05 June 2011 “The Voice” John 17:1-11

05 June 2011 “The Voice” John 17:1-11

With great anticipation and hope we spent the whole of the Lenten season waiting for Jesus’ resurrection. We’ve lived enough Easter’s to know on that same Sunday each year Jesus leaves the tomb alive. He leaves the tomb and he doesn’t just run off to heaven. No, Jesus stays around for a while. He hangs out at the tomb waiting for his disciples, he walks with them along the road, he appears with them around a table. Where ever they may be, we find Jesus has been with them. Perhaps we may have missed the obvious, for these past seven Sundays of the Easter season Jesus has been hanging out with his disciples. Jesus is still risen!
For our part, the church wants to hang on to Jesus, we don’t want to tell him good bye. Here on the pulpit and draped over the cross and there where the choir sits we are still wearing the white of the Easter season as proof. What might not have seemed so obvious at first should be crystal clear this Sunday. We aren’t ready for Jesus to go.

I expect it’s really his fault. These past seven weeks Jesus has been teaching us his most amazing truths about his love and his kingdom and the place he has there for us, his children. We like it when someone tells us they love us. And for Jesus to be that one, well, we were smitten at first but now we are head over heels in love. The really good news is that Jesus loves us back! He wasn’t kidding when he told us about himself from the beginning. Jesus has come to save the world and to save each of us with his love.

For much of the time since Easter we have been reading from John’s gospel. Central to John is his unique and unprecedented message of access to God. As John makes it clear, Jesus shares in God’s character and in God’s identity. In John 1:1 we are told, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” It is as the Word made flesh that Jesus brings God fully to the world. From John 1:14 we read, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a fathers’ only son, full of grace and truth.”
During these post-resurrection days we are being reminded of Jesus living among us. We are being reminded that he has prepared a place for us. A place not found by taking a path or a road, not found in a book or a special place or even our strong and loud declaration of faith. No, our way is found with a man who lived like us, Jesus Christ. A man who calls us to come and risk the impossible life of faithfulness to him .

Knowing this truth, knowing even the risk, our only desire is to be with Jesus each moment of each day, to hear his voice again, to never let him go. We are so like the early disciples, we desire to have the physical, mental, and spiritual presence of the risen Christ alive in our lives always.
Jesus knows this, he wants us to never feel alone, to never feel abandoned by our God, so he promises to send us an advocate, someone to be with us in his absence, the Holy Spirit, who will be in our heart and mind and soul forever. What a comfort, our God will always be with us in the presence of the Holy Spirit, our personal advocate.
Yet, in the midst of our chaotic lives it seems we rarely feel God’s presence this way. We find ourselves thinking if the Holy Spirit is supposed to be living in us, why, the Holy Spirit must be taking an extended nap.
Where is the Holy Spirit when we pray we need all the Godly help we can get to just make it through the day? Where is the Holy Spirit when we pray Jesus will show us how to live a faith filled life so we can be sure about his promises? We just wish Jesus would show up for us. We wish we could hear his voice speaking again to our heart, our soul. Where could he possibly be? Jesus is so difficult to recognize, isn’t he?

Listen again to the promise from the good news of John 17 in verse 11;
“And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
Jesus’ last words to his disciples are this prayer. It is a prayer made directly to God on our behalf. Notice how Jesus prays the way we pray. Holy Father, protect them. Holy Father, guard them. Holy Father, keep them. Then he prays for something only Jesus could pray, it follows today’s scripture. “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”

What a strange thing to say. How can we be in the world, but not of it? Perhaps Jesus’ point is we, his disciples, folk who believe in him, folk who trust in him, wish we could just live in obedience and love him and not have to struggle with the real world. After all, we do not belong to this world, we belong instead to Jesus’ world, the place for which he died, his kingdom. Yet, here we are.

Faced with this dilemma, how do we live knowing we belong to another world, to another person?

I have read of a family that has given up television. They want to remind themselves and their children: this box does not own us!
I have heard it said there are people who designate one day a week as their “car-less” day. They won’t drive, or accept a ride in anyone else’s car. If they need to go some where, they walk or ride their bike. They want to remind themselves: this gasoline does not own me!
A colleague knows a family that keeps a supply of homemade paper sack lunches in the trunk of the car. The children wrap up peanut butter sandwiches, and then pack them with pieces of fruit, granola bars, cookies, and such. If they see a person asking for assistance on the way to school, they stop the car. The children offer a paper sack lunch and a smile. They want to remind us: this myth of scarcity does not own us! This love less world does not own us!

I hear about a pastor who takes himself on an ‘artists date’ once a week. He sets aside two hours to do something completely different, like walking around an art gallery, or going to see a foreign film, or sitting at the bus station and just watching the people who get off, to see life in different ways. The practice feeds his soul, and rejuvenates his spirit. It gives him energy to manage his overloaded calendar. He wants to remind himself: time or the lack of it, does not own me!

We see these responses to life all around us. People volunteer at the hospital or at hospice. People help out in the schools or at the library. People volunteer at church to help feed the community, to help bring fellowship to a gathering of the faithful, to visit with a sick friend, an aging parent, to help a stranger, a foreigner, a widow, a child. People are living and speaking the voice of love. We want to remind ourselves: this world does not own us! God’s love does!

Jesus says this is to be our way, we are to be in the world, loving as we go, but not of it! These things do not own us. God’s love does. We belong to God and God alone.

We have experienced this truth in this church. We have heard this voice from God in the form of the love that is here. At this pulpit, as some of you read our blessed texts, we have heard the voice of love. From this choir loft; in these pews; at fellowship hour and when we meet in committees or gather for Sunday School, we have heard the voice of love. At session meetings and congregational dinners and impromptu gatherings around town, again, truthfully, we have heard the voice of God’s love.
This real life person, Jesus Christ has brought us his voice, and it is one of love. A voice teaching us who we are, a voice teaching us to which world we belong. It might be one of those things we don’t realize until someone points it out, Jesus’ 33 years on earth was not a once in a lifetime incursion into our lives. No, Jesus has continued to hang around with us.
In a certain way of speaking, the body of Christ is still with us because we are that body. We are the body of Christ alive today to the world. We are the believers the apostle Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians when he affirms, “We are Christ’s body.” Literally, the body of believers, like the Communion Eucharist we will take this morning, is the Body of Christ in an organic way. We believers are not a mystical reality, not something that represents Christ, we are something that is him.

This truth has tremendous implications for our lives and the life of the world. The Holy Spirit dwells in each of us and we have become one with Christ. We have become one with God almighty. And we Presbyterians believe that in this holy union, in this Holy Communion, we are called to salvation and to service. To salvation beyond this world, to service in this world.
Ronald Rolheiser, in his book “The Holy Longing”, says “if it is true that we are the Body of Christ, and it is, then God’s presence in the world today depends very much upon us. We have to keep God present in the world in the same way as Jesus did. We have to become, as Teresa of Avila so simply put it, God’s physical hands, feet, mouthpiece, and heart in this world.” (pg. 80)

Don’t we see this truth in one another? Don’t we recognize the gifts of each person here this morning that are evidence of God’s hands, feet, words and heart opened to us and to the world saying, you are not alone, God loves you, Christ Jesus is here with you, the Holy Spirit has come to live in your very soul. Bringing the good news that you belong to God, and God alone.

And while we do live in this world, you, me, all who believe, we do not belong to this world. We are called today to say to the world, world, you do not own us. We have discovered a better way with the one who has given his life that we may live and that way is Jesus Christ.


In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen

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Additional resource:
“Lectionary Homiletics,” Volume XIX, Number 3, pages 32-39.