows you. And beyond that, God has gone to enormous lengths on your behalf, and not as a distant relative—a great aunt who was born into privilege and benevolently decided to send you a couple bucks—but as a parent who every second is watching over you, praying for you, worrying about you, thinking about you all the time.
The God who made every star, every galaxy, every grain of sand and every molecule of every leaf on every tree—that same God is at this instant concerned with your well-being. God knows you, and to address the Creator God, you don’t have to communicate with some life form in the far reaches of outer space. You just talk, and God is right there, listening.
I don’t know how that thought could ever fail to cause the breath to catch in the back of someone’s throat.
Another great thing about being a disciple is that it relieves a lot of the burden of decision-making.
Every year, I tell elected elders in officer training that for the next three years, you no longer have to make a decision on Sunday morning. If there’s some reason you can’t be in worship when the church worships, it will be so obvious that you won’t have to decide. If you have to take someone to the emergency room, you’re not going to be thinking, “maybe I should be in church right now.”
But otherwise, you’re here. You won’t have to wake up and think, “I’m not sure whether or not I feel like going to church today.” Doesn’t matter. When the community is at worship, you’re there.
Worshiping when the community worships is a mark of spiritual discipline—which is rather obviously related to the word disciple.
But to be a disciple also means that some ethical decisions won’t be decisions at all. You don’t have to decide whether or not to treat someone fairly, or with forbearance, or with the respect that is due anyone who was made in God’s image. You don’t have to decide whether to speak out against violence, injustice, hatred. You don’t have to decide whether to stand for what it true, and right, and good, and just, and beautiful. A disciple just does that. And incidentally, it feels great.
The thrill of being a disciple is that your priorities tend to line up with great clarity. Your relationships are touched by angels’ wings, in the sense that if we’re even instructed to pray for our enemies, imagine how forgiving and welcoming our relationships with the people closest to us can be.
And to be a disciple is to be able to find a way to live with yourself—with all your failings, that you know better than anyone else; with all the idiosyncrasies that make you who you are; with all the temptations that only you know, and only you can overcome; with all your beautiful and extraordinary gifts that only you really know how well or how poorly you have used them—or how often or how rarely. A disciple knows that being accepted by God, for all these things, means we can be acceptable to ourselves.
The last Sunday of Easter is also a good time to consider a basic question that I sometimes ask in Bible studies, which is: What’s this story about? We’ve had seven Sundays of rejoicing in Easter, on the heels of seven Sundays of soul-searching in Lent. What is this story about?
The story is about a man named Jesus, who was God’s son, and who lived among us as one of us; who taught us how to be human, how to embrace life, demand life, fight for life, and share life, even as he moved toward the cross, upon which he, in his perfection, gave his life for our countless failures to live up to our own humanity.
The story is about a man who fed those who were hungry and looked after the poor, who saved the lives of the loved ones of people who in other circumstances would have had nothing to do with him.
It’s about a man who with every waking breath and in every move he made taught us that God is love and that God made the world and everything in it, including us, in love.
That’s some of what this story is about. It’s about a manger and a well-worn pair of sandals, and a cross.
I don’t think we’re necessarily all that great at telling that story. Ann Weems, who wrote the poem I began with, has another Easter poem that says,
We are programming and papering ourselves
into perpetuity,
and rationalizing and excusing our immorality.
We spend our energy in complaining,
gloomily forecasting our future together.
That’s not how you tell that story. It’s not what it’s about.
The story is about God, and life, and truth. It’s about Jesus, the Son of God.
And it’s about you.
Toward the end of his earthly life and ministry, Jesus prayed for his disciples, and he said, “N ow I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world.” And he said, “Father, protect them.”
That is a prayer for people who are going to turn their entire lives over to the unspeakable beauty and the daily thrill, but also to the demands, and the cost, of being a disciple.
The thing is: how much protection do we need for what we tend to rather presumptuously call discipleship?
When we cut corners at every opportunity, and willfully allow some people to fall by the wayside; when we make decisions that mess up the world around us for the sake of some extra convenience; when we do things we know we shouldn’t and don’t do things we know we should, we’re just being human. We’re making the couple dozen or so daily compromises that it takes to get by and maybe stay ever so slightly ahead in this world. It’s about being a flawed but generally decent human being.
But it isn’t discipleship.
When we treat the knowledge of God’s holy word as one option among many, and allow our sense of what’s exciting at the moment to dictate whether or not study and prayer and the discipline of faithful worship are important, that’s family functioning. It’s parents trying to do the best they can; adults trying to take care of one or more households; kids trying to keep up with the often ridiculous demands of schoolwork and everything else they want to do while they still can. It’s families and households doing what they need to do, or want to do.
But it’s not discipleship.
When we reluctantly or grudgingly toss some spare change at a church budget rather than giving back to God what God has blessed us with; when we decline to give of our firstfruits, but rather pitch in a little if there’s anything left over, that’s good and decent people trying to hang in there with a recession looming, and a fixed income, or an intimidating sales forecast. It’s good people trying to do what they can to help out.
But it’s not discipleship.
When Jesus prays for my protection, I have to ask myself: what am I doing, as one who would claim the honored title of “disciple,” that would in any way—any way at all—require Jesus to offer a fervent prayer to God for my protection?
And so on this final Sunday of Easter, my fellow disciples, let’s be very careful about our language. And let us pray that Pentecost will bring a renewal of the Holy Spirit in all of our lives, the likes of which we have so far failed to imagine.
Let us continue—boldly, faithfully, optimistically, joyfully and passionately—to claim the title of disciples.
But as long as we’re calling ourselves disciples, let us recommit ourselves to actual discipleship.
Oh, angels, quit your lamenting!
Oh, pilgrims, upon your knees in tearful prayer, rise up and take your hearts and run!
We who were no people are named anew God’s people, for he who was no more is forevermore.
The story we tell is the story of a man named Jesus, who was born and lived and died on a cross for the sins of the world, and was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven.
But it’s also about you.
Let it be so now.
Keith Grogg
Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church
Carolina Beach , NC
May 4, 2008
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