The Seventh Sunday of Easter

24th May 2009: Sung Eucharist 9.00 AM

Preacher: The Revd John Chynchen, Cathedral Chaplain

Readings: Acts 1.15–17, 21–end; 1 John 5.9–13; John 17.6–19

In recent days, as I’ve reflected from time to time upon this morning’s gospel reading, I found myself, for the first time, slowly grasping the significance of Jesus praying for his disciples. Not so much the content of his prayer as the reality that he is praying for them.

This passage comes from that longer section of John’s gospel known as Jesus’ “high priestly prayer.” John places this lengthy prayer on Jesus’ lips at the Last Supper. Jesus and his disciples have, among other things, eaten their meal together and blessed bread and wine. Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet as a sign of how he expects them to treat each other. He has given them a new commandment: to love one another as he loves them. And he has promised them that the Holy Spirit will come to help them accomplish all of this.

Then he prays for them to God, his father and their father. A whole chapter’s worth of prayer.

Jesus then leads them to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he is seized by soldiers, and the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter morning proceed. In other words, through his actions, Jesus continues to pray for his disciples, to intercede on their behalf: an intercession that never really ends, just as it never really begins, but is eternally true.

Since we believe that Christ is alive – however we may put that together individually – then it also means that he can and does pray for us now, just as he prayed for his disciples in that upper room two thousand years ago; he continues to intercede for us with his very life.

Some of us can sense the power of prayer being offered on our behalf. Most of us seek the prayers of one another at times of distress, and some of us seek them all the time. Today’s gospel reminds me that I also depend deeply – that we all depend deeply – on the prayers of Jesus. Prayer is one of the things that bind us together in community with God in Jesus Christ, and with each other in Christ.

Jesus models that for us in his prayer: a major part of his prayer for his disciples is that we might be one; one with God, one with each other. They go hand in hand.

Jesus’ prayer seems an especially appropriate prayer for us to live into right now. For ten years or so there has been endless talk of schism in the Anglican Communion. Since 2005, we have been continually re-visiting the Windsor Report and grinding our way through three drafts of a proposed Anglican covenant that could institutionalise our interdependence. We Anglicans have led the way into the minefield implanted by the central presenting issues of gender and sexuality, which are defining issues in our times. Other mainline churches are following close behind. In the small hours of this morning, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, a Presbyterian church with strong Calvinist roots, voted to uphold the decision to appoint a gay minister, a divorced man with a child now in a same-sex partnership, to a church in Aberdeen. The established church in Scotland has faced up to and confronted its own Gene Robinson moment!

It is hard to imagine a church that once was whole, and which defined itself around Jesus, that found its identity not in agreement about one topic or another but in its communion with the living God of the cross. A time before differences of conviction and theology caused us to divide one from another. We might even wonder if such a time ever existed.

Jesus suggested again and again that people are more important than laws, and rules, and even religious convictions. Unfortunately this word to the world has never lead automatically to one conclusion or another about the most challenging issues. It’s rarely that easy. But again and again Jesus prayed, and in that crucible of prayer in which he ground his experience and the Word of God, something new was formed by the infusion of the Holy Spirit. New understandings, and just as important, the reclaiming and restating of old understandings in a new language, a new body, a new reality: a new life.

Whenever a community is divided over an issue, the place to go is to the depths of that crucible of prayer, to submit ourselves to the grounding action of God so that some new reality can emerge, a reality that we can’t necessarily see when we enter that place of prayer. It requires us as a community to do what we are called to do as individuals: to listen not primarily to our own convictions, but to the voice of God – or even sometimes, to the silence of God. Our lives as Christians and Christian communities are most peaceful when prayer is our first, rather than our last, resource; when God is our first, as well as our last, place to go.

As always, we pray for our community here at St John’s and our daughter churches…that we remain humble in our convictions and steadfast in our witness to God’s loving grace and faithfulness to those who are most vulnerable among us, and who exist among us in many forms.

And pray for yourself. Pray that just as Jesus had the wisdom to trust God beyond his disciples, that you also will always have the wisdom to know the limitations of the church, and that God is greater than all of us put together.

For that reality we can be eternally grateful, for in truth we all are one with God in Jesus Christ, not by our own righteousness, but by God’s loving grace. Amen.