12 May 2013 “Whose Glory?” John 17:20-26

12 May 2013                “Whose Glory?”                     John 17:20-26

  The 1999 movie Tuesday with Morrie, based on the book by the same name, is the true story of a sports writer, Mitch Albom, and his reunion with his former college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who is dying of ALS. Mitch was a multitasking workaholic, whose life is a series of hurried appointments, rushed phone calls, and last minute sprints to catch a flight. When he discovers that Morrie was in the last stages of his disease he honors a long overdue promise to visit him.

  In these visits, Morrie teaches Mitch some important lessons about what matters in life. In one scene Morrie is very frail and is lying in a recliner in obvious pain. He grimaces and asks Mitch to rub his aching feet with salve. “When we are infants,” he says, “we need people to survive; when we are dying, we need people to survive; but here is the secret: in between we need each other even more.”

  Mitch nods and remembers a quote he has heard Morrie say many times. He says, “We must love one another or die.” Morrie loses patience with Mitch. “Yeah, but do you believe that? Does it apply to you?”

 Mitch is stunned and defensive as he confesses that he does not know what he believes. The world he lives in does not allow for thinking about spiritual things.

  Mitch’s struggle is not so different from ours.  Anxiety and passion in life are intimately connected. Writers have even spoken of John Calvin, one of our Presbyterian forefathers, as “a singularly anxious man.” One spoke of him as “viewing human existence as a perpetual crisis of indecision, echoed in the contingencies of nature itself.”   All that keeps the universe from falling apart in any instance, said Calvin, is the immediate act of God’s continual creation.

  “The glory of God, he said, [is] manifested in the stability of the earth.” Apart from this sustaining act of divine intervention, the earth would be “plunged into darkness, . . . thrown into a state of confusion and horrible disorder and misrule, for there can be no stability apart from God.”

 Were God to withdraw God’s hand in any way – were the praise of God to cease in the world, “all things would immediately dissolve into nothing.”

“We must love one another or die,” says Morrie, “It is a very simple lesson, Mitch.”

  In the scripture we have heard this morning, Jesus is praying to God for the church. Jesus is praying that the church feel the hand of God, hear God’s raise and experience the same kind of love and unity in the Spirit that Jesus himself experiences with God. “May they be one, just as I am in you and you are in me.”

 It is important we experience this unity with Jesus and God and the church because how we act says something to others about who God is. It is important because we need each other.   It is also important to remember unity is not uniformity. Jesus did not pray, “That they all may be the same.” He prayed, “That they all may be one.” Variety is valuable, and in the words of Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, “different is not deficient.” It is just different.

 In the movie The Apostle, there is a wonderful scene where Robert Duvall, who plays an evangelist, the Apostle E.F., in the southern Holiness Pentecostal tradition, has just  re-baptized himself by emersion in the river. He is in a simple shirt and pants, the only clothes he has. The river is muddy. It is in Southern Louisiana.

 Then, as he is traveling he comes across a big Roman Catholic celebration, where a whole line of boats festively decorated are traveling down the river and the priest in all his finery is there sprinkling holy water on the boats as they come near the dock. It is a blessing of the fishing fleet.

 The Apostle E.F. says to himself as he watches, “you do it your way, I do it mine, but we get the job done.”

 Yet, it is, of course, precisely because we are different that our unity is sometimes our greatest struggle.   It is important to remember our differences serve a very important function:  They keep us from grievous error. They keep us fresh and alive. They keep us mentally awake and alert. Differences awaken competing viewpoints, which keeps us fresh and relevant. They keep us growing.

  Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks of glory for all. Right at the beginning Jesus and the disciples go to a wedding. You know the story. The wine gives out. Jesus turns water into wine. There was an overflowing of graciousness, a miraculous abundance. This first miracle sets the tone for others to come.

 Often it takes a moment like that to see God’s glory. We plod along in our accustomed ways, victims of the ordinary and the everyday. Allowing the small pleasure, you do it your way, I do it mine, and we both get it done.

  Then there comes some shining moment, an outbreak of glory, a blessing of self or a blessing of the fleet that takes us by surprise. The ordinary veil of the everyday is pulled back, light shines, everything is transformed into golden hues, and we see glory.

 The poet Mary Oliver writes a friend of hers, who is a monk, and a bishop often challenges her to, “Put yourself in the way of grace.”

  For ourselves, well, often we try another way. We do not think first about putting ourselves in the way of grace. No, we look instead for a light in the wilderness. We seek knowledge and understanding from the light of reason. Mary speaks of the light in another way. Not knowing what to call it, she says it may be hope, or even faith.

 Putting ourselves in the way of grace, hope, or faith begins with listening. Listening to the whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community. The poet William Blake likens it to “taking dictation.”

What we seek begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, and it neither begins nor ends with the human world. It is like a nudge, the prick of the instant, the flame of appreciation that shoots into our soul, the unspeakable notion.

 There is nothing so special in this and it may not prove anything in the usual sense. But living like this may be the difference between a luminous life and a ho-hum life.   Between grace and anxiety about what we believe.

 As Mary Oliver say, “My affinity is to the whimsical, the illustrative, and the suggestive – not to the actual or the useful. I walk, and I notice. I use my senses in order to be spiritual.”

 So, we are to put our self in the way of grace. To believe in grace and the soul, to believe in them exactly as much and as hardily as one believe in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view – imagine the consequences!  How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful and potentially life changing!

 For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, and your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world! The other half is filled with amazing grace.

  Jesus has risen. He stayed with us for a while and this past week in the life of the church we remembered  the ascension of our risen Christ to heaven.  The Easter period begins to ease. We approach Pentecost and the day the Holy Spirit came to the church. And what, if anything, has been determined, selected, nailed down in our lives?

 Perhaps this is the lesson of age – events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, and rises again but different. Yet, what happened when one was twenty happens forever.  The sun rolls toward the north. Misery in the world we can do nothing about goes on.

 Along the way we have learned to live, to look, to see, to listen, to feel, to long for, to be surprised by the unexpected. To know joy, love, hope, grace even. There have been moments we thought hard to top. Then, we have.

  Mary Oliver writes, “Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known?

 And if you think that one day the secret of light might come, grace might appear, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?”

 Would this not be your hour to share in God’s glory?

  Jesus says, “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you. I made your name known to them, so the love with which you have loved me may be in them.”

 “It is a very simple lesson, Morrie said to Mitch.”

 “We must love one another…”

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

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