7-easter-2019-winnsboro.md

Sun, Jun 2, 2019 St. John’s Winnsboro

The Seventh Sunday of Easter

06/03/2019
St. John’s, Winnsboro

Opening

Last Thursday was the feast of the Ascension. This Sunday is the last in the season of Easter. A week of weeks. Next Sunday is Pentecost.

From revealing, manifesting, appearing to hiding, fading into the background, no longer as present, but present in a new way.

In preparing for this Sunday, I had occasion to revisit my previous Sundays with you here at St. John’s. I was a little surprised to find that I had been here on the 7th Sunday of Easter last year. The same lessons except in Year B instead of Year C.

Last year I preached on several themes associated with Ascension.

  • ritual passage from one season to another
  • Turning goodbyes into Joy
  • Thin places where the sacred is able to break into our world

Living for others

This year I am especially impressed with another theme. I call it “living for others.”

This year, more than years past for me, I was sensitive to the self-awareness of the writer of John’s gospel. That he writes for those coming after his immediate audience. We’ve heard the theme from John’s gospel really from the beginning of Easter down to today. The author of the gospel portrays Jesus in today’s talk to his disciples the night before he is to die, that he is addressing not just them but to all those who will come to faith in Jesus because of their words and actions. All the descendants of these before him – his immediate audience. Jesus is insistently a man not for himself but for the sake of others. A man for others. And he calls us all, men and women, to be not for ourselves but for those who will come after.

Some examples that we have heard over the course of the Easter season.

Ch. 21 ending:

24 This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. 25 But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

Ch. 20 ending: The Purpose of This Book

30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Ch. 17 (today)

20 I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,

The consensus among scholars is that John’s gospel was written down several generations after the death of Jesus -incorporating traditions going back to Jesus’ lifetime. The writer of the gospel is keenly aware of the need to put down in writing the Traditions about the Christ so that future generations will have what they need to become fully alive human beings, devoted to the glory of God, not for themselves but for the sake of others.

The phrase living for others comes from an address given by the head of the Jesuits in 1973. It was a call to change. Change in individual hearts. Change in the community hearts. To change from a primary concern for one’s own well-being and turning to care for others. 1

The concept of living for others, seeking justice and mercy not first for ones’ self but rather for others, has resonated with many church leaders up to the present day -not least the current pope who is himself a Jesuit. It is looked at by some as a radical idea. It seems that it is only the same idea that Jesus had from the days he was still meeting and eating with his disciples.

From the address:

Men and Women for Others

Today our prime educational objective must be to form men-and-women-for-others; men and women who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ - for the God-man who lived and died for all the world; men and women who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbors; men and women completely convinced that love of God which does not result in justice for others is a farce.

cp. writers aware that their work is aimed not at the people who buy their work, but for the legacy they pass on to future generations.

Ordering the Body of Christ

Many years ago a bishop, I’ll call him Bp. Tom, talked about a new way to understand ordination in the church. He talked about bishops, priests, and deacons as sacred symbols, sacred persons. The basic insight he had come to, rather late in his ministry, was that all Christians are of equal power and importance. Having been baptized into the Body of Christ, we share in authority and responsibility. None is more or less importance.

It was a radical notion, then and now, also calling for change. It meant, among other things, that every congregation ought to have priests and deacons in their midst, to function of sacred symbols, calling all the people to be doing what they were called to do as members of the Body of Christ.

He paid particular attention to three things that the 3 orders of our church called us to:

  1. Deacons call us to serve others
  2. Priests call us to bless and forgive
  3. Bishops call us to stewardship of the gifts we have received

Each of those actions is fundamentally defined in terms of its impact on other people than ourselves. Serving others. Blessing and forgiving others. Stewardship of all that has been freely given to us.

I have resonated with the teaching of Bp. Tom ever sense I heard them. They are powerful because they have the potential to empower a radical, new, and stronger church than the one we so often meet.

God’s love everywhere in plain sight

In The Shack – both the book and the movie – the figure of God the Father very intentionally persuades the narrator that God is “especially fond of him.” Only gradually as the truth of that soaks in, do we begin to realize that God is “especially fond” of everyone – indeed of all of God’s creation. God is so lavish with love it permeates the cosmos.

Whichever way we turn, O God, there is your face in the light of the moon and patterns of stars, in scarred mountain rifts, and ancient groves, in mighty seas, and creatures of the deep. Whichever way we turn, O God, there is your face, in the light of eyes we love, in the salt of tears we have tasted, in weathered countenances east and west, in the soft skin glow of the child everywhere. Whichever way we turn, O God, there is your face, there is your face among us.2

[an intro …]

If we are to lives our lives for the sake of others – that was Jesus’ model, it was the gospel writers’ model – we must live them in such a way that others can recognize Christ. No less. No more. In vulnerability not invincibility. In compassion for others rather than passionate self-service.

A Christian is one who points at Christ and says, ‘I can’t prove a thing, but there’s something about his eyes and his voice. There’s something about the way he carries his head, his hands, the way he carries his cross-the way he carries me.’ 3

Thomas Merton put it this way:

Life is simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything – in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it. 4

Ascension Tide invites us to look at the world around us with new eyes, to hear with new ears, and to love with new hearts. It calls us to be men and women who live not for ourselves but for others.

  1. http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/men-for-others.html The address of Father Pedro Arrupe to the “Tenth International Congress of Jesuit Alumni of Europe,” in Valencia, Spain, on July 31, 1973, has already been published in French, Spanish and Italian. ↩︎

  2. John Philip Newell, Praying With the Earth (Eerdmans: Michigan) 23. Photo courtesy of Jacob Ruff. ↩︎

  3. Frederick Buechner ↩︎

  4. from Thomas Merton via Celtic Daily Prayer ↩︎

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