As We Are One (Easter 7B)

 

“As We Are One”

Easter 7B 
17 May 2015; 8:00 a.m. Said Mass and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass 
Homily Delivered by the Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D. 
at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon 
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; Psalm 1; 1 John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

It’s good to be back here at Trinity, after my pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Elena’s pilgrimage as grandmother and mother to Seattle.  The children took good care of her, and my brother and sister members of the Society of Catholic Priests took good care of me.  Here at Trinity, retired clergy and the baptized rallied around Jane Norris as she died, visiting her, following her instructions and emptying her apartment after she died, and giving her a wonderful sendoff in the Thursday Bible Study group this week.   And we have rallied behind the Latty family with Fred’s death on Wednesday.   We are all so blessed, even amid painful things. 

In Jerusalem, several of my fellow pilgrims came back one evening with a frightening tale:  while walking through the Old City in Christian clerical collars, they were surrounded by teenage boys, shouting in Arabic “Allahu Akhbar!” (God is Great!) and pointing at them with imaginary AK-47s and shooting.  “Typical adolescent schoolboy nonsense!” was the stolid comment of one the male priests, definitely CoE and used to the insolence of 15-year old male students.  But a sister priest expressed her heart, “It was scary.  And I pray to Jesus for those boys.”  

This week, there was another huge earthquake in Nepal.  The niece of Anne McCollum, a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small rural village 2 hours outside of Katmandu, was brought back home to Redding CA because the Peace Corps announced a mandatory draw down, for a minimum of 90 days, of volunteers in that beautiful, but now tormented, country.   

This week an Amtrak passenger train in Pennsylvania derailed, injuring hundreds and killing eight.  And we were reminded of public horror and the enduring power of the death penalty in the U.S. in the Boston Marathon bomber verdict. 

It is a scary world.  That is the constant background noise we must hear behind the Gospel reading today, part of the last supper story told by the Gospel of John.    Here, the night on which Jesus is betrayed, he prays.  And what does he pray for?  For us.  He prays for his disciples and for those who will come to believe because they hear their words.  He prays for us: “I am asking on their behalf; … on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.   … Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”   

He doesn’t ask that we escape the scary world.  He doesn’t ask that everything go easily for us.  Facing his last trial and torment, he sends us on the road ahead, knowing that we will end up facing the same kind of trial and torment. 

And he prays:  Protect them, father.  Make them holy.  Make them one.  May they be comfort and support for each other just as you are my comfort and support.  May they love each other as we love each other.  May they be one as we are one. 

I think that is why this Maundy Thursday reading is chosen for today’s lectionary, the Sunday after the Ascension and before Pentecost: it is about us getting on in the world after Jesus has left us, facing the scary world that he faced.  It is about how we get by, how we find faith, how we don’t lose hope.  How we overcome our petty differences and power struggles and actually help each other, love each other, and comfort, comfort, comfort. 

In Luke’s telling in his Gospel and Acts, this is because of the Spirit that Jesus sends us on Pentecost ten days after he finally leaves us at Ascension, flying up on a cloud to a heaven we cannot see.  In John’s telling, Jesus breathes this spirit on us the evening of Easter when he first appears to us.   How we find faith and comfort and strength, how we find God present is told differently in these different stories.

But in today’s story, it is because Jesus prays for us.  Prays for our safety, for our good, that we not be twisted and distorted by the ugly things we see or do.  That we be one with each other and one with him and his Father. 

Church unity is a nice slogan and a beautiful ideal.  But how it often has played out in our history has been like this: one group or faction uses force to make the others conform to their ideals of the good and orthodox.  It might be brutal and ugly, like the inquisition or the religious wars between various sects, or it might be tarted up and prettified, like when Methodists, Mennonites, or Mormons talk about “laboring with” a disaffected brother or sister, “counseling in love,” that is, browbeating them until they submit.  But it is the same:  force and bullying to achieve the appearance of unity, a simulacrum of consent.   In the Episcopal Church, with our democratic forms of governance and decision-making, we pass resolutions in General Convention, winners take all and losers be damned.  We might not browbeat, but the invitation to walk out the door if you can’t get along with us is implicit in our ever polite, procedure-bound seeking of the same ersatz imitation of union and one-heartedness.  Sometimes I think we might be better off by drawing lots, like the eleven in today’s reading form Acts. 

I believe that one of the great ways to avoid such imitations is to wipe away in our minds the division between us and them, between the righteous and what John’s Jesus calls the ‘world.’  Curiously, unity is possible when we stop insisting on having things our way. 

False unity is not what Jesus is praying for.  This is not what he hopes for us:  “May they be one as you and I, father, are one.”    Unconstrained sharing.  Heartfelt agreement.  Common ground, common life.  A great harmony of song, not a unison monotone.  A perichoresis, or delicate dance of submitting and asserting, cooperating, and loving every minute of it.  “One as we are one.” 

We live in a scary world, one where charity has limits, compassion gets fatigued, and everybody at one time or another is on the make.  One where living the truth of God’s gentle love can get you hurt, and speaking truth to power can get you killed.    And so Jesus prays for us.  As we must pray for each other, and for all. 

In the name of God, Amen.