Easter 6B; Acts 10:44-48; 1 Jn. 5:1-6; Jn.
15:9-17; St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC
Jim Melnyk: “Pyramid Busters”
I don’t know about
you, but I’ve never stood in person before the great pyramids of Egypt. Nor have I stood before the stepped pyramids
of Mexico, Central, or South America. I
have never stood before any of the ancient pyramids – but believe it or not, I
happen to live in a pyramid. In fact, I’ll
venture to say most of the modern day cultures live in a pyramid, without even
realizing we do.
For the most part we
all live in top-down societies – pyramid schemes, as it were, which have most
of the status, authority, and power invested at or near the top. Some of us are higher up on the pyramid, and
some are lower, but we all live somewhere along the slope. Those at the tippy-top of the pyramid stay
there as long as the rest of us are spread out below, creating the foundation
of the whole structure. And that’s the
way things should stay, those at the top tell us.
After all, a pyramid
flipped around and stood on its point will simply topple over, we are told by
the best pyramid makers – there just isn’t another way to make it work – to make
a sound structure – they proclaim.
Enter Jesus – the preeminent
Servant Leader – one who came among us “not to be served, but to serve” (Mk
10:45; Mt 20:28). Jesus is One who comes
among us and exercises power with God’s people, rather than power over them – a
pyramid buster if there ever was one. In
fact, the only times Jesus ever went all “pyramid” on anyone was when he was
casting out unclean spirits – or that one time in the Temple with the whip. Even when Jesus argues with Pharisees, we
should see those exchanges as more of an “in house” debate between rabbis –
recognizing their common call as leaders in their communities rather than a
power play on the part of the Prince of Peace.
As we mentioned in
last week’s sermon, earlier in John’s Gospel, while in the same upper room,
Jesus models servant leadership by offering bread and wine as a sacrament of
his self-giving love – which he then models further in washing his disciples’
feet. We see the commandment to love,
along with the commandment to abide in God’s love, in last week’s lessons and
then again at the beginning of today’s lesson, becoming central themes of Jesus’
teaching in John’s work. To those
themes, Jesus adds one more: the promise
of God’s friendship with us through the life, death, and resurrection of
Jesus.
One of my former
seminary professors, Bob Hughes, likened the shift we see in today’s Gospel
lesson to a “shift in our vocation, or, perhaps better, a deeper insight into
our vocation…focused helpfully in Jesus’ startling statement, ‘I no longer call
you servants, but friends’” (Robert Davis Hughes III, Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life, 2008, p
264). There are at least two
characteristics of this shift in vocation.
First, a servant in the first century “merely obeys orders without question,”
whereas Jesus invites his disciples into a place of shared communion and
purpose, telling them everything the Father has told him. “The
Second difference strikes even deeper: ‘Greater love has no one than this, to
lay down one’s life for one’s friends…. This,” Hughes writes, “puts a unique
spin on Romans 5:8, ‘While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.’ God is
our friend before we are ready to be God’s friends in return” (ibid).
Jesus displays God’s ultimate friendship for and with us through his
death on the cross, and he commands us to “love one another as he has loved us,
that is, with a like friendship” (ibid,
p 342).
Think about
friendship for a moment – and how delightful and humbling the idea of
friendship with God can and should be! Hughes
reminds us that friendship requires “at least a rough equality between the
parties to the relationship,” and that one cannot truly be a friend to one’s
servant or slave – because there can be no mutuality.
Indeed, if we recall
another statement by Jesus in John’s Gospel, “Whoever has seen me has seen the
Father” (John 14:9), we can come to understand Jesus as the outward and visible
sign of God – Jesus, in essence, is the sacrament of the Holy Trinity – Jesus is
the sacrament of God! When we see Jesus,
we catch a glimpse of the fullness of God.
And so we might even join with Bob Hughes in understanding Jesus as “the
sacrament of the friendship between God and humanity… making it possible for
[us] to grow into [our] vocation as ‘friends of God’” (op cit, 265).
Jesus calls us his
friends – Jesus bestows upon us the worthiness of being God’s friends – a rough
sense of cooperation and mutuality that is not inherently ours to claim, but
rather something received by the grace of God in and through Jesus and the
indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit. Perhaps
Jesus calls us friends because he catches a glimpse of God’s image in us –
given at the dawn of our creation. Perhaps Jesus calls us friends because in sharing
our humanity, Jesus understands all the challenges of recognizing that image of
God in one another, and allowing that image to shine in and through us.
And as one
commentator puts it, “When Jesus names the disciples his friends he changes the
shape of things—the community is not to be a pyramid but a circle. The notion
of friendship supplants hierarchy with a certain mutuality and equality. Above
all friendship implies freedom. Not to mention delight in one another’s
presence, that love which is ‘joy complete’” (Bill Wylie-Kellermann, Sojourners,
Preaching the Word, 5/10/2015).
“Friendship
theologies” have been around for a long, long time in the Church, but in a
world of pyramid builders, this particular metaphor for the work of Christ gets
shuffled to the bottom of the deck (or the bottom of the pyramid) simply
because it turns life inside out and upside down.
Even by the time we
get to Acts 10 – which is today’s lesson – there is a set way to invite or
initiate people into the life of the Church.
Step one: hear the Word. Step two
get baptized, and step three: receive the Holy Spirit. On top of that, if you happened to be a
gentile, it meant converting to Judaism first - and you guys out there... we don't even want to talk about what that entails!
In today’s lesson
from Acts, Peter proclaims the Good News, and the Holy Spirit smashes the
pyramid of power by coming upon the listeners – gentiles at that – before they
had a chance to be baptized – which they were.
Events like that shook the pyramid that was the beginnings of the organized
Church – and would lead to a serious argument in Acts 15 regarding entry of
gentiles into the Church as gentile followers of Jesus – and argument won by
grace and a Gospel of full inclusion for gentiles.
Jesus is the pyramid
buster par excellence. Torah loving and
Torah faithful, Jesus distains ways in which our humanity can get in the way of
our relationships with God and each other and he invites us to share in his
proclamation of Good News and the inbreaking of God’s kingdom on earth.
In
this, Jesus calls us first to cultivate the friendship of God in our lives,
which in and of itself can seem daunting – friends with God? How can that be? Jesus calls us his friends, and therefore we
are compelled to live with one another as friends of Christ; being filled with
the Holy Spirit promised us by Jesus on the very night he was betrayed and
eventually handed over to Rome.
When we realize that
Jesus calls his disciples friends, even as he sees the handwriting of his
arrest and execution written on the wall, we may also come to understand that
the friendship of God offered in and through Jesus has nothing at all to do
with our actions –has nothing to do
with any sort of equal ground based on our own lives – but a friendship that
comes solely at the discretion and desire of the God who creates us, who loves
us, and who, by the gift of the Holy Spirit, lives within us. Fortified with that knowledge, we can indeed
cultivate, through Word and Sacrament – through prayer and service – our
friendship with God.
Being faithful to
the call of friendship, we are then called by Jesus to be pyramid busters
ourselves; which can be even more daunting than thinking about our friendship with
God, if only because it carries with it all the risks of standing before power
with a critical voice.
Reading the Gospels
we come to know a Jesus who stands against the systems that not only create
poverty, but that actively sustain that poverty for the wellbeing of
others. We come to know a Jesus who
disdains the mindset that embraces retribution over reconciliation – that
embraces a fear of scarcity over a spirit of generosity – or a mindset that
values justice without it being tempered by mercy. We come to know a Jesus speaks against a
world that values war over diplomacy – that still sees color instead of character
– gender and age over personhood – and we have to ask ourselves, “What would
our friend Jesus have to say about all this?
What would our friend Jesus have us do?”
And then we have to act – we have to bust down those pyramids so that
all may join the circle of God’s love.
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