Online Sermons
The 7th Sunday in Easter: May 24, Charles Crawley
Welcome to our website. You are here: The Word --> Online SermonsWhen I was eighteen years old and just graduated from high school, I decided to waste no time in getting out of my small hometown in west Texas. So I opted for summer school at Southern Methodist University in the big city of Dallas. I packed my car, making sure I had plenty of eight track tapes for the long road trip, and was ready to go. My parents gathered outside my car to see me off. I thought they would be glad to see me go, since I was the youngest of three children and they’d finally have time for themselves. That’s why I was completely surprised when they started crying both of them!
It was only years later that I understood how they felt when I watched my own eighteen year old son, Nathaniel, pull away from the curb to go to school in Wisconsin. It was that same feeling of grief that Wordsworth expressed this way:
“Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.”
How can we find strength in what remains behind when what remains behind is only a memory of former happiness?
Today’s gospel reading may help us find strength in what remains behind. Chapter 17 in John’s Gospel contains what has been called the Farewell or Consecration or High Priestly Prayer. While it may strike us as formal, obscure and even a little Gnostic, the Farewell Prayer occupies a crucial place in John’s Gospel.
The German New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann wrote a whole book on this one chapter, saying it held the key to the entire gospel of John.
This prayer is positioned strategically between the teaching ministry of Jesus and his Passion and Resurrection. And it is a mission-critical part of Jesus’ ministry because if the disciples fail, then Jesus will have failed as well. The disciples will have to rely on their own inner resources without physical contact with Jesus.
Let’s take a closer look at the text. Jesus talks a lot about the world in this passage. In fact, he uses the word “world” (kosmos in Greek) thirteen times in a span of fourteen verses.
It is clear that Jesus does not see himself as belonging to this world, nor does he see his followers as belonging to it. He has had to protect his followers from the world, just as parents try to protect their children from the dangers of the world, which are many.
Not only does Jesus pray for protection of his followers from the world, but also from the evil one. This is a reference to the demonic, forces over which we have little or no control and are often powerless to explain.
But God so loved the world that he gave his only son (John 3:16)— that’s the Bible verse I learned as a little boy and which you used see in the end zone of football games during an extra point attempt. It’s the verse that Martin Luther called “the Gospel in miniature.” So while the world is a dangerous place, we are not to be afraid of it but to love it and embrace it, because the spirit of God is with us.
It’s like what Tom Joad says to his mother in The Grapes of Wrath. Tom has killed a man in self-defense and is forced to leave the barracks that his family lived in while working as migrant farmers in California. (If you saw the Simpsons last Sunday, there was an homage to the Joads when the people of Ogdenville had to leave and become migrant workers in Springfield, complete with a Beverly Hillbillies’ style truck loaded to the gills with junk.)
Ma Joad is worried because her son is leaving her and she won’t know what’s happening to him. No emails or cellphone calls or even a card on Mother’s Day. The book reads:
“Tom laughed uneasily, ‘Well, maybe like [Preacher] Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one—an’ then—“
‘Then what Tom?’ [Ma asks.]
‘Then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.
… ‘I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”
Similarly our graduates, whom we are honoring this weekend in church and with graduation parties across the land, are going to have to rely on themselves as they go out into the world, without the physical help of their parents or their extended families. We can hope the values we have attempted in instill in them, from little children to the young adults they are today, will stay with them when they are on their own.
Most commencement speakers try to pump up graduates by telling them to follow their passion and do what they love. These speakers often neglect to tell graduates how that passion may not be discovered immediately or may only be found further down the road after a few false starts or detours. Or that you may have to work some less than stellar jobs while you pursue that passion.
Libby and I attended her goddaughter’s graduation last weekend at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where General Colin Powell was the commencement speaker. He gave an excellent speech, which earned a standing ovation, but most important in his remarks were the honest reflections that the General shared as he recalled his mediocre high school performance and equally average college career.
I was reminded of my own days as a student when I studied classical Greek at Yale one summer. I never studied harder than I did that summer, but I had only a D to show for it. But as a good friend told me later, just think how bad it would have been if you hadn’t studied at all!
Jesus prays for his disciples in the Farewell Prayer because he knows they will fail; but he continues to love them, nonetheless. Parents and family members, just like members of the larger church family, will love our graduates, no matter what happens to them.
In his poem, “Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost says:
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
One could say the same of Christ Church, except I would say:
“Church is the place where, when you have to go there, we want to take you in.”
So to graduates and to family members, to those leaving and those left behind, if you need to find strength in what remains behind, remember that your church—including the greater church—will always love you and will always take you in.
May it be so—Amen.