Able and willing to shine: both adjectives necessary (Sunday, May 21, 2023)

Focusing:

This is the seventh Sunday of the season of Easter -- the season of the resurrection of Jesus.  Spiritually, seven is a number of perfection, of fullness.  

What does it mean to be living into the fullness of the resurrection of Jesus? 

Reading:  John 17:1-11

This reading is the beginning of a prayer that Jesus offers to his Father at the end of what we know as the Upper Room Discourse.  It is the last night Jesus is with his disciples.  They have shared their last supper together – the Passover feast.  He has talked with them about his impending death, and his resurrection and ascension.  He has talked about them inheriting and receiving the Spirit of the Father that they have seen at work in him, and about them now becoming his body in the world – a new incarnation of God’s Word for the good of the world.

 

After saying all this, he turns away from them, towards the Father, and prays.

 

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:

 

“Father, the hour has come.  Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.

 

“I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours; you gave them to me and they have obeyed your word. Now they know that everything you have given me, comes from you. For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. 

 

“I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours. All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them. I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one."

 

Meditation

The main headline on the front page of Wednesday’s issue of The Hamilton Spectator said exactly what I needed to know to start the day well.  In big, bold caps it declared, “A Moment to Shine.”  Beneath it was a bright full-colour picture of a big bed of tulips in Gage Park.

 

I really needed it, because of the rest of the front page.

 

At the very top margin was a small image of the wildfires throughout Western Canada, and a reference to the latest news about it in a story titled “We are challenged” on page A7.   

The two actual stories that began on the front page and were continued inside, were about the ongoing crisis of homelessness in Hamilton and City Council’s plan to consider the latest proposal of a helpful response, and about a scandal of high-level academic fraud at McMaster University.   

It was all laid out there for my morning read: increasing effects of climate change on human life and on plant and animal life on Earth, increasing brokenness and polarization in our society, one more diminishment of trust in our leaders and teachers and in the possibility of truth.

At the heart of it all, though, and standing out from it all, covering 20- 25% of the front page space, was this big colour photo of a brightly lit bed of brilliant yellow and purple tulips at a pedestrian entrance to Gage Park (with a caption saying exactly that), and the headline above it in full caps declaring, “A MOMENT TO SHINE”.

Don’t we need to see and be reminded of moments like that?  And in the midst of all its sorrows and crises, doesn’t the world need people who rise to moments like that – moments to shine?

In his prayer to the Father at the end of his last supper with his disciples. Jesus says, “I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do…. I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world…. they are still in the world … Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one as we are one.”

“That they may all be one” – a quotation from a bit later in this prayer (v. 21) is the motto of the United Church of Canada.  At the time of our amalgamation in 1925 of three denominations into one, this was a guiding concern – to live out and to live into this prayer of faithful unity with high-level things like institutional unity, doctrinal uniformity, and cultural coherence, as a way to have and be recognized as having power and influence in our country’s development, as well as a strong place at the table of global ecumenical discussion and action.

Today, though, I am struck by a different kind of faithful unity.  A unity that comes not from top-down, but from inside-out.  A union and communion of the body in all its working parts that is not a matter of structures and statements, but a result of sharing in and being guided by a common Spirit – the Spirit of Christ and of God planted alike in all of us, to be lived out and lived into the life of the world in all the diversity of ways that we are.

 

When I think of the glory of God that Jesus prays to be revealed in and through his disciples, radiating through them into the world because of their shared knowledge of God, I think of people – specific and particular persons.

A person like Maeve – a wee Irish nun, well into her 70’s when I met her in the early 1980’s.  It was at a directed prayer retreat for ministers seeking nourishment in their faith and ministries.  She was on a year’s sabbatical from her house in Ireland, and in Canada for part of it.  I was a newly ordained minister – still Baptist at the time, in my first church and already feeling empty and dry. I was a retreatant for the week – all 6-foot-5 of me, and she – all 4 ½ feet of her, with her face happily showing every deep, earned wrinkle of her 70-plus years, was assigned to be my director. 

It was the first time I had ever done anything like this – attend a Roman Catholic prayer retreat, intentionally put my soul for a week into the hands of another person, and commit to a daily pattern of reading a brief passage of Scripture, spending 45 to 6o minutes in contemplative prayer twice through the day, and meeting for 45 minutes to talk with my director about what I was hearing God say to me.

By the third day, I was downcast and discouraged.  Not once yet had I managed to complete even 30 minutes of silent contemplation.  Every time I tried, within 20 minutes I was asleep.  I felt like a failure, and in embarrassment, confessed my failure to Maeve.  She heard my confession, looked quietly and gently at me for a moment, and then said, “How wonderful … that you are able to fall asleep in the arms of God.”

Not a word of judgement.  Not a sign of reproach.  Just a gentle encouraging word about how God was present to me, and with me as I was.  Even when I felt unable to be present to God.  The kind of word I needed in my discouragement and self-judgement.

A moment to shine with the love of God for someone discouraged, and feeling they were failing God and inadequate as a servant – the memory of which has gently lightened times of darkness and discouragement many times over the past forty years.

 

When I think of the glory of God Jesus prays to be revealed in and through his disciples, radiating through them into the world because of their shared knowledge of God, I think of a person like Oscar Romero. 

Romero was ordained a priest in 1942 and for the first 35 years of his ministry he was known in El Salvador as a conservative priest.  He supported and worked within the traditional church and its alliance with the government of the day despite the government’s record of oppressing and denying the basic human rights of its citizens, especially of the poor.  He rose through the ranks of the church, and in February 1977 he was made Archbishop of San Salvador.

One month later, in March 1977, Rutillo Grande – a friend of Romero and a Jesuit priest active in helping create self-reliance groups among the poor, was assassinated.  At that point, Romero’s life changed.  He began questioning the government.  Began paying close attention to the plight and the powerlessness of the poor.  Began writing letters and preaching radio sermons in support of change and social transformation.  He began preaching and living the Gospel of liberation.  And in March 1980, just three years after his friend’s assassination, he too was assassinated while celebrating Mass.

A moment to shine with the love of God in support of the poor and the marginalized, in suffering solidarity with the powerless and oppressed, giving his life to the vocation of helping to right a wrong and lopsided society – in a way that brings to unmistakable light for all the world to see, what the love of God is really about in the world as it is.

 

When I think of the glory of God that Jesus prays to be revealed in and through his disciples, radiating through them into the world because of their shared knowledge of God, I think of Pearl, a woman who lived all her life in one little house in Paisley, a town of about 1,000 people in Bruce County, Ontario.  Pearl was unmarried and already in her 60’s or 70’s.  She had worked for years in the kitchen at the local hospital in nearby Walkertown, and now was retired.

So when the new minister at the church she attended said he was looking for someone to take on the weekly job of typing the worship bulletin onto the wax stencil for the Gestetner machine, when no one came forward, she said with a big smile and smokers’-cough throaty chuckle, “I don’t have a typewriter, but if someone could lend me one, and if it seems okay, I’ll give it a try.”  Someone lent her one, and four years later when the minister resigned from that church to go elsewhere, Pearl was still happily typing the weekly bulletin, hunt-and-peck, on a borrowed typewriter.

A moment to shine with the love of God in service to a congregation, helping it in some little way to work well in its worship of God and its work for God – and don’t good things happen all around, when someone is able to rise to the moment? 

 

It’s not just the moment, though, is it? 

When you think about people like these who are able to rise to the moment when it emerges, and shine when it’s needed, it’s because they spend their lives rooted and grounded in the love and knowledge of God, of God’s good will for the world, and of God’s ways of bringing that good will to life.

It’s their daily communion and continual union with God that lets their lives be filled with the light of God’s love for all, so that when the occasion arises, when the opportunity presents itself, when the moment comes for the light of God to shine through them, they are there and are ready to rise to new life.

Don’t we need to be able to see and be open to moments like that?   

In the midst of all its sorrows and crises, doesn’t the world – and doesn’t God, need people who are able to rise to these moments to shine just as they are, where they are, because of who they are with God?

Why else would Jesus pray for the Father to guard and to guide us in this way?

Living in the flow (Sunday, May 14, 2023)

Reading:  John 14:15-21

The reading is part of a larger passage in The Gospel of John that we know as The Upper Room Discourse.  Jesus is sharing a last supper with his disciples before his arrest and his death at the hands of the authorities.  He is preparing them for what is to come, especially for their life as his followers beyond his death and resurrection.  He will not be with them in the same way as he has been.  But their bond with him and with God will not be broken; it will be deepened.

“If you love me,” Jesus says, “keep my commands.  And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

"I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me.  The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.”

Meditation

It’s remarkable how Jesus gets to the point.  Cuts through the crap and gets to the heart of the matter.

Probably because he lives from the heart of God.  And day by day just lives out what is there, just waiting to be lived out.  Puts it into practice.  Brings it to life.

And tells us to do the same.

And it sounds so right, the way he puts it.  And the way he points us.  It just sounds like the good thing to do.  The good way to be.

And when we do it, we know it is.  Because when we do it, we find ourselves – like him, caught up in the flow of the Spirit of God in the world.  Caught up in the life of God in the world.  Sharing in the life of God’s love breathing into the world, and all through it, especially into all the nooks and crannies where it’s most needed.  It just feels good, and right, and true, and alive to be part of it.

So it’s really good news when he says, I give you a new commandment – you are to love one another as I have loved you.  A new commandment!  And just one!

 

One thing about commandments – whether we're thinking of the situation of his disciples, or the people of Israel in general, or all of us, really – is that there are usually scads of them, to govern our lives and ostensibly to make the world work the way it’s supposed to work, the way it works best.

For Israel, it began with Ten Commandments on two stone tablets – 10 directions to make a good society.  That soon grew – exploded, into bushel-basketsful of all kinds of laws and ordinances, religious rituals and moral requirements meant to keep society good, and the people within it, pure.  There were hundreds of them, and they became overwhelming and impossible.  Talk about bureaucracy and red tape, boxes and tight molds to fit into, moral and religious correctness.

Jesus, though, in the same way of the ancient prophets, cuts through all that, and when asked, boils it down to just two.  The first commandment, he says, is to love God with all your heart, mind and strength, in all you do and are.  And when you love God – the true God, honestly, you will know the second – to love your neighbour as yourself, whoever your neighbour is at any moment.

Two commandments.  How simple.  Except now, at the end, he adds one more.  Or, maybe, sums the two up – combines them and makes them perfect, in a new one-commandment form.  “Love one another as I have loved you.”

“As I have loved you.”  That’s the catch.  That’s where the challenge comes.  That’s also where the clarity comes.

Because how has Jesus loved?  How has Jesus loved the disciples?  How has Jesus loved others they met along the way?  How has Jesus loved us?  Loved anyone?  And everyone?

 

I’m gonna get to the point here, and suggest that any story we know about Jesus loving anyone, any story we read about Jesus living out the love of God, any story told in the Gospels about Jesus bringing the love and good will of God to life in the world, at some point and ultimately is not just or most importantly about blessing people in their privacies, their own little domains, their separate success, but is about bringing people together.

I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I suggest that every story of Jesus loving anyone, at some point and ultimately is about creating community where it did not exist before, or restoring community where it’s been broken or divided, or healing community where it’s become toxic – or even deadly, for some of its members.

About bringing people out of their shells and their self-concern, out of their private little kingdoms, out of their holy and unholy solitudes, to become together the kind of community God really wants – a community of all people bound together, of mutual caring and sharing across boundaries, of mutual welcome and hospitality across divides, of shared vulnerability and openness with one another, of gracious forgiveness and healing.

Which means the stories and experiences of Jesus reaching out in love to others more often than not involve reaching across some barrier or divide, breaking some social convention or religious taboo, crossing over to the other side, putting himself at risk of censure and ostracization – even death.

Because the kind of community God wants, and loves to create – loves, in order to create – is a community with more bridges than barriers, lots of doors in every wall, and opened hands and opened hearts.

When God’s love is acted out and brought to life in the world it leads to a full and diverse community that gathers around a single table with places and enough for all.

I received a comment this week from a colleague in ministry somewhere in the world, connected by the internet, about how important this understanding of the Gospel and of the work of God and of God’s Spirit is in light of all the research today about the disease and the epidemic of loneliness that’s affecting the mental and emotional health of people today including seniors, young people and children, and everyone in between,  Community – connection with real people, being draw into caring for, and being cared for by others, are exactly the experience of healing and of salvation that Jesus offers, and would be freely offering today as much he did in first-century Galilee.

It makes me wonder if the most helpful mission question we could be asking ourselves is not simply “how do we get more people in the church,”  but “who around is lonely in any way and for any reason, and how can we reach out (i.e. how can we be drawn out of our privacies and solitude) to connect with them in any way that makes sense to them?”  And “who around us lives just for themselves in their own little circle and privacy, and how do we invite them to reach out with us beyond ourselves, to help serve the well-being of others, and the well-being of all?”

Because when we live that way – when we are drawn out of ourselves to love others, and when we are loved by others with a love that reaches beyond self-concern to create community instead, it feels right, doesn’t it?  It feels good.  Doesn’t it feel like we are being caught up in the flow of God’s love, and the life of God’s Spirit at work in the world for the good of all?  Like Jesus was, and calls us to be?