Jill Y. Crainshaw
Text: Isaiah 49:1-6
John 17:20-26
“The truth will set you free, but first it will shatter the safe, sweet way you live” (Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter). Three years ago 20 students with eyes as big as the moon and hearts that are even bigger took the risk. They began the adventure of a lifetime in search of that illusive “truth” that could set them free, that might even set the world free. Free from what? None of the 20 were quite sure. Perhaps none of us ever are, but even the notion of freedom shimmers on the horizon, a silver lining that tugs us toward its promises.
One student began the journey with sixty-year-old feet. For her, theological education was a mountaintop field of wildflowers she’d heard about but never seen. She decided to climb that mountain, to run through that field of wildflowers with Paul Tillich’s “fear and trembling,” and, like C.S. Lewis, was “surprised by joy.” Her study partner was a 40-year-old woman who decided one day she “had to do it.” She had to step off the highway she was on to follow the path of her heart. There was really no choice to make. She had to do it.
For another student, the story is much different. In the dawning hours of mid-life, her days as a public school teacher were peaceful and satisfying, until that unexpected vision. With Kafka-esque drama and intrigue, the vision “came like an ice ax upon a frozen sea” (Kidd), shattering what she thought was her life. A few months later she suddenly found herself taking notes in a wirebound college-ruled notebook, pulling all-nighters, and envisioning herself—yes, her--baptizing, breaking bread, preaching.
Six days from today, one day after Pentecost Sunday’s winds have taken flight,
the
As a part of the North Carolina Council of Churches, most of us here today
seek the kind of truth that will shatter the frozen seas of racism, hatred and
poverty. Our ongoing struggle for unity as people created in God’s image perhaps
IS the journey in search of that truth. We have journeyed far in our search
and there is much to celebrate, but there are many miles yet to go. The quest
of the
John 17:18-21 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes, I sanctify myself so that they also may be sanctified in truth. I ask not only on behalf of these disciples but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that all may be one.
The room began to fill with people. Even the air wiggled with excitement because soon it would happen, music weaving threads of sound into the tapestry of anticipation. So it was that I stepped into the middle of it all, and became a face in the crowd. That is what we all were—voices, elbows, arms, and faces in the crowd. Then, quiet embraced the restlessness. Winged notes of the orchestra fluttered into the air. It was an enchanted moment as hundreds of those faces turned to watch.
Graduation day.
On this day, as we gather from places far and wide
in
John 17:18-21 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes, I sanctify myself so that they also may be sanctified in truth. I ask not only on behalf of these disciples but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that all may be one.
I wonder sometimes how things ever turned out the way they did for the Christian church. Sometimes I wonder how Christianity ever became more than a stone monument to another dead hero. After all, Jesus’ followers in the Gospels? They were quite human, with elbows and arms, hearts and faces, not so different from ours. Who could recognize in their wind-leathered faces the face of God?
Peter. Mary. Martha. James. Bartholomew. They lived in a very real and complicated world. Sometimes their dreams didn’t come true. There were days when they didn’t get along with each other. Yes, Jesus’ closest followers were men and women who were quite human—unbelievably courageous and bold at times, but also at other times scheming, jealous, selfish, complex—human. Like you. Like me.
Even so, though they were radically different in personality and even in political predisposition, Jesus never asked them to do anything but be more fully who they were in God’s image. He never asked them to abandon their heart language; he only asked them to add the words of koinonia—of grace—to that language.
So I wonder. How did it happen? How did the gold, purple and crimson yarns of God’s sacred vestments get woven onto their threadbare everyday existence, transforming the ordinariness of their lives into kodacolor extraordinariness? What they did together changed the world. How did people like you and me make that happen? How did this eclectic group of wildly diverse individuals become the body of Christ, the church?
Yes, I wonder about the meaning of unity in Christ
when the thunder and lightning of gunfire shatter the laughter of children at
school or when I see a homeless person on the street. I wonder about it especially
during these seven weeks of the liturgical Easter season when we proclaim the
resurrection. The questions tumble into our consciousness with profundity.
What does our language of life mean to those who are dying on the holy war battlefields
of the
We yearn for unity. After all, we believe that every person is created in God’s image, but even if we could reach minimal agreement on what God’s image looks like, another profoundly more radical question haunts us: Where, in our busy burdened lives, can God’s sweet living water find room to flow, setting us free from the falsely safe confines of our sanitized lives, uniting us with one another—across boundaries of race and creed and class—in spirit and truth?
The 17th chapter of John is the lectionary text every year for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, two days ago. After the Ascension. On the brink of Pentecost. Some traditions call it the High Priestly Prayer. This text from John appears in the lectionary as we remember those in between moments when Jesus is no longer with the disciples and the Spirit winds are not yet blowing. In that time of silence?
We remember. We remember the night Jesus shared with the disciples around the table. We remember the way Jesus washed their feet. The words Jesus spoke. John 17 invites us also to remember the way Jesus prayed for this ragtag bunch of refugees who no longer have the same place in the synagogue but who have no map of the future. In John 17, Jesus prays for them, that they—and we—might be one.
“God make them one. Fill them with so much love for you and for one another that it trembles quiet ponds and awakens the world to the wonders of your grace. As you are in me, God, and I am in you, may they also be in us. Give them the glory that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.”
It is a powerful prayer, full of theological insight about the intimate bond between God and Jesus. It is profound in the picture of unity it paints. It proclaims a truth that, if we embrace it? Ah, yes, it will set us free, but it will also reveal ever-deeper meanings about who God is and who we are. Could it be that we are still seeking the courage to live into this truth?
She told me about her dream. She was walking through a crowd of people who were laughing at her. She kept looking in the crowd for a familiar face, and somehow she knew. Somewhere out there on the edge of the crowd, there is a face she can’t see, and it is that face, the one she never sees, that could change her life.
“I know I’m ugly,” she said. “Kids at school started making fun of me in third grade. I’ll always be ugly.” She was one of those people who couldn’t find a face of love in the crowd. Lonely. Deep scars. Afraid.
I told her that God loves her, but I could tell that she didn’t believe me. Then, unexpectedly, she came to our church, one of those little country churches where “the women gather wildflowers from their backyards and haul them to church in arrangements the size of hedges” (Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm).
Her face appeared in the doorway. Her eyes searched the crowd. Then, it
happened. A church member welcomed her. They sat together. The next Sunday she came again. This time, her eyes searched the crowd, and this time she found what she was looking for—that familiar face. She and the church member sat together again. It happened another Sunday, and another. One Sunday, several months later, we welcomed that young woman as a member of the church, and I baptized her.
In my memory as she stood there drenched and dripping in the shimmering waters of God’s grace? A picture of the skeptical look in her eyes as I told her that God loves her. Now? As she sang the closing hymn, her new friend beside her?. The recognition of it was in her eyes. She could see it. She could finally see the hidden face in her dream, the face of love that waits for us out there in the midst of the world’s cruel crowd. In that little country church, she saw Christ’s face, and for a moment there? Sunlight poured from her face.
God chooses us to be the ekklesia, the church, Christ’s familiar face in a cruel and crowded world. God chooses us, called into the community of faith through our baptisms—not by denominational labels or gender labels, not by sexual orientation labels or class labels or race labels—but baptized “by name” into the body of Christ.
The 21st century church, like the church Jesus prays for in John 17, is in an in-between time. We are refugees from our past of institutional supremacy, and we are not yet sure what path to follow into the future. God chooses us still, ordinary searching folks like you and me. I suppose that is why we continue to gather despite the divisions and skepticism and uncertainty. We gather because God keeps choosing us, to hope beyond hope that this will be the season when all those baptized by name into the body of Christ can gather in freedom and truth around this welcome table. God keeps choosing us, to hope beyond hope that this will be the season when we can make square tables round. “No preferred seating, no first and last. . . no corners” (Chuck Lathrop, “In Search of a Roundtable”). Roundtable gathering—where we hope, search, look—and here and there, now and then as we look deeply into the eyes of friend and stranger, we see in the faces of each other the face of Christ. And we become one as God and Christ are one. And the truth is discovered yet again.