O God: Do not leave us
comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to
that place where our Savior Christ has gone before. Amen.
Have you ever encountered
a really great love song? One of those
songs that sneaked up beside you and touched the most private recesses of your
soul when you didn’t expect it?
I was reminded of one of
those experiences the other day. While
wandering through Center City, and smelling the blooming wisteria, my mind
wandered back to springtime a few years ago.
I had been away visiting
family and friends around the South. I
flew into Nashville where I borrowed a car from my parents and spent the next
week on a road trip through Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and
Alabama, before finally heading back to Tennessee to fly home to the northeast. I stopped all along the way to reacquaint
myself with the people and places that make up many of the stories of my life.
It was a great week. I love a good road trip, and it was one of
those times that really fed my soul. The
car I had borrowed was a convertible, and the weather was just perfect, so I
drove along those many miles with the top down, listening to mindless music too
loudly, seeing familiar sites, and all the while accompanied by the fragrances
of the South – honeysuckle, Confederate jasmine, and pine.
It really was a great
week.
When I was finally headed
home, I decided to keep wrapping myself in that blanket of nurturing
familiarity just a while longer, so I listened to one of my favorite bands: the
Indigo Girls - one of their earlier albums that best fit my mindset. Hearing it on that trip was like seeing another
old friend again after a long time away.
Out on the highway, in
the middle of nowhere, it hit me: this old familiar song – a love song – that
touched me in a new way. It isn’t your
typical love song. It’s not meant for a
person, but for that peculiar union of place and time. It’s something like “nostalgia” but deeper in
your gut than that word usually seems to imply.
The song is called
“Southland in the Springtime”. The
chorus says, “There’s something about the Southland in the springtime, where
the waters flow with confidence and reason.
Though I miss her when I am gone, it won’t ever be too long, ‘til I’m
home again to spend my favorite season… there’s no place like home and none
more pleasin’, than the Southland in the springtime.”
As those words enveloped
me my eyes welled with tears. It wasn’t
because I was sad to be leaving the South.
It certainly wasn’t because I was sad to be headed home. It was because those words were, for me, so
true. They touched my own experience of
those past few days (and those days’ relationship with the rest of my life) in
a very deep and intimate way. They
caused a divine comfort to surround me – like an embrace from something or
someone that was more than present.
I had that same feeling
when I read this Gospel with new eyes about a few years. I forget exactly when it was, but I was
preparing to preach on an passage from the 18th chapter of John and
I was feeling stumped by it.
John’s Gospel can be that
way sometimes – at first glance it can sometimes seem a little obtuse. The style of writing can, at times, come
across as so deliberate and calculated, that it almost seems to explain away
any hope of clarity. “As you, God, are
in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe
that you have sent me…. The world does
not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will
make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them,
and I in them.”
Right. It almost sounds like the kind of puzzle you
might find in the Sunday paper: see if you can rearrange these words to make a
coherent sentence.
I’ve learned that –
though it’s true in all of the Gospels, it seems somehow more so in John – that
context is key. When I’m stumped by a
passage or a story, sometimes the key to beginning to understand it is as
simple as reading the things around it.
Allow it to set its own stage.
Some of its meaning might begin to flow from there.
So I first REALLY read
the seventeenth chapter of John while preparing to preach on the eighteenth
chapter of John. I remember sitting in
the church where I was serving at the time with a Bible, feeling utterly
confused. I’d already read the appointed
text and about a chapter after it before turning back a couple of pages to
begin reading the chapter before.
Then it struck me. This is a love letter. It’s a love letter about us – about me and
about you – written millennia ago to God, but with us – the church of the ages
– in mind.
It really is quite
humbling – to be so loved through the centuries. It’s humbling to recognize that the Bible
isn’t just a collection of stories about people long ago, but that it’s
connected to our story. We were
mentioned right there in the seventeenth chapter of John.
Jesus’ prayer for us was
not about what we would do. Instead, it
was about who, and how, we would be. He
prayed that we would be “one”. He prayed
that we would be in relationship with one another and that those relationships
would be characterized by love. That’s
how Christ lives even now: in our love.
We need that prayer now
more than ever.
Our culture values
individualism. We honor those who are
said to have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. Even those from more evangelistic Christian
traditions than ours talk about each individual’s “personal” relationship with
Jesus.
But that is not Christ’s
prayer for us.
In this closing episode
of his long goodbye, his prayer is not that we will be strong, rugged
individuals. He doesn’t pray that we
will be capable of tending to ourselves in matters of our own livelihood and
faith.
He prays that we will be
faithful in our relationships.
It’s a love song that
reaches us “like a tapestry passed down through generations” – like an embrace
from someone who is more than just present.
In the collect today we
pray that we will not be left “comfortless”.
This final “good bye prayer” of Jesus - his love song to God about us -
is our comfort. It’s the answer to our
own prayer.
May we all know that
love. May it be as familiar to us as a
pleasing scent that brings back fond memories.
May we practice it in each of our own relationships, and may we all
experience Christ living, still, in that love.
May we allow our individual threads of this still-living tapestry of
history to interweave themselves into the still-living community of Christ. May his prayer - his love song - be our own. In it, may we all be one. Amen.
(a previous version of this sermon appears here. You can also hear the song "Southland in the Springtime" in that post.)
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