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May
23, 2004 (Jimmie Johnson)
Psalm 97:1-9
The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands
be glad! Clouds and thick darkness are all around him; righteousness
and justice are the foundation of his throne. Fire goes before him,
and consumes his adversaries on every side. His lightnings light
up the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like
wax before the LORD, before the Lord of all the earth. The heavens
proclaim his righteousness; and all the peoples behold his glory.
All worshipers of images are put to shame, those who make their
boast in worthless idols; all gods bow down before him. Zion hears
and is glad, and the towns of Judah rejoice, because of your judgments,
O God. For you, O LORD, are most high over all the earth; you are
exalted far above all gods.
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John 17:20-26
“I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of
those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all
be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also
be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The
glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may
be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become
completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me
and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire
that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I
am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me
before the foundation of the world. “Righteous Father, the
world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you
have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it
known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them,
and I in them.”
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Every Sunday, except during the season of Easter, (which is still
going on by the way), David or I stand in front of you, and following
the Prayer of Confession, David or I say the Assurance of Pardon
to the whole Lord’s Day assembly. All Presbyterian ministers
do this. By not saying it in Easter, we are saying even more powerfully
that the truest truth about us is not that we are sinners but rather
that we are forgiven.
The Assurance of Pardon we say to you is based on words written
by St. Paul in the letter to the Romans in the New Testament, Romans
8:34, to be specific. Remember how the words go? “Who is in
a position to condemn us? Only Christ! Christ is the one who died
for us, Christ is the one who was raised for us, Christ is the one
ruling in authority for us. Christ is the one praying for us.”
That’s the promise of St. Paul’s words in the Bible.
I love all those affirmations, but the one that has come to mean
the most to me is the final affirmation of who Christ is. “Christ
is the one praying for us.” Isn’t this the true insight
of Easter, that God’s word to us through Christ is a prayer
for us? Our only possible condemner, the only one who has the moral
stature to accuse us of falling short of God’s glory with
the way we live our lives, is Jesus Christ. And he is praying for
us, not condemning us but speaking up for us.
If you want some news that will help you take a deep breath, and
perhaps even sleep better, help you not feel unduly anxious about
the world your grandchildren will inherit, help inspire you to serve
the least and resist injustice— there it is! Christ is praying
for us!
The lesson from the gospel of John is a text passing on to us followers
of Jesus the words of his prayer. We are located in these verses.
The First Presbyterian Church of Waco, Texas, is actually in these
verses. Verse 20 talks about us who are believers of the word, what
we call the gospel—the good news of Jesus—the “Jesus
words” passed on to us through the preaching, sacraments and
writings of the earliest Christians. Jesus is praying for us in
this text from John. This news of Jesus praying for us is, at least
for me, the most powerful image concerning our relationship with
God.
How would your life be different today if at each and every moment
of fear, guilt, or despair, you reminded yourself Jesus is praying?
Whom else would you want more than Jesus praying for you? Whom else
more than Jesus would you want praying for the world? An enemy doesn’t
pray for you. An uninterested party doesn’t pray for you.
A condemner doesn’t pray for you. Even those who love us forget
to pray for us. And eventually the reality of time removes us and
the fact we ever existed from human memory. This slouching toward
nothingness haunts us.
Yet, in the eternal memory of Jesus Christ, we will be remembered
in prayer. The heart of the good news in the Lord’s Day Assembly—what
we call the service of worship—the heart of the good news
is that Jesus stands among us and of all the available options that
are his—he is praying for us! He is praying that’s God’s
glory, God’s love, God’s oneness will be ours.
What’s remarkable is the context of this prayer. What may
overcome our resistance to belief, our cynicism, is the context
of this prayer. This prayer on the part of Jesus takes place between
the betrayal of Judas, which involves the arrest of Jesus in the
garden, followed by Peter’s denying that he is even a follower
of Jesus. This is the context: betrayal and denial. Jesus is at
prayer for us and all—while he is being squeezed by the betrayal
of our common humanity. Followers of Jesus are betraying and denying
him and the image is one of Jesus on his knees.
Christians who believe in their thinking and think in their believing
proclaim this good news in the face of our human dilemma. We turn
on God. We turn on one another. Yes. We betray and deny the best
within ourselves and the best among us. Yes. The tale of history
and even the news of the day verify our proclivity toward night.
Technology, education, science, rationality—none of these
can deliver us from such self-destruction and deception. There is
a great darkness in the world at this moment.
As a whole, the world is the most educated, the most technologically
developed in human history; even a new term was created for the
world: the global village. And, yet, we are on the eve of destruction.
This is a great time to be commissioning the Confirmation Class!
What a great sign of hope! What a very Christian and Reformed thing
to do!
In the face of death and destruction’s threat, Presbyterians
always are at their best when we do the opposite. It’s our
belief in predestination. Predestination in our day is best thought
of as God’s confidence in being God. When life says fear,
we say hope. When current events say despair, we say faith. When
the world shouts hate, we pray for love. We believe predestination
means God will not back off living up to God’s name.
As the class members stand among us, they are signs of God answering
the on-going prayers of Jesus. They, in the humanity of their young
lives, are agents of hopefulness among us. We are saying that in
the face of darkness and death, in the face of our inhumanity to
one another, in the absence of any human reason for hope, there
is this act called confirmation of the young in Christ where the
church—the faith community created around the good news of
who God is in Jesus-- presents young people and their future not
with fearful condemnation but with affirmation of faith, hope and
love.
This is a sheer act of out-of-this-world-hopefulness to present
young people in the face of the threatening world and by doing so
say: “Life is good because God is good. Yes, we believe love
is stronger than hate. Peace will outlast war. Our ending is a beginning.
Death doesn’t have the last word; rathe,r the prayer of Jesus
for us is the last word about each of us and all of us—
including these Confirmands”
We hold such beliefs in the full awareness of the mystery of the
unknowable that surrounds every realm of meaning. The prayers of
Jesus simply signal us that the Invisible Realm will hold and the
Center will not fold. As a faith community we exist to come together
on Sunday mornings, the day of Resurrection, the Little Easters,
and be a committee on behalf of the whole creation, to give thanks
to God that God’s glory is God’s oneness, that what
God has joined together, in the end, whatever the end is and whenever
the end is, in the end, we human beings are unable at our “best
worst” to separate what God has joined together: God’s
love for us.
Betrayal and desertion and denial will not curse the prayers of
Jesus. Jesus’ prayers for us will see us through. Individually
and collectively. This great darkness is not denied. But neither
is the good news that we have it on good authority that the light
shines in the darkness and the darkness shall never overcome. The
great ambiguity is not denied. We experience the confusion, the
cross-purposes, the meaninglessness of human life; we simply trust
that the suffering and evil, the incoherencies of nature and history
are simply overcome by the prayers of Jesus for God’s children.
When we assemble here with our flawed humanity upon us, bringing
all our betrayals, our denials, bringing all our finiteness and
anxiety, we are adventurous enough and bold enough in the face of
this human predicament to ask: “Who is in a position to condemn
us?” and to hear the truest truth: “Only Christ.”
Of all the many things that Christ is doing for us on our behalf,
Christ is praying for us. There’s the source of our hope.
There’s the reason to commission young people to be Christ’s
servants in the world. There’s the reason to risk looking
foolish to come to church on Sunday morning. There’s the reason
to face death with life. There is the courage to pray ourselves.
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