John's beautiful, poetic and mystical gospel can be difficult to preach about. In this sermon I use the image of a stew in an attempt to illustrate what those illusive words, "...that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us..."
The Sunday after
Ascension
Transcribed from a
sermon given
On May 16, 2010
By Rev. Valerie Ann
Hart
At St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
John 17:20-26
I love John's gospel. There's something about reading John's gospel
that I can't just read it straight through.
I'll read it for awhile and then I'll reach something that just moves me
and I have to stop and be with it. It's
not like reading a textbook. It's
something else. It's like poetry. It's transformative. I love to read John's gospel.
Preaching on John's gospel
however is a whole other thing because John was a mystic. In every spiritual tradition there is a
mystic tradition. In the Jewish
tradition it's Kabbalah. In the Islamic
tradition it's the Sufis. And there have been Christian mystics since the
beginning. Some of them you might know like St. John of the cross or Teresa of
Avila. A mystic is someone who has had
an experience of God, a sense of union with God, and then tries to share that
experience with others.
What the mystics always end up
doing is writing poetry because you can't describe an experience of God in
normal language. It would be like going
to a concert where they perform Beethoven's 9th Symphony and you are
so moved by that final movement that when you come back and you go to tell your
neighbor about it. Now your neighbor has
not only never been to a symphony or heard Beethoven's 9th but they
don't even know what classical music is. You are trying to describe to them
that experience when the chorus comes in and just blasts everything away. It's
just totally transformative. And they are going to go, "Huh?"
So all you can do is sort of
paint pictures, talk in poetic terms. You know what you want to do. You want to
go get your stereo or CD player or MP3 player or however it is you listen to
music – and give it to them. Say,
"Listen to this. Experience
this." That's what John is trying
to do I believe in his gospel.
One of the commentators I read
talks about John's gospel as not so much attempting to convey information as to
elicit an experience. As poetry elicits
an experience from us or a great painting elicits an experience from us. So you run into things like we have today
where it states, "That they may be one as you and I are one, that I may be
in them, and you in me and I in you and them in us." And as you read it, if you try to follow it
logically what you end up is one plus one plus one equals one, and then the
mind kind of goes, “oh”. But if you read
it as poetry, if you read it as trying to elicit that experience of unity that
sense of oneness with God, it can be transformative.
This particular passage is Jesus
praying during the last supper. It's
called the High Priestly Prayer and this is a part of it. He is praying. He is
praying for His disciples. And He is
praying for everyone who would believe in Him based on that Word. That means you and you and you and me. Here He is, the last night, getting ready to
go to His death and He is praying. Now
that last prayer, the last words, the last things we say are sometimes the most
important.
And what does He pray for? What is it that Jesus wants from God more
than anything else? He wants for His
followers to be one. He wants them to be
one as He and the Father are one. That's
what He wants for us. It's like a father about to die. He's in the hospital and
his children are all gathered around him and his last request is that they get
along with each other. Treat each other
well. Don't fight. That's what the heart of a father, or a mother,
wants for their children and that was Jesus' final prayer.
This piece of poetry about union
reflects back, reminds us of, the prolog of John's gospel. Remember John's gospel begins with that
enigmatic, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word
was God?” How can something be with
something and also be it? That what is
written at the beginning of John's gospel. It's a little like a Zen koan. It's poetry; it’s mystery - that relationship
between Christ and the Father where there is oneness and yet separateness. John is trying to elicit in us as we read
this that sense, that intimacy with God.
So, I'm trying to think about how
do I preach on that? How do I put that into
some other words? Something that might
be a little more concrete, a little more grounded, and so I came up with the
image of a stew. Now, if you take
vegetables, you have a carrot and you have onions and you have potatoes and you
have broccoli and you have whatever else happens to be in your refrigerator or
out in the garden at that time. If you put them all in a pot and they sit in the
pot not much happens. They are just
being stored in a pot because when a carrot stored next to a broccoli, they
don't really interact with each other.
They don't change each other.
They don't learn from each other.
They're just there together. In order for them to come into relationship
with each other you have to add the water.
You might think of the water as Christ, and each one of those pieces of
vegetable has a relationship with the water.
But of course not a whole lot happens until you turn on the heat and
that's the Holy Spirit, right? And the
water starts to heat up and as the water starts to heat up that carrot begins
to soften a little bit and some of the flavor of the carrot gets out into the
water and spreads and starts to be picked up by the other vegetables. The onion is also softening up and some of
its flavor gets out into the water and gets absorbed by the carrot. Gradually
with the water and that heat over time all of the vegetables change and change
each other. If you cook a bunch of
carrots together they taste one way, but if you have carrots in with a lot of
other vegetables, they pick up the flavor of each other. And in a good stew that has taken its time,
when you have a bite of that carrot you know it's a carrot but it has the
flavor of everything else that's in the stew because they've come
together. And so there's a way in which
they're all one. They all form one stew
but they each have their own identity, their own essence. And each one tastes better because of their
interaction, because of that chemistry that happens together.
It's like that for us, for a
community. Jesus never talks about Christians as being individuals. It has been said that you cannot be a
Christian in isolation. The relationship
between the individual and Christ is important, but you can't really be a
Christian without being in community because you need that stew around
you. A carrot in the water by itself is
okay, but it's so much better when it's in the stew.
So when we come together, as we
sit in Christ together, we are enriched by one another. And you know sometimes hot water feels really
good when it's been a long day and you're a little achy and you've got a hot
tub and you sit in it and oh, the hot water just feels wonderful. Other times we can say, "Oh, my gosh –
hot water. I don't want to have anything
to do with it." It's a little
uncomfortable because the hot water kind of softens the things, and it can be
uncomfortable, and we change. When we
come together as community we are changed individually. When we really become a community we open
ourselves to be changed by the people around us. And the people around us are changed by the
gifts we bring. And each one of us
brings unique gifts.
One of the great joys that I have
is getting to know people. When new
people come to the church and are becoming involved in the church I try to go
and visit them. It is such a delight to
discover the backgrounds of people, what their passions are and the work
they've done and the unique things that they bring to this community. Each one has a different flavor, a different
taste, different experiences, and each person enriches the whole. That's how we become one by sitting in the
hot water together, by being together, by being there for each other, by
showing up and getting to know each other better.
And this was Jesus' prayer. Notice His last prayer, His prayer to God
when His death was about to arrive was that you and I and each one of us and
all Christians everywhere in the world would be one. He didn't pray that we'd get the theology
right. He didn't pray that we would
figure out how we were supposed to live and what the rules are. He didn't pray for that. He could have. He didn't.
He didn't pray that we'd all be nice or we'd all be good. He didn't pray that the world would all
become a Christian nation.
His prayer was that we would be
one as He and the Father are one. That
would be His glory. His glory is the
oneness of His community and his followers.
And that's what we're called to focus on.
How do we build up the
relationship? How do we enrich ourselves
by the people who are here? We do it by
showing up. We do it by coming to
activities. We do it by picking up the
phone and calling somebody you haven't seen for awhile and say, "Hey, I
haven't seen you for awhile. How are
you?" Or going up to a new person
or somebody who may not be new but you just don't know very well and saying,
"Hey, let's have coffee together. I
want to get to know you better." Or
finding out that someone is hurting and reaching out to help them. Or celebrating something and sharing that
celebration with others.
It's about relationship. It's all about relationship, the relationship
between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The essence of the universe is relationship
and Christ wants for us to be in relationship with one another. He wants for us to love one another as He has
loved us. Amen.
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