Prayed For

 

Text: John 17:1-11 (NASB)

Focus: Unity

Function: to see how the Spirit makes us a family of God.

17:¹Jesus spoke these things; and raising His eyes to heaven, He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, so that the Son may glorify You, ²just as You gave Him authority over all mankind, so that to all whom You have given Him, He may give eternal life. ³And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. ⁴I glorified You on the earth by accomplishing the work which You have given Me to do. ⁵And now You, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world existed.

⁶“I have revealed Your name to the men whom You gave Me out of the world; they were Yours and You gave them to Me, and they have followed Your word. ⁷Now they have come to know that everything which You have given Me is from You; ⁸for the words which You gave Me I have given to them; and they received them and truly understood that I came forth from You, and they believed that You sent Me. ⁹I ask on their behalf; I do not ask on behalf of the world, but on the behalf of those whom You have given Me, because they are Yours; ¹⁰and all things that are Mine are Yours, and Yours are Mine; and I have been glorified in them. ¹¹I am no longer going to be in the world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I am coming to You. Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, so that they may be one just as We are

I hope that through the understanding of this passage, we do not fall into the pride of believing that somehow we are better, or more special, in the eyes of God.

However, the passage rings of a distinction between those who consider themselves part of God’s kingdom, or family as I like to call it, but they are one in the same and those who are not yet part of God’s family.

The church, I believe, consists of those who seek to follow Jesus by loving their neighbors in obedience to his all encompassing command, the new commandment: Love One Another.

I once attended a debate between an Anabaptist preacher and a Greek Orthodox priest. The Greek Orthodox priest said something that transformed me and changed my perspective.

He, like me, believes that in the end, Love Wins and everyone will be saved by the love of God. “So what is the purpose of the church?” He was asked.

And he replied that it was the family of God already here on earth, since they will all be included in the family in heaven.

I agree. Except I might say that the church is those who consider themselves to be the family of God here on earth. This viewpoint bears witness to my soul and the fact that according to 1 john 2:2: Jesus came to save the entire world from its brokenness or sinfulness.

Everyone is God’s child, the church is the people who recognize that. (repeat)

So, since Jesus came to save the world entire, God loves everyone and wants everyone back into God’s own family.

And that leads us to our mission as Christ followers. We are to be the peacemakers that help to restore people to God and to each other. It is a big task, given the divisive nature of our nation, politics and the irreligious culture wars that are being waged.

That is sort of the lesson I learn from this passage, but I want to emphasize the fact that this is Jesus praying for those of us who consider ourselves to be the family of God here on earth.

Jesus’ prayer is that we may be one, just as he and the Father are One and united.

It is a mystery to be united with the living God. I believe that Jesus is talking again about the advocate, the comforter, the Spirit of God living inside everyone and filling those who consider themselves part of the family of God.

Of course, that is my theology interpreting the passage the way I see fit. Someone else might have a different and brighter understanding of the mystery of God being united with humanity as one.

It reminds me of a book I am reading: “Eager To Love” by Richard Rohr. He speaks of this exactly and how the Christ is incarnated in everyone and everything. And he doesn’t disavow the unique relationship that is happening to people of faith, like us, who are now prayed for by the Christ that we also might experience the mystery of the divine in our own lives.

I believe that the path to this is forgiveness. Jesus told us to stand forgiving (Mark 11:25) when we come to God in prayer.

Now, don’t be proud, but be happy because we are the prayed for by Christ. We are those who are empowered by Christ to love others in ways that we do not imagine. We believe that in the end of all things, the love of God for God’s children will win out. We are excited to be called to that purpose. For that is what the word “Church” means, the gathering of those who are “called out” by God.

Because we have turned away from ourselves and dedicated ourselves to the teachings of Jesus to love others, be filled with mercy for the least of these and to be peacemakers in a world of conflict, we are prayed for and empowered by none other that the Spirit of Christ itself inside of us.

Praise God!

Let me correct a little bit of perspective that I learned from this passage. Jesus makes a statement that I have never heard a sermon on except the few times I have preached about it. Like I’m about to.

Jesus was killed because his politics threatened the status quo and they needed to silence him. His politics were so radical that the fist thing the disciples did after the resurrection was to start a commune. Yet I never heard about that growing up.

I heard only this. Jesus came to save us from hell so that when we die we can escape the wrath of God and end up in heaven. And by the way, it is your mission to convince everyone else of this truth and if you don’t they will go to hell and it will be your fault. But don’t worry, you’ll be in heaven and forgiven for all of the things that you did.

Do you see what happened? Jesus said, If you love me, you will love others, and by the way, this passage is about how God will empower you to love others.

Jesus commanded the direct action of caring for others. In the sermon on the mount, he tells us all these commands about what to do and then, three centuries later, the Apostles Creed was written and it had nothing to do with what we are called to do, but only what we believe.

So look at verse 4 from the text. Jesus said, I accomplished all the work you sent me to do.

For three years Jesus has been teaching his disciples everything that God wanted them to know and to do. It was so radical that they killed him to silence him and the disciples took radical action as we already mentioned in response to what Jesus taught.

For those first three centuries, the Church took on the responsibility of caring for the poor until it became the State Church and the welfare system as we know it was formed and taken out of the hands of the people of God and placed in the government.

No longer did the church care for the poor. By the way, the pastors weren’t in it for the money and they met in houses to control expenses so that there was more money to give to the poor. Records show that 80-90% of their income from giving went to outreach.

The Church changed the narrative about the poor and included them and empowered them and they were blessed and became servants of each other. Most of it was because the rich among them followed Jesus and shared their wealth.

The organization appealed to the masses and grew quickly. Praise God.

All of that was because of the church’s devotion to Jesus and the mission that got him killed.

Now, my brother would read this sermon and might respond with, but Jesus wasn’t political and his mission was to save the world from its sins so that everyone who believes is saved and those who do not believe are condemned.

We disagree on that point, and the problem is that he is counting on the next phase of Jesus’ ministry. Which is also relevant.

For three years he taught us how to live. He commanded us to focus on that and his teachings. That is why I primarily stick to the gospel passage every week. Growing up, no one emphasized the teaching of Jesus to love one another, they instead emphasized the sacrifice of Jesus to keep us from hell. They were three day Christians, as I call them.

And that is because in three days his sacrifice and resurrection took place to prove to humanity that death is not to be feared if we trust and rest in the power of God.

We will live again. And although I would still be a follower of Christ if neither hell or heaven existed, because I believe in the teachings of Jesus, I am blessed to believe and place a hopeful peace in the knowledge of the resurrection and the hope that Jesus has gone ahead to prepare a place for us.

The three days are important. I find the mystery of Jesus being God and man to come out here. He says that as God he accomplished all that God wanted him to do. And then he goes on to work as man, on behalf of man, to be the atoning sacrifice for all of humanity.

He worked on behalf of God for three years teaching us how to live and he worked on behalf of mankind for three days as the atonement for our sins.

Praise God.

I can’t forget either. To forget the teachings of Jesus in exchange for quoting a creed seems to be missing the point of Jesus life and teachings since it only focuses on the three days of his sacrifice.

I love to focus on the three years of teachings because they give us so much to do and to understand and they consume much of the gospel’s narrative.

And the emphasis, the beauty of this passage is that we are prayed for by Jesus to have the power to follow him. It is journey he wants us to walk with him.

No Longer Orphans

 

Text: John 14:15-21

Focus: Holy Spirit

Function: to help people see how the Spirit moves us into family

¹⁵“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. ¹⁶And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. ¹⁷This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

¹⁸“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. ¹⁹In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. ²⁰On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. ²¹They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

Well, Good morning. I love to talk about the Holy Spirit and experience how the Holy Spirit is moving us together in our community. She is making us into a family.

So, today I am going to do a little Bible Study. Let us break down these verses.

It starts out with a passage that either inspires us or shames us. I was raised hearing that first verse of our text, “If you really loved Jesus, then you wouldn’t sin. And when questioned about that, the justification was that we don’t sin, not to save ourselves, but because we are so grateful for the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Hence, “If you love me, you won’t sin. You won’t repeat the offenses that brought Jesus to the cross.”

Now I want to tell you that this is a crock of stuff that comes out of the South end of a North bound bull.

The passage says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And John, the apostle writing this passage goes on later to repeat that phrase of Jesus, in his epistle, and adds a significant addendum to it. He says, ³For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome,

This verse was intended to set us free, not put us in bondage to shame.

John, in the epistle, has just got done saying that God is love and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. And he adds that those who do not love do not know God (no matter what they confess.)

And he repeats Jesus from this passage from today’s text where Jesus himself has just said, “here is the new commandment: Love one another.” John 13:34

So, to be clear, Jesus is not saying “If you love me you will not sin” but he is saying “If you love me you will love others.”

Remember, according to Matthew 25, we love God by loving others.

That is why, I believe, that John takes an entire epistle to describe the nature and working of love and its connection to the power and the infilling of the Holy Spirit.

God gives us the Spirit of God so that we can have the power to love others.

That is the gospel according to Phil.

The Spirit inside of us, according to scripture however, bears witness to the Christ inside of us. And she adopts us into the family of God.

The Holy Spirit of God whom resides inside of us does the work of transforming us into people who were once selfish, proud and self-righteous to those who love mercy, do the justice of God and walk in humility because of God’s grace given to us.

So what about this idea of sin and not sinning?

In the beginning of the epistle, John tells us to confess our sins and we will be forgiven. Simple as that.

But I want to remind you about what sin is.

Sin is anything that gets in the way of loving others, since that is the new commandment and the term “sin” means that we miss the goal. It oftentimes means that we thought our hearts were in the right place, but the arrow missed the bullseye, not quite there. It could be a big miss, or a little miss. But what it is is a deviation from God’s love for us and for others.

I was raised in an holiness movement. Growing up, sin was everything. One that was particularly emphasized was using slang terms for cuss works like shucks, darn, dang, and shoot since they really were metaphors for those awful four letter words.

And I don’t understand that. Some of the actual language in the bible is much worse, there is a lot of cussing and cursing in the Bible that is glossed over by the translators so that it can be read from the pulpit.

Sadly, we made a religion out of not cussing when I was growing up. And it was all coated under the guise that if we really loved Jesus we wouldn’t cuss.

Now the apostle did say for us to not let any unwholesome words come out of our mouths, but again, there are times when the phrase “God, damn this,” maybe with a please added, is appropriate.

I was once convicted by the Holy Spirit about what “unwholesome words” means after telling a racist joke. And then in history class at Bible College I learned how the Pollock Joke was invented so that the German soldiers would not feel bad about killing their white, but Slavic, neighbors.

The Pollock joke was made to dehumanize the others. And I learned the process of racism inside of myself began to lessen when I refused to laugh at or repeat racist jokes.

Again, the Spirit of God convicted me to give up racist jokes.

It is a serious aspect to loving our neighbors. When we joke about the other, we dehumanize them and that makes it easier for us to not love them.

We are called to love others, even our enemies.

And Jesus gives a promise in this passage.

He tells them that if they do indeed obey and love others, the Holy Spirit will move inside of them and bring them into a sense of belonging to the family of God.

He calls the Holy Spirit the advocate, or the comforter. God with us. Brother Paul talks about her in Romans 8 when he tells us this: “You have received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, “Daddy!” The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8: 15-17).

Paul puts the caveat “If we suffer with him…” to the promise of the Holy Spirit.

And I believe that this means if we, like Jesus love sacrificially.

But I don’t like looking at the condition: “if we suffer with him” so much as I love looking at the empowering that God is doing in our midst.

In Our midst, here, right now.

The longing for community and the way that it is fulfilled in the presence of God here in this holy place shows us that God is indeed at work in our midst.

And the promise of God is that through love, we are adopted into the family of God.

There is a suffering of self-sacrifice in forgiveness. If we suffer with him reminds me of Christ on the cross forgiving his murderers.

In Kairos, on Saturday night, we have a hand washing ceremony. They guys are given a forgiveness list at the beginning of the day and are encouraged to write names of people they need to forgive on the list. The list is written on rice paper and then we place the paper in a bowl of water and the lists evaporate as we pray over them and give our unforgiveness over to God to heal.

And then, we wash their hands while proclaiming they they are forgiven, they are cleansed and they are now the child of God.

And I believe we get the authority to make that proclamation from this passage.

And then we give them an extra dozen cookies to take back to the pods and they are asked to give the cookies to someone they forgave.

Through love and forgiveness we are born into the family of God.

And in Kairos, that is where we witness the men being born of God, from above, by the Spirit of God.

Trust Also In...

 

Text: John 14:1-14

Focus: Trust

Function: to build faith

14:¹“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. ²In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? ³And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. ⁴And you know the way to the place where I am going.” ⁵Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” ⁶Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. ⁷If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

⁸Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” ⁹Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? ¹⁰Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. ¹¹Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves. ¹²Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. ¹³I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. ¹⁴If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.

The text for today is part of Jesus’ charge to the disciples during the last supper. It is his last and final instructions to them, a last minute sermon, if you will.

And I love the way it starts: “Do not let your hearts be troubled you believe in God, believe also in me.

“If that were not true, I wouldn’t have told you that I go to prepare a place for you.”

I love the comfort those words bring. I almost invariably read those words of comfort at a funeral celebration.

Jesus means a lot when he says these words to the disciples. The Gospel of John starts out with the symbolism of Jesus being the Word of God incarnated. Literally, the Greek word used in John’s translation is Logos. Logos means “words of.” For example psyche -human mind- and Logos form the word Psychology, the study of the human mind.

Jesus is the theology of God. The Word of God. The picture of God that we can understand. God is infinite and although we can imagine infinity, we can’t quantify it. But we believe that God can. And God, who is infinite wanted us finite humans to understand God’s own self so God became human in the form of Jesus the Christ so that we can understand what God wants to us to know about God.

And Jesus made it clear: God wants us to love others. I have spent my life trying to understand the mystery of the cross of Christ. God portrayed that image of God’s own self as the suffering servant prophesied on Isaiah 53 and God allowed Himself to be crucified instead of fighting back and calling the 10,000 angels at his ready disposal.

What a way to show us love! It show us that we don’t have to be involved in a system of justice that brings retribution anymore. Jesus changed that and showed us a system of justice that is designed to restore to wholeness the evildoer. From the cross Jesus prayed to the Father to forgive his murderers. What love is expressed in the midst of human suffering! I am amazed by it and it points to the nature of the Christ who redeems humanity.

And then Jesus briefly mentions heaven, or an eternal reward and he tells them that is something, apparently inside of them, that they understand in a mysterious or mystical way, through perhaps the Spirit of God herself that leads us to believe in the afterlife.

I sense it. I believe according to this text that Jesus is suggesting that we all sense it. We sense that there is more to life that here on earth. We sense the existence of heaven.

And Thomas says to him, yes, but we don’t quite understand.

And Jesus tells him that it is simple. If we see God for whom God is, then we will see and agree that Jesus is sent from God, the Christ who is anointed to restore the world to God and to each other.

Those, by implication, that reject the idea of the Jesus the Christ are rejecting the notion of a just and loving God.

Because, Jesus, as John points out is the picture of God that God wants us to see is the Christ who loves and accepts everyone. Throughout the gospels the only people that he chastises are those who are not willing to accept others. I call them the self-righteous.

It is important to understand that there were many righteous people during the time of Christ. They were described in one instance as those who were waiting for the Kingdom of God to come.

Joseph, Mary’s husband, along with Zachariah and Elisabeth, Mary’s uncle and aunt were considered to be righteous people in the eyes of the Lord.

They were saved because they lived a life honoring God in the way they treat others.

They were and are people who believe in the just and loving nature of God and who turn away from doing evil and treating others poorly because they believe God to indeed be the final judge of the earth.

Easter brings us good news about that. Because of the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, we can rest assured of the justice as well.

So Jesus tells them. Do you want to know what God is like? Look at me. If you can accept me and my teachings, then you have accepted God.

It is kind of like telling them, Look, of you trust in me, the Christ, then you are trusting in God. If you are trusting in God, then it will be obvious to you that I speak for God and have come from God and I represent God.

But remember the first line of today’s text. “Do not let your heart be troubled, you believe in God, trust also in me.”

The name “Jesus” literally means Savior. Jesus came to save us. So, he is saying: Let not your heart be troubled, the idea of God isn’t foreign to you, so let the idea of the Christ, the Savior sent from God settle in your hearts as well.

Let yourself have hope and rest in God.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy. But it does mean that God is with you.

I witnessed it in a powerful way last weekend at Kairos. The guy sitting to my left was a recent convert to Christianity. He told me how he knew he needed a change and he started crying out to God and how God met him in a supernatural way and led him to Christ.

He had an odd sort of faith but it was genuine.

And then he told us that he was led by God to leave the Aryan Nation brotherhood gang in the prison.

He told them he became a Christian and could no longer walk in their violent ways so, he casually says, “they bled me out.”

I was shocked that he was so casual about it. Bleeding out of a gang is sometimes lethal. But he told them if they forced him to stay he would just keep preaching at them, so they cut him out of the gang without killing him, but, there was bloodshed involved, he was beat up real good and ever since then, they have left him alone and he now feels safe. But for the first few weeks after he confessed Christ, he didn’t know if he was destined for a shiv in the compound or his freedom. God spared his life, but he took the step in faith.

I was pretty blown away by his commitment to Christ.

Jesus didn’t say it was going to be easy. There will be tests, trials, and resistance to us. But still he said, “let not your hearts be troubled, rest in God, rest also in me.”