John 17:6-19
“Otherworldly”
May 16, 2021
On a walk along a beach, leaning into the window of an idling car, in a busy ER waiting room, standing in the snow, on a train heading to New York, on a darkened porch, in the produce aisle at Hannaford, at a table in a diner filled with cups of coffee.
Of course, the more common locations have been next to a bed in the hospital, standing on a grassy hill in a cemetery, sitting at a long holiday table filled with family, on the phone, streaming via Zoom and, again in the not-too-distant future within the four walls we know and miss over there across the street.
All of these and so many more have been places where I have prayed. To quote C.S. Lewis, “I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”
The very fact that prayer is not restricted to a church building but rather is available everywhere and in every time is what sustains so many of us.
The location of this second most well known of Jesus’ prayers is meant to solidify the three-way connection between Jesus and his disciples and God.
Jesus is the mediator between God and humanity.
This is all happening at the Last Supper just before Jesus will be put to death and he wants to be a source of strength for his friends because he knows that their life will not be easier once he’s gone.
Jesus is asking God to take care of them because he knows what a mess the world he’s leaving is and the armor he’s leaving them is the knowledge that though they will dwell in this violent, hard, unjust world they are otherworldly.
They must stay behind in solidarity with the hurting people of the world and work at making it better.
Jesus is offering them hope rather than despair through this prayer.
When we pray we are communicating with a purpose.
Whenever I get to hear someone praying aloud, I’m always listening to see if the person praying is seeking change or am I the one to be changed – sometimes it’s the pray-er and those being prayed for who come away a little different then they were before the prayer.
Prayer can have the ability to make us want to be the change we hold up to God.
Jesus is praying so the disciples will not lose heart.
We, too, as his latter-day disciples need to muster the strength and resolve to not back down in the face of suffering and injustice and poverty that cries out for our response.
We are intended to dive in and do what we can to repair the world – one small act and one single day at a time.
When we pray here together be it when we seek God’s favor in the Lord’s Prayer, or raise up the celebrations and hurts in the Prayer of the People or the blessing for when we’re not together the rest of the week that is the Benediction, we are acknowledging that we are embarking on God’s work through the living of our days.
There’s so much work to be done.
Jesus’ radical message was a challenge to the powers that be of his time.
He lived a life that drew lots of folks from all different walks of life who came from diverse family backgrounds.
Some had money, most did not.
Some were sick or living with a disability.
And yet he was able to infuse them with the knowledge that each and every one was beloved by God and of equal value which went against everything the Empire of the time stood for.
Power and privilege was assumed by those with property and influential families and their priority was to stay on top. Not much has changed, has it?
What Jesus shares with his disciples then and we followers now through this prayer is his appeal to God to keep them and us safe, especially when we face challenges trying to act in love.
Jesus is looking for protection for followers when they stick their necks out and are vulnerable to the evils of the world.
His prayer is that as followers we will be actively engaged in the world but be held and strengthened by God.
Jesus is modeling the power inherent in prayer.
He recognizes that prayer takes what is, good and evil, and places God right in the middle of it all.
Such recognition is what empowers us to first imagine and then pursue a world of love, justice and mercy, the one Jesus envisioned.
Psalm 1 that we said together with Alyson is an example of the power of prayer to remind us of the presence of a loving God during hard times. Todd Jenkins has an amazing reflection on that power:
The psalmists knew very well
how carefully loaded phrases
strung together in surprising ways
can be explosive in both
hopeful and dangerous ways;
how hurling guttural truth
toward the heavens changes
the world in ways we can
neither explain nor predict;
how leaving wide margins
of blank silence leaves room
for the other voice to speak.
The pieces that both come from
and travel to the deepest places
often begin with empty lines,
which represent the ways
we duct-tape the voices in our head
long enough to hear the one in our heart.
Those are the ones asking us
questions which most need answering;
questions that all creation asks daily;
questions that weave us into
a tapestry of history and hope.
(from Tuesday’s Muse 2)
Jesus’ prayer here is for us, today, when the world is both a mess and glorious. May we live into his words…
The ones he sends us out into the world with and may we be changed for the better by our own prayers.
Amen.