Seventh Sunday of Easter – Bill Harkins
John 17:6-19
17:6 “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 17:7 Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; 17:8 for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. 17:9 I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 17:10 All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. 17:11 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. 17:12 While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. 17:13 But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. 17:14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17:15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. 17:16 They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 17:17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 17:18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 17:19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.
In the name of the God of Creation who loves us all, Amen. Good morning friends, and welcome to Holy Family on this Seventh Sunday of Easter. I am glad you are here. In the passage for this Sunday, we hear a heartfelt passage as Jesus looks to the heavens, praying for his friends. Surrounded by his loved ones, Jesus begs God to watch out for his friends while he’s gone. “I am asking on their behalf,” Jesus says as he offers his supplication. “Now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world.” He pleads for God to “protect them in your name.” With both crucifixion and ascension on the horizon, the thought of being gone, and his awareness of this comes from his soul; “While I was with them, I protected them,” he says to the stars, “I guarded them.” For the third time in this short passage, Jesus pleads for God’s protection— using the same word again and again. He has lived his life for them—“for their sakes”—and now glimpses a future without them. His spirit is in pain because he can’t imagine being away from them; “you in me, and I in you.” All of this is a very difficult trail to be on.
Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century theologian, is compelling in her vision of Jesus’ thirst for reunion with his friends. “We are his joy,” she writes in chapter 31 of the long text of Revelations of Divine Love:
“He has longed to have us.” Julian explains: “For this is the spiritual thirst of Christ, the love-longing that lasts and ever shall do until we see that revelation…. Therefore it seems to me that this is his thirst: a love-longing to have us all together, wholly in himself for his delight.
As Julian says, Jesus thirsts for companionship with us. We are his delight. Our union with him is his hope, and his burden. “For that same longing and thirst which he had on the cross—a longing and thirst which it seems to me had been in him from eternity—those he still has,” Julian comments on the passion of Christ, “and shall have until the time when the last soul which is to be saved has come up into his bliss.” On this Mother’s Day we give thanks for all who have been mothers to us—including Julian of Norwich and her many spiritual sisters. Christian theology is in this sense a love story. “For God so loved the world,” the Gospel of John declares at the beginning (3:16). That love is Jesus. And in chapter 17 he reveals that his heart beats with this longing for communion with us. This love proclaims the truth of the gospel, the truth about us: that we are the beloved of God, and that in Christ the eternal love of God longs for connection with us.
In his wonderful book “Tattoos on the Heart,” Father Greg Boyle, recently awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom, tells of his work with “Homeboy Industries,” a gang-intervention program in Los Angeles. In one chapter he quotes Mother Teresa, who said that most of the world’s ills can be traced to the fact that we have forgotten that we belong to each other. With kinship as a goal, Boyle says, we would no longer be promoting justice, we would be celebrating it. Boyle describes kinship as a “circle of compassion… outside of which no one is standing, and we gradually move ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there,” he says, “with those whose dignity has been denied…we locate ourselves among the poor and the powerless and the voiceless. At the edges, we join with the easily despised…we situate ourselves right next to the disposable so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.” At Homeboy Industries they seek to tell each person this truth: they are exactly what God had in mind when God made them. I think Jesus is saying the same thing to us in today’s Gospel. And I think he is talking to me and to you, and asking what walls we may have been building, and why, and when.
Boyle tells the story of driving on an errand with three members of the community when he says to the one riding in the front seat, “Be on the lookout for a gas station.” The companion leans leftward toward the gas gage and says “You’re fine.” “Como que’ I’m fine—I’m on ECHALE, Cabron,” Boyle says. Waving at him, Boyle says “Hello, E means empty.” JoJo, his friend, looks at him with shock. “E means empty?” “Well, yeah, what did you think it meant?” Boyle asked. “I thought it meant ‘Enough’.” “Well, what did you think F stood for?” Boyle asked? “I thought it meant ‘Finished’,” JoJo says. Boyle writes, “After I thank him for visiting our planet, I realized this is how the journey from change to transition has to play out. When others stare into the mirror and pronounce EMPTY, our collective kinship task is the suggest instead ENOUGH—enough gifts, talent, goodness, enough love to go around…and when the verdict is “FINISHED” we are called to lead instead to fullness—that place within—where Boyle suggests we find in themselves, in ourselves, what God had in mind. Dear friends, in this season of transition at Holy Family, can we practice a theology of abundance—can we say there is enough love and empathy and connection to go around when, in our anxiety we might be tempted to say we are on “empty”? I believe we can. I believe we are. But we have to work together.
I’ll never forget my sophomore year of football at Sandy Springs High School, entering the stadium with my teammates at mighty St. Pius for the Regional play-offs on a cold November night, and hearing 6,000 screaming Catholics telling us to go home. I knew we were in trouble, even though we had beaten them at our home field earlier in the season. I will never forget what it was like to be the opposing team on that night. And, I was to remember that night for other reasons as well. Just before this big game, the senior wide receiver in relation to whom I had been apprenticed that season was injured. I was given the task of filling in for him until he recovered, and I was scared. St. Pius—a stadium reminiscent of Clemson, or LSU’s “Death Valley”—is a tough place to play, and the game was hard fought until the end. I remember how, late in the game, a ghostly, menacing fog emerged out of the ivy covered ravine on the visitor’s side of the field, a fog into which a deep post pattern took me with only a few minutes left to play. In my fear, and in front of those 6,000 fans, I dropped a pass that I usually would have caught. My coach called me to the sideline and said, “Harkins! You’re killin’ me!”—which was actually an excellent but painful example of hyperbole for effect as a pedagogical tool. For the next week I had to stay after practice with my right arm duct-taped to my chest while the receivers’ coach fired passes at me almost, but not quite, out of reach.
My coach sat me down at the end of the week and said, “William, the point of this exercise is not that you should never drop a pass. The point is that you let your being afraid compromise your ability to be in right relationship with your teammates, and with yourself. You let being anxious about starting on first string unexpectedly—about change, cause you to give in to fear.” I have successfully avoided thinking about this memory for a long time, but it came back to me in the reading of this text, and I found myself wondering why, in the context of this Gospel, it resurfaced. This made me curious, and I’ll say more about that in a moment, but any way you slice it, these passages are hard to hear. It is hard to bear witness to Jesus’ painful, heartfelt prayer. And yet, he is fully present to his pain, and he does not allow his anxiety and pain to mask what he is feeling. It’s all right there, and he’s giving it over to God. As we should, too. Friends, when we are in a time of change, we are more tempted to give in to anxiety, which Family Systems Theory reminds us can spread like a virus. I am so very proud of each of you—of the members of the vestry, and the nominating committee, and everyone who continues to show up here each Sunday and serve in the choir, as Eucharistic Ministers and Vergers, as members of the various committees so engaged in sustaining and nurturing this parish. Let’s remember that as the author William Bridges has said, change is inevitable, while transition is not. Transition is not just a nice way to say change. It is the inner psychological process through which people come to terms with a change, as they let go of how things used to be, and reorient themselves to the way that things are now. In an organization, transition means helping people to make that difficult process less painful and disruptive. Family Systems Theory helps church leaders see the congregation as a system of interrelated parts. This asks of us that we be more self-aware and self-differentiating—paying attention to healthy boundaries, engaging in “good gossip” rather than allowing anxiety to be the occasion for spreading unhelpful gossip in parking lot conversations…it can help us be better equipped to identify those in our congregation with good leadership skills, as we are doing, and for each of us to consider how we might grow and contribute to Holy Family in generative and life-giving ways. We can better recognize and deal with unhealthy anxiety in the system; longing, for example, for the past in ways that keep us from what God is calling us to in our time. When we manage our own anxiety it enables us to function more effectively as a whole. So let’s give freely of ourselves, and our gifts and graces. Let’s promise to go above and beyond financially, and examine our hearts to see if there are other ways we might give to the common good. A robust financial picture, and an engaged, enthusiastic congregation positions us in the best possible way to call our new rector, whoever she or he may be.
Oh, and one more thing. The night after my first post-practice one-armed catching drill I went home and told my parents I was quitting football. I was ashamed, and angry, and anxious about being seen as a failure. They wisely suggested I give it ‘till the end of the week, and that I not make a hasty decision about something that was so important to me. The next day, with my right arm taped to my chest, I took my place on the goal line, ten yards from my coach, and we began the drill. Then, he suddenly stopped throwing passes my way, and looking toward the field house, I saw why. Headed back out onto the field were three of my teammates in the receivers’ corps, each of whose right-arm was duck-taped to his chest. Without saying a word, they took their places on the goal line, where for the next three days they could be found after practice in solidarity with me. I’m sure they had better things to do, but each of them stayed an extra hour, in friendship and loyalty. I had threatened in my shame to consign myself to the alienation of estrangement—and instead, because of the generous, extravagant searching of their hearts—because they “read between the lines” of the football field and said “enough” when I was saying “empty”—I found instead on that field a little bit of heaven; a vision of beloved, blessed community, and the connection for which Jesus prayed in our Gospel for today. May it be so for us as at Holy Family, as well. Amen.