Message Of Loving Belief - Easter 7

John 17:20-26 - May 29th, 2022

The Lord Be With You.

A parable on our Gospel …

There once was an old woman who was known for many years for her insights and truisms. People from her community and surrounding area would come and stand in line just to hear what this woman told them about whatever predicament they were in. Some would walk away shaking their heads and then proceed to do just the opposite and they would find themselves in more trouble than when they first came to her and got the message of how to avoid those mistakes. Some would listen to the old woman and attempt to do what she advised but their old habits would come back and they ended up failing at heeding her advice too. Some would stay away because they really didn’t want to know the answers to their life’s questions and they, too, found themselves in dire straits. It seemed that the folks around her just couldn’t keep from going back into their old habits. As time went on and the old woman got even older she was asked why she tried to help others if they just went and did things opposite of what they were told anyways. The old woman said that it was not the fact that the vast majority of the people coming to her would make mistakes, it was more that there was always a chance just one person could be saved from the heart ache and pain of what they were fixing to do and if only that one person could be saved from that hurt then everything else, every other moment she spent advising people, was worth it. If only one.

Here ends the parable.

Verse 20 says, in part “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message” and I believe that Jesus was giving us a promise that if we’ll just follow in His footsteps and tell others of what we saw and heard then everything that He did would be worth it. That His ultimate demise at the hands of the Romans would be worth it. That Him coming back to us would be worth it. He didn’t just say that He prays for those who believe but those who believe in Him through their message. The Good News. The promise that Jesus will forever be a force to recon with. The idea that grace and mercy do exist regardless of what the rulers, the Pharisees, of His day drummed into their heads and made them cower in fear because they couldn’t live up to some expectation.

This passage is the mid-point between His farewell discourse and the passion. It is God’s response to us, through Jesus, of our newness in our relationship with God and with the possibilities that await us when we can spread that Good News. That mercy and grace. That light that is ever shining with the word of God. It is Jesus getting intimate with His Father on behalf of those who want to know but are afraid to even begin to guess. Maybe you’re like that. Maybe you know that there is a God but some person or organization has turned you away through their use of those words that the Father gave to others to record. Maybe, deep down inside, you have questions that you feel have never been answered, questions that you have asked in vein, questions that are for something you hold dear and all you have gotten is silence. Maybe you feel like David, in his Psalm 94, where he says, “Unless the LORD had given me help, I would soon have dwelt in the silence of death.” Maybe. Just maybe. I know I have.

The first three verses speaks of the prayer for later generations. You know, the beloved disciples. Us. The ones that are around gathering others up into communities. The unity of the Father and the Son and us. And it’s through this unity that the world will know of the saving grace of God through His Son, Jesus. Jesus is present through the love of that community. And maybe, just maybe, some of the questions as to what all this means can be answered. I can tell you that it’s something that rarely hits you like a bolt of lightning. I haven’t read anything about how some guy fed 5,000 plus people on the banks of a lake. Or raised someone from the dead. Or cured the lame or the blind just by touching them. I haven’t read any of that stuff but I can tell you that just because I haven’t seen it, or heard about it, doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. I haven’t seen or heard of everything. After all, just when you think you’ve graduated from the school of experience, along comes a whole new course.

I’ve called this message, “Message of Loving Belief” because I firmly hold that there are many that want to know what tomorrow will bring, bet on what they think it will be, but are really, deep down, more concerned with what happens to them after those tomorrows. Where they’ll end up in eternity regardless if they publicly profess that they truly believe. Wonder if Jesus really did come back for them. Can’t find any relativity in what little Gospels or any of the other books in the bible they may have read. Hears about all the daily inconsistencies between one religious leader and another and then wonders which of them is right. But, it’s really all about what’s gonna happen after our tomorrows are up. When we’re called home. When we’re gonna have to stand in front of the Father and give an account of what we’ve done to further His kingdom here, on this earth. Yea, our tomorrows tomorrow.

There’s a story I heard about the innocence of children and how they view tomorrows. You see, every day this family would pass the cemetery as the father drove his two preschoolers to their day care. As they passed each day, his son Tim would remind his younger sister, “Janna, that’s where the dead people are.”

Janna was almost three years of age, and the idea of death was somewhat confusing to her. Her brother explained that the cemetery is where they bury people’s bodies in the ground when they are dead and their spirits go back to God.

Several months later, on Memorial Day, their family went for a little bike ride. Janna rode behind the father in a bike trailer. With helmet on and her eyes darting from site to site, they all enjoyed the fresh air and sunshine of that day. They rode by the cemetery. It was filled with flowers and flags, people everywhere. Some were huddled in groups. Others knelt alone in front of headstones.

Janna saw this site and from the bike trailer behind her father began to shout, “They’re alive! They’re alive! Daddy, they’re alive!” It may have been Memorial Day, but for Janna, it was Easter. We’re never too young to hear and believe and tell.

Folks, Jesus was addressing this telling when He was talking to His Father. Our Father. Jesus was trying to pave the way for you and me to follow Him and tell what He did and what He said and how that might apply to you and me. Jesus was asking for God to show a little grace toward His creations when it comes time to pass judgment. He was making a promise that there will still be someone here to spread the message He gave to all those who are ready to face the truth rather than the worldly machinations of those in power or those that want to intimidate through fear. If only they would latch onto the message of His that calls for loving belief because we do show our true belief by what message we say and do. The danger is that we substitute what we want to be the truth for the real truth without fully understanding that truth or that lie.

There are those who use what is going on in this world for their own gain. Their own power. From the shooting down in Texas to many other events. They believe, or try to make you believe, that they have all the answers. That given just a little more power to control your todays that they can control your tomorrows and overcome evil. They use tragedy to their own ends to elevate their own self-absorbed narcissistic power trip. Raise themselves up to feed their own egos at your ultimate expense. But they are lying to you. Evil has a way of doing that. It plays on the fears that we may wake up tomorrow to something worse than it is today. But evil is just that. Evil. No matter where it rears its ugly head, and it will from time to time, it is still evil and it’ll lie to you and try to convince you to just put your trust in it. But that’s just it. It’s all a lie.

What did Ronald Reagan say? He said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” That was said 34 years ago and it was said again on national TV just a few weeks ago. It was a lie then and it still is today because no one living on this earth has that much power over evil. No one. And if they tell you they do, then just turn around. After all, amid all the talk of gun control by the crowd that pushes it, all one has to do is to look to Chicago every Monday morning and count the bodies. Where are the speeches? Where are the leaders on this? Or go to a VA hospital and count how many will spend days just trying to get in. And don’t. And don’t get me started on Social Security. Now it’s considered a benefit rather than what it was originally. But those in power don’t care. They play to the cameras. To gain more power. Power based on nothing but evil. Pure and simple.

Now, in the end, Jesus places the future of our world and the faith community in God’s hands. But like literally everything else, God requires our action. Not necessarily in a macro world sense but in a micro community sense. Community of neighbor to neighbor. Relative to relative. Friend to friend. Father to son and mother to daughter. Brother to sister and leader to constituent. Each of us is to carry on with our message of loving belief to each and every person who can’t seem to get through the door jam of God’s house because they’re so stuck in all the crap of this world. So they can be included in this prayer of Jesus. So they can see the light too. And He wants to give a level of confidence that He’ll be there, walking beside you, helping you to lend that hand, give that word, be that presence so that everyone can know that they’ve heard the real truth in the Good News.

The old woman, in our parable, is you and me because we see others and we sometimes wonder where their head is at. We hear about all the people who are so caught up in their own self that they can’t begin to see others that need to hear what the Good News is. People, like the first group, that walk away knowing, down deep, that their own definitions of right and wrong are flawed but become entrenched in their own sense of righteousness. People, like the second group, that get inspired by new understanding but the trenches of this world and their own sensibilities drag them back and they end up reaching that same end of the road as if they had never been warned. People, like the third group, that walk around the truth like it was gonna reach out and bite them causing them to deflate their own sense of self-god. They ignore truth like it was the plague because that truth might be uncomfortable and not with it in the present culture. They seem to have forgotten that they’ve become exactly what they hate the most in other people and evolved into them and then they really begin to hate themselves in the end. You know, people who lose their heads are usually the last to miss them.

We, as the old woman, can impart what we know as truth given to us by our Gospels and then it is up to others as to what they do with it. But, we are, never the less, tasked with giving that bit of Good News to others. And, just like the people who went to the old woman, what they do with it is up to them. Jesus is still praying to His Father on behalf of each of us to come to the final realization that what happens next in our lives depends on the decisions we make today. God’s response is a sign of each of our own eschatological possibilities.

We only have so many tomorrows and then we stand in front of the Almighty and give an account to what advice and words we choose to hear, choose to ignore, choose to scream at others, choose to live by, choose to put on the back burner, choose to walk around, choose to keep to ourselves, choose to give away, choose to disbelieve, choose to believe. There are those that chose to sacrifice so you and I could have a tomorrow. They were not glory seekers or power hungry. They didn’t use a tragic event, like in Texas, to promote their own agenda. No, they decided that they would do as Jesus did. Serve. Serve something larger than themselves. Our time is not God’s time. Who we serve can define who we can be. What time we have left here on this earth can be spent celebrating the gifts we’ve been given or can be a time to regret, the people who gave of themselves so we could live. Those that choose to help others celebrate the freedoms they were promised made good use of their time.

Ecclesiastes says it best when it talks about the time each of us has in our lives. There is an appointed time for everything and there is a time for every event under heaven. A time to plant. A time to embrace. A time to search. A time to love. Shouldn’t we be cognizant that our time might fall into one of those time slots Solomon wrote about? Shouldn’t we be aware that the truth he wrote about was spoken of by Jesus in this Gospel? Shouldn’t we do something? Anything? The old woman continued to tell others of what their next time would entail. Maybe we can hear what Jesus is putting on our own hearts too. Something to think about! Something to pray about?

Can we pray? …

Father we pray for the strength and guidance to follow in the path of your Son. We pray that we can always be on the lookout for any that might be straying or in darkness. We pray that we can have the courage to face our own tomorrows with the assurance that you’ve always been there to help us to take those next steps with certainty. Please send your Holy Spirit down to us to show us the way. We pray for your spirit so that we can be a part of this prayer that Jesus said to His father. We pray that you give us the grace and the mercy that we need on a day to day basis and let us begin to show others that you are the truth and the light. Never to be diminished. Never to go out. We pray this in the name of your Son, Jesus the Christ.

And all God’s people said – Amen?!

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