20 May 2012

“Drenched … in Jesus”
7 Easter B
John 17:6-19
20 May 2012


Every year, right before Easter, it’s the same story … cable networks, news channels, “news” magazines … they all mark the upcoming Christian Holy Week and festival with … scandalous stories about Christianity, Jesus, his apostles and followers.
In years past we’ve had reports on the “Jesus seminar” and the parts of the Bible these scholars want to reject … exposes on the “conspiracies” that kept the “lost gospels” out of the Bible … and who can forget several years ago when everyone was obsessed with the supposed “truth” behind that mediocre work of fiction, “The Da Vinci Code”?
Well, this year … the big pre-Easter blow up … was not from the media … but from a Christian. And an Evangelical Christian at that.
Perhaps you’ve read about the YouTube video sensation Jefferson Bethke – he’s from Tacoma, and he put up a rap video entitled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” So far on YouTube, this video has over 21 million views … 21 million … and there’s been articles, news stories, rebuttal videos … our own ELCA Presiding Bishop Hanson even wrote about it in his March reflections in “The Lutheran” magazine.
For those of you who haven’t seen the video … Jeff Bethke, as I said, lives in Tacoma and is a member of the Mars Hill Church in Federal Way. He says he wanted to write and rap something that reflected his love of Jesus, but also his disgust with how he sees organized religion departing from Jesus’ core teachings. The rap includes these lines …

What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion …
I mean, if religion is so great, why has it started so many wars
Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor …
Because if grace is water, then the church should be an ocean,
It’s not a museum for good people, it’s a hospital for the broken …
Religion says do, Jesus says done
Religion says slave, Jesus says son
Religion puts you in bondage, while Jesus sets you free
Religion makes you blind, but Jesus makes you see.

Bethke’s rap has gotten a ‘bad rap’ from many Evangelical leaders … his own ‘tribe,’ if you will … but it’s scored big with people under the age of 40, including many who call themselves evangelical.
If you’ve been paying attention, this should be no surprise. The Barna Group, an organization which regularly takes the pulse of religion in America … George Barna is a conservative, thorough, trustworthy writer … The Barna Group recently polled non-Christian Americans in the 16-29 age group, as to what words or phrases they believe best describe Christianity. The top responses … from a staggering 91 percent of these young people … were “too involved in politics,” “sheltered,” “insincere,” “uncaring,” “judgmental,” “hypocritical” and “bigoted.”
The same was true for 80 percent of churchgoing Christians in the same 16-29 age group.
It seems that we have a problem.
80 million young people worldwide under the age of thirty have left the church over the past decade.
We have a BIG problem.
It’s not that these young people aren’t interested in spirituality … many, many of them confess a strong faith in Jesus Christ … many, many of them do lots of good, what we would call “charity” or “service” works … it’s just that, when it comes to what we in the Church call “the body of Christ,” well, they’d rather be amputated from that body.
They’ll gladly have Jesus, but would rather leave his institutional followers … us .. behind.
Now, for those of us who are also part of a self-professed Evangelical tradition … truly, the Original one, … these kind of developments can be, are, quite frustrating. Many of us resent how the loud mouths have seized control of the media … so that those huge percentages of young people only see Christianity as inseparable from … and requiring total allegiance to … one kind of politics, one ideology … one focus for morality … but on the other hand, ignoring large swaths of the Bible’s other moral teachings … such as care for the creation, and care for the least of our brothers and sisters (widows, orphans, the poor).
It is annoying, and frustrating, to be lumped together … so falsely. Especially to us here at Nativity. Yes, it’s another election year, and the bumper stickers are sprouting on cars in the parking lot once again … reflecting the whole spectrum of political choices on the ballot this year. And yet … when we enter these doors, we leave that stuff behind … our politics, our ideologies, they are different but no one calls the other “unchristian” … here, we are one body, one people, drenched in our baptism, walking wet to the altar where we are drenched in the love and forgiveness of Jesus in Holy Communion … and then sent, as one, out the doors, into the many places, serving the many faces in whom, through whom, we serve our one Lord.
From where does that difference come? How can things be so different here, different from other churches, different from others who use the name “Christian” … different from the perceptions of so many of these young people who say that they don’t want any part of “religion?”
I think it’s because those other Evangelicals haven’t read John 17. And we who do read it haven’t proclaimed it, lived it, obviously enough.
The seventeenth chapter of John’s gospel is always read on this, the 7th Sunday of Easter, in the majority of Christian churches, we who follow the three year lectionary cycle of readings. It’s been that way for hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand years. On the final Sunday of this season of Resurrection and new life, those ancient church leaders who created our reading cycle wanted to make sure that we ended the Easter season and moved into Pentecost … the two most ancient festivals of the Church … they wanted to make sure that believers read, heard, and knew these words from the prayer Jesus prayed on the night before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion … his “last will and testament,” if you will, for the Church, his body, the body of Christ, in the world … charged with living out his Word, sharing his Word in speech and action, after Jesus rose from the dead and ascended back to his Father in heaven.
And Jesus’ will? His Word, his fervent prayer, for those who follow him?

Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

That they may be one. That’s Jesus’ word for us.
But it’s not a political unity, an ideological unity, a denominational or liturgical or form / function unity that he’s talking about here.
That they may be one is all about the ONE event at the center of Jesus’ life.
His suffering. His death on the Cross. And his rising.
That they may be one is about being ONE … only … around, in, with, through, the CROSS.
The Church has long called Jesus’ words in this 17th chapter of John, his – Jesus’ - “high priestly prayer.” The language here is “high” and difficult … and somewhat circular. It’s probably the most difficult portion of John’s gospel to read and understand because it seems to spin around and around, tighter and tighter, like a Slinky.
Yet … don’t let the difficulty obscure the beauty of the Word for us here.

That they may be one, as we are one.

Jesus is on his way to the Cross, the defining event of his life and ministry, for himself and everyone who follows him. The Cross is the time, the place, the event when God the Father, most certainly and definitely, knows, feels, becomes in his very being exactly as us … in Jesus’ suffering, God the Father suffers what we suffer … in Jesus’ absolute emptying, God the Father is absolutely emptied, even as we are ‘in the valley of the shadow of death’ … in Jesus’ dying, GOD DIES … even as we ourselves all die …
In the Cross, Jesus and God the Father are ONE … in mockery, in suffering, in death.
And in the final event of the Cross … Jesus’ rising from the dead … God the Father is enlivened once again … the fusion of flesh and bone and spirit in LOVE … drenched in God’s love … Jesus is sent back out, to proclaim the death of death itself … ascending once again to God the Father … and empowering his followers, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, to live and serve and BE ONE.
To be ONE even as Jesus and God the Father are One.
One in suffering.
One in service.
One in giving and sending, proclaiming and loving.
One body of believers, in the world, proclaiming, living, the One Christ. Drenched … in Jesus … to be Jesus and bring Jesus into the world.
It is the Cross … not politics, not ideological or denominational or liturgical unity … it is the Cross alone which makes us ONE with Jesus … ONE with God the Father … and ONE with each other.
Lutherans know this. It’s part and parcel of our central organizational document, the Augsburg Confession, in article 7:

It is also taught among us that one holy Christian church will be and remain forever. This is the assembly of all believers among who the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel. 2 For it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word. 3 It is not necessary for the true unity of the Christian church that ceremonies, instituted by men, should be observed uniformly in all places. 4 It is as Paul says in Eph. 4:4, 5, “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism.”

We know this. We have it in God’s Word … and in the word of our confessions which reflect God’s Word.
I’m afraid, though, that our “Lutheran laryngitis” has gotten in the way, once again … and so we’ve abdicated the public space to others who insist that being drenched in Jesus alone … his Cross, his Word, his death and resurrection … being drenched in Jesus alone isn’t enough to be ONE … that we need something else … worshipping the same way, singing the same way, voting the same way… to be REAL Christians.
But that’s garbage. It’s not Biblical. It’s not faithful. It is NOT Christian.
And it’s high time we told the world so, in no uncertain terms. Amen? Amen?
Those 80 million young people need to hear another Word … see another Way … Christ’s Word … Christ’s way … and the only way they will hear and see, feel and, we hope and pray, follow … is because of, by, for, through us. Amen? AMEN.
Drenched in Jesus … we ARE ONE. One with him in our baptism. One with him in our serving. One with him in our suffering, our being with and for the least of these, our living for and loving those who the world rejects.
One with him and each other in, with, through this meal we share … forgiven, called together from different places, sent out to different places and people … but ONE in the ONE bread, ONE cup, ONE meal Jesus gives us … gives us each a piece, a part of himself, through which we are drenched in him, drenched in Jesus … drenched in spoken Word and Scripture Word and en-fleshed Word to be sent into the ONE world for which Jesus suffered, and died, and rose, and ascended to his Father.
Say it. Share it. Live it.
Drenched in Jesus … part of Jesus … we ARE ONE.
From different places, different backgrounds, with different tastes and preferences, different politics, different ideologies … we ARE ONE.
ONE IN JESUS. ONE WITH GOD THE FATHER.
One in faith and love and service.
ONE.
Amen.