May 24, 2009 Des Moines
Memorial Day Weekend
TEXT: John
17:6-19
The Object of His Prayers
I know that it’s dangerous to simplify humankind
down to two types of people; the result is usually a caricature of reality that
exaggerates a few distinctive features into a portrait that, while including
elements of truth, looks completely artificial.
But, Jesus did it on occasion – the “wheat” on the one hand, and the
“weeds” on the other; the sheep on the right and the goats to the left. So, in his good company I’ll risk the
observation that there seem to be two kinds of people: those who so can’t get over their own
greatness that they pity everyone else because “you” can’t be “me”, too; and
those for whom saying nice things about themselves is nothing short of
open-heart surgery.
Some sing:
O Lord, it's hard to be humble
When you're perfect in every way.
I can't wait to look in the
mirror,
'cause I get better looking each
day.
To know me is to love me.
I must be a heck of a man.
O Lord, it's hard to be humble,
But I'm doing the best that I can.[1]
While others sing:
When something goes wrong
I'm the first to admit it.
The first to admit it; the last
one to know.
But when something goes right
Well it's likely to lose me
It's apt to confuse me
Its such an unusual sight
Oh, I can't get used to something
so right
Something so right.[2]
Some look inside themselves and see no flaws;
others look and find few – if any – gifts.
While we tend to hear more from and about the
egotists, I have a hunch that the world is much more populated with the
blushingly humble.
I remember
one time in a small group at church camp being subjected to an exercise
designed to personalize scripture. We
were given a copy of the 23rd Psalm with blanks inserted in place of
the Psalmist’s own pronouns, and were told to read through the Psalm, writing
our own names and appropriate pronouns in the blanks…
“The Lord is Tim’s shepherd; he shall not want…”
We were given a copy of John 3:16-17 with similar
blanks, and invited to do the same:
“For God
so loved Tim that he gave his only son so that Tim might believe in him and not
perish, but have eternal life. God did
not send the son into the world to condemn Tim, but in order that Tim might be
saved through him.”
I remember how playfully some completed the
exercise; how awkwardly others scribbled around on the papers – uncomfortably,
as if doing something wrong.
For some,
it’s easy to think about God loving humankind “in general” – caring, planning,
comforting, uplifting – but putting one’s own name on that love – allowing it
to be intimately personal – can be a stretch.
And yet, if you read this passage from the Gospel of John through a
little different lens, there is Jesus, praying for you, in what
some have suggested is the real “Lord’s Prayer.” No, it isn’t the prayer that we recite every
week – the one he taught us to pray; instead, this is the prayer that the Lord
prayed himself…on our behalf.
In the storyline of John’s
Gospel, the prayer is prayed on the night that Jesus was betrayed. You remember the setting: they had gathered for supper – what would
turn out to be a “last supper,” and after the meal, Jesus had knelt down and
washed their feet, before launching into an extended time of teaching. Some of Jesus’ most familiar, most instructive
– and most comforting – words come from this conversation:
Just
to note a few. Along the way, the
narrator indicates that they left the room where they had shared the meal, but
he doesn’t say where they went – maybe they simply walked, offering themselves
into the therapeutic grounding of mindlessly putting one foot in front of the
other. Walking. Talking.
Listening.
Eventually, though, Jesus came
to the end of what he had to say and shifted his attention. Turning away from his disciples and toward
God, he abruptly began to pray – and it is as though a dam had burst and the
river of the soul swelled out of its banks.
On and on he prayed – about the life he had lived, about the work he had
sought to accomplish, about the difficult moments that still lay ahead. In other Gospels, Jesus prays for clarity and
strength and maybe even for a different way out of this mess that was about to
engulf him. But not in John. Here, Jesus is both reflective and resolute,
simply taking the fullness of his life and work and offering it into God’s own
keeping. The real burden of the prayer,
according to John, was intercessory.
Here Jesus doesn’t pray for himself, but for all those he has come to
love. “Hold them,” he asks God; “guide,
protect, sanctify and strengthen. Look
after them.”
It is a valedictory prayer somehow
appropriate for this Memorial Day weekend.
Here in this time when we pay such careful attention to remembering
people who have been significant to us – flowering their graves and spending a
little more time, perhaps, around their pictures; extending their lives by
stewarding the memory of their gifts and noting the enduring fingerprints they
have left on our lives – it is powerful to remember that someone is remembering
us...
...holding us in
the arms of their spirit...
...praying
for us...
...praying for you. Jesus is praying for you.
“Hold them, and make them one…so
that they can accomplish the work you have for them to do.” And we need to hear that last part, as much
as we need to get comfortable wrapping ourselves in the first part. God does have work for us to do. Jesus keeps coming back to that reality. “I am not asking you to take them out of the
world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world just as I do
not belong to the world.”
There is work for us to do –
work that will often feel awkward and difficult, because it is God's very work
of changing the world, but it is not work we undertake alone. God is with us. Jesus is praying for us.
Did you ever have the childhood
apprehension about playing hide and seek – that you might just hide so well
that your playmates couldn't find you and eventually tire of looking, and
ultimately forget all about you? Were
you ever tempted, after some initial satisfaction from hiding well, to step out
from behind the shrub or the rock or beneath the wheel-barrow where you had
been and jump up and down and wave your arms shouting, “here I am”, because you
didn't want to be forgotten?
If you have ever been that kind
of afraid, then hear the Good News: you
are not forgotten. While you are busy
remembering others this weekend, know the joyful truth that you are being
remembered, too.
Get used to the idea: You are the object of his prayers. Jesus is praying for you.