We Do Not Belong to the World.

John 17:6-19.

First of all, I want to thank Jeff and the session for inviting me to preach today.  It has been a pleasure getting to know the members of the resolution team.  However, this works out I hope we remain sisters and brothers in our one Lord Jesus.

I.

Our passage for this morning is the second part of Jesus’ great High Priestly Prayer in John 17.  Jesus offers these words to God on the evening before his death, as a kind of prayer of consecration leading up to his sacrifice where he gives his life for the life of the world.

I am interested in what he has to say about our relationship as disciples of Jesus to “the world.”  One of the most common complaints against denominations like the PCUSA is that we have essentially abandoned the gospel and caved in to the world.  That is, instead of following Christ, we allow our agenda to be set by the latest secular fad, or the newest, most vanguard, leftist political movement.  Where Jesus talks about conquering the world, many assert that the PCUSA has allowed itself to be conquered by the world.  My colleague Jeff has suggested as much.  Repeatedly. 

In the first part of this passage, the Lord refers to the disciples as those whom God gave him from the world.  Disciples are therefore called out of the world, in the sense of being called to God and away from the values, practices, habits, traditions, politics, and economics dominant in the world.  

Jesus is focusing like a mother-bird hovering over this fragile, shaky, still fairly clueless gathering of disciples he has called together, knowing that he is placing the whole future of God’s mission into their frankly pretty incompetent and inept hands.  

Now, anticipating his status only a few hours later, he says he is “no longer in the world.”  He is returning to the Father.  He is about to be “lifted up” on the cross to draw all people to himself.  He is about take away the sin of the world.  The hour has come for him to drive out the ruler of this world.

II.

And, in leaving this gathering behind in the world, the Lord calls upon them to be one with each other even as he, the Son, is one with the Father.  In their unity in him they will find unity with and in God; they will become the continuing earthly expression of the saving presence and love of God that he himself was while he was with them.

In other words, Jesus establishes an on-going community, a community that, in the way its members cling to and support each other, continues to dwell under his protection.  And they will need protection.  The Lord knows the world is a hostile and violent place.  In binding themselves to each other as one, the disciples are binding themselves to him and therefore to God.

Now they will have to be protected, not by his physical presence, but by his remembered and enacted word.  Jesus, who is going on back to his Father,  addresses his disciples while they are still in the world so that they may have his joy complete in themselves.  What we receive from the Lord is his joy!  Joy is what is going to get them through.  

Joy comes from the knowledge that no matter what happens in the meantime, God wins in the end.  In Christ’s sacrifice, the world’s sins are taken away, the ruler of this world is defeated, God’s life is given for the life of the world, and God’s love dwells within them.  If this doesn’t produce joy in the disciples, nothing will.

Jesus says, “They do not belong to the world just as I do not belong to the world.”   He repeats that sentence for emphasis.  He is not asking God to take the disciples out of the world, but to protect them from the evil one while they are in the world.  Here is the key to the whole passage, I think.  We who belong to Christ do not belong to the world anymore than Christ does.  We do not belong to the world.  The world does not own us.  Rather, he has sent us into the world, even as the Father sent him into the world.  We are sent, as if into an alien country, into the world.

So Christ sends the church into the world equipped with and by himself, the Word of God, and his teachings and commandments.  The Word is at the same time our protection and our proclamation.  The Word shapes our lives and our gathering, and by him we witness to his casting out of the ruler of this world, and his taking away the sins of the world, indeed his conquest of the world, his drawing of all things and all people to himself, the One whom God sent into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him.

III.

In our Book of Confessions, we find this very truth affirmed in these amazing, strong, and basic words from the Declaration of Barmen: “Jesus Christ, as he is attested in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.  We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”  We follow the Word in and into the world; we do not follow the world or the rulers of this world.

This sensibility has motivated me for my 33 years in ministry.  These affirmations have been taken with utmost seriousness and rigor by many in the Presbyterian Church (USA) over the past six or seven decades.    

It makes a difference to realize and affirm that “Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture” is at the center of our life.  It makes a difference to invest in holding to that standard, because it subjects everything else, all those “other events and powers, figures and truths,” to withering critique.  It takes energy and courage to listen to that one Word of God when he challenges and calls us away from every sacred cow, every corrupt allegiance, every comfortable assumption, every self-serving value that had managed to sidle and sneak and bully and buy its way into our churches over the centuries.  

First of all, we sought to take the Bible even more seriously by identifying and getting away from the interpretive lenses of the world, and the past, and the assumptions and biases of conventional, self-serving theologies, and allowing the word to challenge and contradict our lives.

Then, when we looked to “Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture,” we found someone not all that comfortable with the systems in his own day that preserved and protected by violence and coercion the privilege, inequality, wealth, and power of the elites.  We found someone who, from before he is even born, is charged with turning upside-down those regimes, and who commences his ministry by proclaiming justice and jubilee.  We found someone who makes it his business to heal the sick, raise the dead, welcome the outcast, and feed the hungry; who is notorious for including and welcoming and even identifying with all kinds of marginalized people; who infamously hangs out with tax collectors and prostitutes; and who has almost nothing positive to say about wealth or most of the other things valued by the world; and who demands that we give up our lives and follow him.  We found someone who preaches non-violence and the love of enemies.  We found someone who even overturns and cancels out much of Scripture, like the ceremonial and kosher laws.  We found someone who was crucified by the ruling authorities and powers of his day as a seditious blasphemer.

IV.

At our best, what we have tried to do is to follow this Jesus.  We looked around at our own world and we found it under the same powers of evil, and filled with the same kinds of corruption and destructive disorder, that Jesus addresses.  And we have endeavored to follow and obey this subversive radical Jesus by looking to challenge in our own day the same kinds of injustices, inequalities, violence, hypocrisies, and accretions of wealth and power that he opposed.  We have tried to identify with, serve, and include the poor, the victims, the outcast, the hungry, and the blind.  We have stood with suffering people even when it was unpopular.  We have worked for peace and non-violence.  And if we have been sometimes very slow to judge and condemn people labelled as seditious blasphemers today, maybe it is because Jesus, and we, have sometimes been given the same label.  Indeed, when the world calls you a seditious blasphemer it means we could be doing something right.  It could be because we are following the Lord.  

Thus the PCUSA has been “Christ-centered.”  Because the Jesus Christ attested in Holy Scripture is about justice, inclusion, non-violence, equality, and forgiveness.     

This journey hasn’t been pretty.  It hasn’t been easy.  It hasn’t been orderly.  It hasn’t even been particularly nice.  There were and are nasty and demonic aspects of the world that we have not given up, but chose instead of follow rather uncritically.  We have allowed ourselves to be duped by figures using violence.  We would rather trust in our often adversarial and legalistic procedures than in the Holy Spirit.  

And we have found ways to be depressingly cruel with each other, self-righteously treating sisters and brothers in Christ as enemies.  Instead of gathering around the Word together, we huddled in our separate corners where it is easier to hear what we want to hear and demonize those others.  We have spoken at each other rather than with each other.  We have allowed ourselves to be motivated by fear rather than love, and anger rather than trust.  I hope we have learned in the crucible of these difficult decades to be a lot less arrogant, self-righteous, and exclusive.  A lot of us have.  

At the same time, the Kingdom of God has been blooming here and there among us in spite of our too often faithless and malicious ineptitude.  We are changing. 

After decades of a top-heavy, corporate, bureaucratic, regulatory regime, we are now focusing on and lifting up congregations as the primary locus of mission which presbyteries exist to empower and support.  After decades of careless ineptitude in church-planting and evangelism, we have set ourselves the task of establishing new worshiping communities, of which there are now nearly 300, including one formed by this congregation.  After decades of a knee-jerk, one-dimensional ideological agenda, we are now more open to orthodox and traditional and evangelical voices in terms of spiritual practices, new liturgies and music, ecclesiology, and evangelism.  You have had more influence than you realize.

         

V.

All of this and more is a result, in my view, of a continuous response to Jesus Christ, as he is attested in Holy Scripture.  I wonder if Jesus doesn’t intend for his disciples to be an inclusive, diverse “big tent.”  Jesus even shares his last meal with, and washes the feet of Judas Iscariot, for heaven’s sake.  Yet we can’t manage to remain connected to each other? 

  Jesus assumes a community of mutually correcting and supporting oneness and unity.  The term “denomination” is not found in the New Testament.  Indeed, we are in an increasingly post-denominational age.  We need to be integrating and connecting with each other, not starting new independent entities.  We need to be exploring new kinds of networking and organization, new ways of communicating and learning from each other, new ways of conversation and discernment.  Should we really be separating off into yet more precise and exclusive grades of Presbyterian, of all things?  What kind of witness does that make?  How is that obedience to Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture?

The Lord doesn’t call on us to agree on everything.  He calls on us to love one another as he has loved us.  He loves us by giving us his life!  And in that life he sends us into the world as his witnesses.  Whatever the Spirit has for us, may we realize in our life together the sanctification that Jesus asks for.  May we be made holy in the truth which is God’s Word, Jesus Christ.  May we be made holy together in his love and his joy and his peace.

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