I Just Want to Be Sure of You

Easter 7B; John 17:6-19; St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC 5/17/2015

Jim Melnyk: “Finding a Sure Home”

Winnie the Pooh is standing at the edge of the 100 Acre Wood, quietly watching a most glorious sunset.  Suddenly Piglet is standing beside him, slipping his tiny “hand” into Pooh’s.  “Pooh,” he says rather timidly.  “Yes, Piglet,” replies Pooh-Bear.   “Nothing,” sighs Piglet.  “I just want to be sure of you.”

           

We all have something – or some things – we would like to be sure of, don’t we?  “Mommy!  Daddy!  There’s a monster under my bed!”  “Mom, Dad, what if she says ‘no’ when I ask her out?” or “What if he doesn’t ask me out?”  “How do I know if he/she is the right one?”  “Is this the job I should go after?” “Am I in the next round of layoffs or am I safe for now?”  “Do I risk this surgery?”  “What should I do about the guy I always see asking for help at the stoplight near the grocery store?”  “God, are you really there?”  We all have something – or some things – we would like to be sure of, don’t we?

           

Today’s Gospel lesson speaks to that hope – that need – we all feel in our lives.  Jesus prays for his disciples just prior to facing the cross – that they will know themselves to be beloved and protected by God.  On the flip side of the coin, I believe a careful reading of the text handed down to us also shows us a Jesus who wants to be sure of a few things, himself, before his world turns upside down and rabid.  “I’m praying this prayer out loud, Father – Abba – because I want my disciples to be sure of you – but also because I need to be sure of you – and sure of myself – as well.  Oh, God, I’m not so sure I can face this test!  I’m not so sure I can really drink this cup – or that I want to drink it, either.  I just want to be sure of you, God.  I just want to be sure.”

           

You see, on the surface none of this suffering Messiah stuff makes any sense.  Dying, yet we live?  It makes no sense.  Embracing the cross on behalf of a world that doesn’t seem to care – that in fact is often adversarial at best?  It makes no sense.  Our following Jesus who says to us, “Take up your cross and follow me?”  Our following Jesus who says to us, “Follow me and the world will hate you?”  It makes no sense.  It should make us feel uncomfortable – like having monsters under the bed.

           

Throughout what we call Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” from John 13 up to the garden, or his “High Priestly Prayer,” which we read from today, we come to learn Jesus’ ultimate hope for humanity – his ultimate hope for us – a transfiguring union for us with God.  Following up with last week’s exploration of friendship with God, theologian Bob Hughes adds, “As we grow in union with God (“All mine are yours, and yours are mine,” Jesus tells us), as we grow in union with God, whatever virtue we have comes more and more to be a participation in God’s own perfection(s).  This is like the effect of friendship with a truly great human person whose excellences of character ‘rub off’ on us.” (Robert Davis Hughes III, Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life, 2008, P 299)   Imagine having God ‘rub off’ on us – pretty cool, huh?  Hughes goes on to say, “The love of God for us, and our love of God for God’s own goodness,” becomes the central motivating factor of our lives, leading us to also love “that which our great Friend [Jesus] loves,” loving our neighbor – a love that “flows naturally, directly, and inevitably from [our] love of God” (ibid).

           

 All of which points to the totally incarnational aspects of our faith.  We are not meant to follow Jesus or love God on some abstract level surrounded solely by theological constructs.  We don’t look to theory or sentimental platitudes to find our assurances of God’s presence and God’s love in our lives.  Rather, we see God’s presence – we come to understand what it means to be called God’s own people – we come to understand union with the Divine – in and through the everydayness of life, and the ways in which we live out all those theological constructs in community with one another.  Because in the end, “love of God cannot be seen reliably… the only visible measure we have for someone’s progress in the spiritual life is an increase of effective love for the neighbor” (ibid).

           

Author and Christian activist Robert Roth writes, “It is one thing to live our lives sleepily in this world, yet quite another to adopt an incarnational faith that causes us to engage with history—specifically people who need our love—by heading into the world where we already live.  In extending Jesus’ resurrection love into the world, we go with others, and we go empowered: ‘As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world’ (John 17:18)” (Sojourners Online, Preaching the Word, 5/17/2015).  This is what our bishops mean when they talk with us about going into Galilee.  In the midst of all that, it’s no wonder we feel a need to be sure of something – of someone – beyond us.  It can leave us wanting to find a loving hand to hold in the uncertainties of life.

As adults we realize that when we were little, at the best of times our parents comforted us when we were hurting or scared.  We felt one with them when they checked for monsters under the bed, held us when we were sick or hurting, and encouraged us when we felt lost.  But when they were at their best, they also taught us to stand on our own two feet and sleep in our own rooms – eventually even without a nightlight.  They taught us that even in the midst of all of life’s uncertainties, there are things of which we can be certain – most assuredly among those things being the presence and love of God.

           

That’s the whole flip-side of the assurance thing.  God in Christ assures us of God’s love for us – assures us of God’s ongoing presence in our lives that will come with the gift of the Holy Spirit – which we will celebrate on the Feast of Pentecost next Sunday.  God reaches over (as opposed to “down”) – God reaches over and takes us by the hand – names us God’s own beloved – and then – and then – once empowered by the gift of Holy Spirit in our lives, sends us out into the world to love and serve God by loving and serving our neighbor – any and every neighbor – even the neighbors we have chosen not to like so much – even those who don’t like us very much. 

And that’s the challenge, isn’t it? We cannot just stop and bask in the comfort and love of God without understanding that God’s love is meant to move us to action, because theologically things like comfort and love are as much – if not more – verbs than they are nouns.  There is always a “therefore” that comes with realizing the sureness of God’s presence with, and for us.  We are, in essence, “Therefore People.” 

God loves us and calls us – God is present with us, which is the whole purpose behind the incarnation – God taking on human flesh and dwelling among us – therefore, we are called to live out that love – that presence – in our own lives and for the life of this world.  Which begs the questions: “When and where do you need comfort in your life? When and where is God sending you out to bring comfort and hope for others – for family – for friends – for our neighbor – for the stranger or sojourner among us?

           

In the end, we find our deepest place – our deepest home – in God when we listen to, hear, and follow the desire of Jesus that we become one with one another and one with God.  It is in our desire for – and the acting out of – our oneness, that we finally understand the reasons behind loving one another and caring for and with one another.  And it is in our oneness – our oneness with each other and our oneness with God in Christ – that we can make a difference in this world – that we can make a difference in people’s lives – because alone we can only do so much – but together we can help God change a world.

Pyramid Busters

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.

At times it quite frankly blows my mind to think about being friends with the God of all creation – it seems impossible, remembering what we say each Ash Wednesday – how we are but dust, and that to dust we shall return.  How can God be friends with dust?  But then I realize we have a friend in pretty high places – Jesus – and I hear my seminary professor remind me – we may be dust, but we are “beloved dust,” and that, my friends, gives me hope.

Servant Leaders - Servant Love

Easter 5B; 1 John 3:14-24 & John 15:1-8; St. Paul’s, Smithfield, NC 5/3/2015

Jim Melnyk, “Servant Leaders/Servant Love”

There’s an old country song that starts out, “My heroes have been cowboys.”  Well, with apologies to Willie Nelson, it seems that all of my heroes while I was growing up were ball players of some sort.  As a youngster, I remember checking the box scores every day, following the exploits of Mickey Mantle.  And I was in High School when Willis Reed, the center for the New York Knicks, limped onto the court at the start of game seven of the championship series against the L.A. Lakers – struggling down the court and hitting the first two jump shots of the game when he shouldn’t have even been in uniform – totally psyching out the Lakers – with the Knicks never looking back!  Now that was hero time! 

           

But today, although some would say I still wear my sports allegiances like a second skin, my heroes have changed.  Today my heroes are folks like Desmond Tutu, who is perhaps for me one of the greatest witnesses to the love of God in this world today.  People of God like Tutu have heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ, taken it deep within their hearts and souls, and have found ways to be imitators – and initiators – of the Spirit of Christ.  They have become what many choose to call “Servant Leaders.”  Servant Leaders – people called by God to lead others into the heart of God.  As people called to imitate the holy paradox of Jesus of Nazareth – the God who serves, they lead others into the heart of God by standing alongside their sisters and brothers – by seeking wholeness and holiness for others and glory only for God.

The author of First John proclaims: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love…. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them (1 John 4).  And so, both Jesus and the author of First John in today’s lessons connect loving and being loved by God with abiding in God – sort of setting up house in God and living in God – and thus keeping God’s commandment that we love one another. 

We might ask, what does all this look like – this abiding – this loving – for followers of Jesus?   Only moments before today’s lesson from John’s Gospel Jesus offers three commandments for his disciples to take to heart. 

           

First, during their last meal together, Jesus takes ordinary bread and a cup of wine.  “This is my body – offered for you.  This is my blood – poured out for all.  Whenever you share this meal,” he tells them, “I will be present with you.”  And in the sharing of the bread and the cup we come to know Jesus, and recall his revolutionary message of justice-love for all people – especially those whom the world chooses to ignore or hate.  In sharing Christ’s body and blood we abide with God in a tangible way – remembering Christ’s sacrificial love, and pledging to carry that love with us into the world.

And then, while they are still at the table together, Jesus gets up and gently washes his disciples’ feet.  The Word of God made human flesh – the Very Promise of God from the foundation of time – washes the grime of Jerusalem’s dusty streets from the feet of his disciples.  “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet,” he tells his disciples, “you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”  Jesus comes among us as one who serves, and this act of foot washing is a defining sacrament of servant leadership.

Finally, as the meal comes to a close Jesus says to his friends, “[Now I am giving] you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  Jesus offers us two sentences that encompass a whole world – two sentences so easy to say – and so difficult to live.

And so the stage is set for today’s gospel lesson.  “Abide in me as I abide in you.”  The whole show boils down to our abiding in God through Christ, and as a result, loving one another as God has loved us.  The center of God’s universe is love.  The central act of God’s universe – the central action of God’s universe – is love.  Yesterday at the Festival I came across a guy handing out religious tracts.  In huge, bold, letters the tract proclaimed: God’s Judgment of the world is underway!  Yet, when I read John’s Gospel – when I read First John – what I hear is a Gospel of love and forgiveness.  Now that doesn’t mean there is no judgment – but what it does mean is that judgment is always anchored in love and forgiveness.  To be centered in God’s universe is to be centered in God’s love – to find ourselves centered in and abiding in God’s love, and to be in love is to act in love and act out of love. 

And that is why folks like Desmond Tutu have become heroes of my faith.  They speak to me of what it means to be centered in God’s universe – to be centered in God’s love – and they remind me of God’s call to invite others to share with me in the promise of God’s love.

“God has a dream,” Tutu has said so often.  “God has a dream that we will [someday] realize that we are [all] members of one family.  That’s the one lesson God is [still] hoping we will learn, and if it takes millennia for us to learn, God will give us those millennia.  But that’s the one lesson God wants us to learn….  Not as a figure of speech, but as the most real thing about us.  That we are members one with another.  In this family,” Tutu reminds us, “there are no outsiders.  All are insiders.”

And Tutu is willing to further define what he means by this.  “There are no aliens.  All, all, all belong: black, white, yellow, gray, rich, poor, educated, not educated, beautiful, not-so-beautiful, gay, straight.  ‘HEY,’ God says, ‘all, all.’  Even those we call extremists,” says Tutu – and you recall that Tutu spent so much of his ministry in South Africa in the midst of Apartheid! “Even those we call extremists, “he says, “they belong, they belong.  That’s why it’s so radical,” Tutu says, “That’s why if we’re able to accept this truth, then we wouldn’t – we couldn’t – spend those amounts on budgets of death and destruction, when we know just a small, small fraction of that would enable God’s children everywhere to have clean water, enough to eat, adequate education, accessible health care, and a safe home environment.”  These are powerful words, and for some – perhaps for many – disturbing words from a servant leader whose words echo the greatest servant leader of all time – Jesus of Nazareth.

The Servant Leader heeds the commandments of Jesus offered as he prepares to give his life for the life of the world: Jesus, the one who comes among us not to be served, but to be a servant of all.  We are all branches of the One Vine that is Jesus – and as branches, not one of us is more important or more beloved of the vine; each of us called to abide in the vine, and each are called to bear fruit on behalf of the vine.

Once again across our nation we have witnessed the violence of riots – this time we watched as neighborhoods in Baltimore burned – and all sorts of emotions have boiled forth: Anger at the violence, anger at injustices still experienced by minorities, dismay – with some folks disparaging the violence and others asking for understanding over what led to the eruption of violence.  Eugene Taylor Sutton, Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Maryland pleads, “Weep and pray for Baltimore.  Violence never works.  Ever.” (http://episcopalmaryland.org/weeping-for-baltimore-statement-by-bishop-eugene-taylor-sutton/)  And as followers of Jesus we seek an end to violence – we declare there must be a more constructive way.

But we also must remember what has been said many times, “Poverty is the worst form of violence” (Gandhi).  We must remember that modern day realities such as homelessness, discrimination of any kind, isolation, and our turning deaf ears toward suffering and the root causes of suffering, are also forms of violence.  And abiding in Christ – in the love of God – invites us into relationship with those who suffer from any form of human-caused violence in places like Baltimore

The Servant Leader hears the words of First John – words written for the faithful throughout the generations, but also written during a time when the Church was being persecuted by Rome: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters are liars” – tough language to be sure – “for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”  And so we are called to seek the end of violence in all its incarnations.

These are indeed the marks of a Servant Leader: To hear the commandment of God in Christ and to follow; to draw the circle of faith ever wider and to work for the healing of our lives and the life of this world – what our Jewish brothers and sisters call tikkun olam – as we seek to find our place in the center of God’ universe – as we seek to find our home in the center of God’s love.  And we know ourselves called, like Desmond Tutu, to risk saying and doing the very things the world doesn’t want us to say or do – as followers of Jesus saying and doing the very things that will turn our world inside out and upside down for the love of God.   Amen.