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When I was younger, one of my favorite books was Love You Forever by Robert S. Munsch. The story is told about a mother’s unconditional and unending love for her son, through his two year old trials to his adult antics. No matter what her son did, she rocked him and sang a song: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” In the end of the book, as the mother is dying the roles are reversed; the son holds her and sings her song back to the old woman. “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you forever, as long as I’m living, my mommy you’ll be.”
In John 17 we see another type of role reversal. Jesus, the teacher, model, leader, is about to depart from this world. He takes his disciples aside and prays for them, telling them it is their turn to be the leaders, teachers, and models. He has sung them the song of life, and now it is their turn to sing it to others. I don’t know about you, but when I try to imagine myself as one of the disciples in this particular story I think that I would be a bundle of different emotions and questions. I would be confused as to why Jesus is speaking, yet again, about leaving us. Saddened by the idea of being left alone. And apprehensive about transitioning from the role of follower to leader.
The chief question that I would be asking is “How?”. “How can I know what to teach, Jesus?” “How can I function without you?” “ How will I have the strength?” But Jesus has an answer for all of my “How” questions in this prayer, stay close to the source – God.
In the gospel of John, Jesus is constantly pointing back to the Father, and this prayer is no exception. Starting at the beginning of today’s scripture lesson Jesus prays, I have made YOUR name known to those whom YOU have given me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word.” Everything that we recognize in Jesus as blessed and vital, his teachings, his following, his power, his love, all come from God. And because God gave him these things, we as disciples are not only given access to them, but are called to have and share. We are to spread and glorify God’s name by our actions and words, just as Jesus did.
Jesus says, “For the words that you gave to me I have given to them.” The big theme through out the Gospel of John in truth. Jesus speaks the truth because he is the truth. And all that he speaks and is comes from God. But now Jesus has given us those same prophetic words to speak into our world. And he warns that people are probably not going to like what we have to say. However, we must remember that we are not asking for people to like us, but rather to seek and possibly see the truth. But, all too often I think we twist and shy away from Jesus’ truth.
For the past week I have been taking a summer class to prepare for my upcoming job assignment called Community Organizing. I struggled the whole way through the week with different things that were learning, just feeling overall uncomfortable in my spirit. Finally, on Friday, I realized why I was so unhappy. We were being told to exaggerate statements, twisting the truth, for the sole reaction of agitating people.
Friends, Jesus gives us hard words to speak, but they are not just to agitate. We are called to share Jesus’ prophetic message, not to shy away and make it more manageable. Those prophetic messages are truth that cuts and hurts and heals in order to re-create the world into the Kingdom that God intended it to be. To focus on God and his power alone. We should not shrink God’s powerful message in order to make ourselves or others more comfortable.
I also had unease with the class around the topic of power, especially while I was working on this sermon. While Jesus does not explicitly state it, he is giving his disciples, you and me, his power. The training spoke of using power for good, but the power Christ gives us is for much more then doing good – it is for bringing about the kingdom of God and making disciples. We are given the power to bring people wholeness and the truth that can only come by revealing to others whom the source is. Are we singing God’s song to other people “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, for always and ever, my child you’ll be” or are we like the world, using power to sort people into categories of the important and the unimportant? Christ states in his prayer that, “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong.”. Dear Friends, if we truly used our power the way Christ did and spoke God’s words of truth, we would not belong to this world. We either shrug off the power we have, because we just don’t want to deal with the tension it will create, or we use power like the world, exploiting some to get further ahead.
I heard a heart-wrenching tale this week that I would like to share with you. Up until the 1980s, a well-known car company had plants in New Jersey about ten minutes from the small town of Ringwood. They originally planned to build a 50 million closed community there for their executives, but decided against that idea. Instead, they took Ringwood and made it the dumping ground for the chemicals emitted from their plants, burying barrel after barrel of toxic waste and lead paint in its mines and dams. But what is buried on the 900+ acres of land used for dumping could not stay underground forever. The residences of the area, mostly Native Americans, began to find that they were becoming sick and that there woman were unable to give birth and that their children were dying very young. However, the government of NJ, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the car company insisted that the 61 drums of toxic waste and 720 tons of lead paint sludge that had been dumped there could not have caused these problems. The man who was telling me his story shared that his town is dying off – at a rate of two people every 12 days from the effects of the toxins, and that he is a dying man, having over 13 cists and 9 tumors removed from his body, with 7 more to be removed.
The city of Ringwood is the source of 4 major rivers that flow combine as a reservoir to provide water for over 2 million New Jersey residents. The water in the town resembles orange peanut butter like sludge that is not only unsafe to drink, but has also tainted the Native Americans food as it is absorbed into their fruits and vegetables. The source of their life, the living water, only brings death.
This story causes me to pause and ask you two questions Practically – what would you do if you knew that other children of God were being poisoned? For far too many religious people around Ringwood, the answer has been to do nothing. But Christ did not pray for us in this prayer to do nothing, he prayed for us to speak God’s truth! Christ prays to God to “Protect them…. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” But what have we been sent into the world to do? Are we to turn a blind eye to injustice or toss up our hands in defeat? If this the model that we are teaching others, what type of Christians will the generation that follow us be? And is this indifference speaking God’s message of unconditional love to others?
The Ringwood story originally prompted me to ask the “how” question, similar to the questions the disciples asked when they heard that Jesus would be leaving them shortly. “How can I know what to do and say, Jesus?” and “How can I bring about the Kingdom in this situation?” The answer I found was the same for me as it would have been for the disciples, stay close to the source. This leads to the second question - so what does it look like to stay close to the source? Perhaps an answer can be found in Psalm 1. Here we are told that “[the righteous] are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.”
We all find our source in something. For those whom find their source in and through God, they “delight in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.” As people of God we must first and foremost draw our strength from the scriptures. How do we know the will of God? From his word given to us. We must be a people grounded in the scripture if we are to draw upon life giving water. Secondly, we must be a people of prayer – seeking after God’s heart. Prayer is an expression of our relationship with the source. And finally, we stay close to the source by being in community. Jesus prayed, “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.” This does not mean that we need to agree on every issue or the meaning behind every piece of scripture, but it does we that we are in community with the righteous and follow their direction. The Psalmist writes, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners treed, or sit the seats of the scoffers.” For these things expose us to a lack of fresh water. It is like drawing up the orange sludge water from Ringwood into our trees, we will wither and die, not being able to produce fruits for others that reflect God’s goodness. We cannot be paralyzed by fear – of being wrong, of being disliked by others, or of not being with the agenda of the world. May we strive to speak the truth, the word of God, and to do so in love, unconditionally?
Another one of my favorite stories as a child was “Who’s Going to Take Care of Me?” by Michelle Magorian. The book told the story of Eric, a little boy who looked to his big sister, Karin to take care of him at daycare. But one day, Karin had to go to school instead of daycare, which prompted little Eric to ask, “Who is going to take care of me?” In the end, Eric found himself taking care of another little boy at daycare, leading the new boy as Karin had done for him.
While I can imagine the disciples asking at the conclusion of this prayer, “Who is going to take care of me Jesus?” their story did not end there. For they learned to take care of each other and the world, spreading the news of the gospel so that we have it today. They told the story that the empire and the religious establishment didn’t want them to tell, because it was against their world. They healed those who had been caste off by society. And they befriended those who were deemed untouchable. They pointed others back to the source that brought life.
May we too cease to think about ourselves, as little Eric learned to do in the story. Instead of being concerned for himself, he reached out in concern for others. May we stay close to the source through prayer, scripture, and community, drawing upon it for the strength we need to speak the powerful message of truth to the world.
Amen.
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