May 12, 2024
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
John 17:6-19
Jesus raised this prayer to God at the end of the Last Supper, after a long address to his gathered followers. He’d called them his friends. He’d warned them of his impending separation from them. He’d told them to love one another. He’d promised them the comfort and support of the Holy Spirit.
Then he prayed for them. Debie Thomas, writing at JourneyWithJesus.net, calls the prayer “long, rambling, and rather hard to follow. And though the disciples are meant to overhear the words, Jesus’s tone has an urgency and passion to it that is achingly private. Jesus isn’t engaging in a teaching moment with this Lord’s Prayer; he’s rending his heart.”
Most of the Gospel writers didn’t spend much time with emotion, except for confusion, I suppose. John, in contrast, lingered with Jesus in his pain and sorrow, and with the disciples in their fear and anguish. Beyond that, however, John lingered with Jesus’ deep care for his friends, the love that is emotional. As David Lose writes at DavidLose.net, “Prayer is love. Taking the time to name the hopes, joys, concerns, fears, and thanksgiving of someone you know and bring all of that into the presence of God through prayer is an act of love, plain and simple. It expresses your care, your concern, and your compassion for the one(s) for whom you are praying. And it expresses your trust that they are as important to God as they are to you. Prayer is love. It’s that simple.”
That equivalence might be simple – and I do think Dr. Lose is right to equate prayer and love, and certainly in this passage – but neither prayer nor love are simple in themselves, and they aren’t simple in this passage, either. Jesus said his disciples came from the world, but that they did not belong to the world, and that the world hated them. Despite the world’s hatred, he didn’t ask God to remove them from the world, but to protect them in the world – but such protection had to have its limits. Jesus asked God to sanctify them in the word, in the truth, but he knew and the disciples knew and we know that life in the world as it is makes truth a difficult thing to discern, to understand, and to maintain. Like the ‘amakihi, we come to the ohi’a flower ignorant of its flavor. Like the ‘amakihi, we can be misled by others’ malice, and persuaded not to taste what is good. Like the ‘amakihi, we can even find ourselves feeling sorry for those who know what is good and pursue it when we, in our ignorance and in our acceptance of others’ mistruths, observe without understanding.
We live in the world, but as followers of Jesus we are also not people of the world. We live amidst ignorance, our own and that of others, while we are people of the truth. We live subject to lies and fraud even as we struggle to bear witness to the truth.
In the world; in the truth. It’s a strange place to be, a strange way to live, a strange dance to dance.
Susan Hedahl writes at Working Preacher, “From the perspective of the biblical text, the world signifies the origin of the disciples. They did not come from outside of society but from inside of it, from the everyday people. However, in belonging to Jesus, the disciples have been separated from the world. Still, they must continue to do ministry in it (cf. John 17:18).
“But what exactly is ‘the world?’ It should not be defined to mean a place antithetical to the goodness of creation. Rather, it is the persons and forces opposed or indifferent to the things of God embodied in Jesus.”
The created order, in and of itself, is not the problem. Genesis asserts that God created, and what God created was and is good. That means that ignorance, in and of itself, is also not a problem, or at least it’s not an intractable one. The ‘amakihi didn’t know that ohi’a was good. All he had to do was try it to find out whether it was or not. Because he didn’t make that test, he remained ignorant. But if he had made that test, if he’d followed the guidance of his nose (I would guess that ohi’a flowers smell pretty good to an ‘amakihi), or the example of the other birds feeding on the lehua, he would have learned something and been glad to know it.
Learning can be a wonderful thing.
Lies, on the other hand, are not.
As Melissa Bane Sevier writes in her blog, “When lies are passed off as truth, when sexual misconduct and gun violence garner a shrug, when the ones Jesus loved the most are refused adequate access to healthcare, when those fleeing terror and tyranny are denied refuge, when the environment is sacrificed for greed, and when all these things are defended by religion, then our concepts of κόσμως collide.”
“Kosmos” is the Greek word John used and which has been translated as “world.”
My purpose today is not to encourage you to tell the truth. I am in favor of it, to be clear. Tell the truth. It’s a Good Thing.
My purpose today is to encourage you to discern the truth, and to maintain the truth, and to cling to the truth amidst all the efforts other make, have made, and will make to shake you from it or pull you away from it. We people of the truth are surrounded by people who will mislead or misinform or encourage us to misinterpret – and yes, people who will tell out and out lies in order to defraud or defame.
Test the things you hear, or read, or see, friends. Compare one assertion to another. Is this new thing you’ve heard consistent with other things you know? Is it supported by facts? Is there a larger or smaller number of people who believe it?
Majority belief is not a guarantee of truthfulness, not even close. In the world of science, it took a long time to verify some of the things Albert Einstein proposed in physics – and Einstein himself objected to developments in physics that have since been experimentally affirmed. Look at Christian accounts of the news of Jesus’ resurrection. For a period of time on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene may have been the only person who knew the truth, that he had risen – and nobody else believed her.
Still: check to see what others know or believe.
Could somebody know what they claim to know? That’s a harder question in these days of free-floating information, but a lot of the claims people make on the Internet make me wonder: Who could know this? If someone claims to know what somebody else is thinking, but they’ve quoted no speeches or public statements, if they’ve had no direct experience with the person, if there’s no writing or correspondence to quote, well. How do they know what they say they know?
Employ the old Roman question, “Cui bono?” “Who benefits?” Attributed to a Roman judge named Lucius Cassius, “Who benefits?” helps us to decide the likelihood of someone attempting to mislead. Somebody saying something that doesn’t benefit them is more likely to be telling the truth, or at least the truth as they understand it. Somebody saying something that does benefit them – particularly if it’s something that’s contradicted by other sources – well, they’re more likely to be lying.
A corollary, of course, is to know the history of someone and their habits of truth-telling. One of the well-known stories attributed to the Greek storyteller Aesop is that of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” In the tale, a shepherd would get lonely, holler that there was a wolf, and the villagers would come up and he’d have company. Eventually they recognized his habit of lying, so they stopped coming – and, of course, that’s when the wolf came.
Somebody with a habit of lying might be telling the truth. But you’d better approach those assertions with a good amount of skepticism and a lot of tests.
And pray.
I’m not urging prayer so much as a search for definitive answers. Personally, I’ve managed to deceive myself in prayer more than once, convinced that God was telling me something that, in the end, I had to admit came from my own voice. That first group of Christians used casting lots to make room for God to influence the selection of a twelfth apostle, but I note that they’d already done their work to make sure God chose between two solid candidates.
I urge prayer to settle your soul in the pursuit of truth with the One who has called you to Truth. I urge prayer to affirm your commitment, and to calm the emotions that can distract you. I urge prayer because, first and last, the search for truth is a sacred task, a holy occupation, a prayerful endeavor. I urge prayer to that God may hold you gently and guide you firmly.
We live with ignorance. We live with lies. We live firmly in the world.
We also live as seekers of the truth. Seek, my friends. Seek: and find.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches. Sometimes they’re improvements, but they’re always differences.
The image is La Ultima Cena (the Last Supper) by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo – http://sitevasari.free.fr/Vasari/Tableaux/IMAGES/M/Murillo/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84355889.
