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That We May Be One

John 17.1-11

June 1, 2014

Robert D. Gamble

“We’re one but we’re not same. We’ve got to carry each other.” U2

It must have been a scary time for the disciples, pharisees on the hunt for Jesus, trying to trick him or find some way to rid themselves of him. An exciting time, though, as well, for the disciples. They were hanging with a man whose fame had spread. I think they were caught a little off guard by Jesus words John 17, in the upper room. He tells them they will be scattered, but not to worry about him as the Father will be with him. He has said all this that they may have peace. Jesus is not in his teaching or healing mode. He is not giving a speech to thousands, only to them. They are remarkably intimate words:

John 17:1-11

17After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, 2since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. 4I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. 5So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.

6”I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; 8for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. 9I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.

11And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

Most of you know, Yulia and I recently returned from Ukraine.

I got several emails before we went:

"Are you sure you wanna do this?"

"Be careful over there!"

"We are praying for you." and later, "Are you home yet???"

There was really only one time I was afraid. If you watched the news, you know that May 2nd was a day of violence and death in Odessa, Ukraine.

A football match was scheduled for that day between two teams in Ukraine. A parade for fans was also scheduled. A lot people were on the street with Ukrainian flags. Witnesses said a van pulled up with Separatists.... the pro-Putin side. They were armed with automatic weapons. I don't know how it started but there were cobble stones thrown and shots fired. A sniper on a roof top was also shooting. People were killed or wounded. Things quieted for a time. Then a large crowd of Pro-Ukrainians walked to the headquarters for the Pro-Putin side. A stone building several stories high with tents set up in front. The crowd set fire to the tents, molotov cocktails came down from the roof , others were thrown up from the ground. The building caught fire, thirty something people died in the fire and added to those killed on the streets, 46 people had died that day.

Some days later, people entered the building , tore down police barricades and even steel walls constructed to keep people out of the crime scene. The whole scene became a shrine. Candles and flowers everywhere. That weekend, I went in with my camera. I was there more than an hour. At first I was nervous because of the red flag with the hammer and sickle outside and the other flag with the face of Stalin. I just walked right through the crowd. Then I was in the zone.... shooting. The burned out stairwell and rooms, and people wandering through. Finally, outside, I started taking shots of the columns of the building, with photos taped to them of burned bodies and the words Nazi's and Fascists written on the walls. Terms used by Pro-Putin side to describe Pro-Ukrainians. It's confusing, I know, it's WWII language. It's as blatant a lie as "there are no Russian troops in Ukraine." Mr Putin seems to be labeling everyone who disagrees with him as a Fascist or Neo Nazi.

Suddenly there was a man standing in front of me in green field pants and a para military shirt shouting "He's taking pictures of people. He's taking pictures of people. Why you do this?" I know at this point, it's not any use to argue or reason, especially in my limited Russian.... Statements like,

"Because the story is not about a fire.... it's about people." Or "Don't you want the world to know what this looks like?" or "Because people care about what happened here..." All this is of no use. So I said nothing, quickly put my camera in a bag, and walked away.... still he shouted.... "He's walking away..!!!" I kept going, down the street back into the city.

In my years in Ukraine, since 2005, I've never seen such rage: the evidence of it in the fire... or in this man, or between Russians and Ukrainians. Odessa always was a sea of people, Russians, Ukrainians, Turks, Moldovan, people from the country of Georgia, all living and working together.... All speaking Russian.

But now they are divided, That oneness they had. It's gone. And it's going to take years to get it back. Belief can bring people together. It can also tear them apart. .

In Jesus with the disciples, there are things given and received, things known in truth. There is belief and belonging: yours mine and mine yours. There is sharing, and a reason for it all: That they may be one.

It’s the last line of that text that interests me: Jesus prays to God on behalf of his disciples who have received what he has given them and believed in him. All mine are yours and yours mine. He prays, “That they may be one, as we are one.”

I want to talk to you this morning about oneness, belief and belonging.

No man is an island entirely of itself,

each man is a piece of the continent,

a part of the main,

if a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

John Donne

Donne would have to say “person” not “man” if he were to write that poem today, because “person” is more inclusive language..... Everyone is included, men and women. Everyone belongs. Still, I think that’s a bit much. If a clod be washed away....Europe is the less.

I no longer live with the illusion of unity at that level for humankind.

Or the unity of the Church for that matter.

I used to think it possible....

But the Presbyterian church alone has divided and mended and divided fourteen or fifteen times since the beginning of the Civil War.

Every time denominations unite, someone splinters off, takes their marbles and goes home.

We say we believe, but we don’t know how to belong.

Can you be a Christian by yourself?

I realize that’s one of those hypothetical questions....

Can a child left alone on an island, raised by dolphins, who finds a New Testament in a bottle.... read it and become a Christian?

But even then, that child is not alone.... You have all those characters in the Bible to relate to.... and the dolphins.

Do you belong because you believe, or do you believe because you belong?

I think most people would respond first by saying, You belong because you believe. You belong to a church because you believe in what they believe in....

Because you have faith.... You answer the questions of faith and then you join the church.

But when you think back on it. On the very time, you decided you were a Christian... is it because you you said, I believe? or did you first say inside yourself: I belong.

Perhaps it’s just semantics, but I don’t see any way one can believe without understanding what it means, and feeling what it means, to belong.

When people leave the church and their faith behind in the dust of it... I suspect its not really because they don’t believe any of it any more. I suspect it’s because they say to themselves, “That does it..... I don't belong."

And when Jesus said, "I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be ONE,” he is talking about believing and belonging.

This passage is a prayer.

Jesus is praying first on behalf of the disciples in front of him, on behalf of Christians across the globe, and then on our behalf.

He is praying that they may be one, that Christians of the world be one, that WE be one. Paul said it too.

In Collosians:

COL 3:15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. . . .

In Romans:

ROM 12:5 we, who are many, are one body in Christ....

And to the Galatians:

GAL 3:28 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

And to the Ephesians:

2: 14 For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.

Today Paul might pray, There is no longer black or white, hispanic or asian.

I think he might like that line in the U2 song, We are one, but we're not the same. We've got to carry each other.

For so many years in Odessa, Ukraine there was no longer Russian or Ukrainian.

We are all Odessites, one friend once said.... we all get along.

But violence came and people died. In the secular world, nationally, or globally we have these difference to overcome. We are not one...We are not the same....

And in the context of such a world, like Jesus, Paul is saying over and over.... you believe, you also belong.

One body, one faith, one baptism.

Craig Anderson, president of the Episcopal Seminary (called General Seminary) in New York says, “Human beings don't create community as much as they are created by it. A human being is by nature a communal being . . . .[but] Accepting this fact . . . . is difficult in [our] age and culture . . .”

He speaks of, “Our worship of rugged individualism,

the . . . hero in our . . . collective unconscious and [the way we see] . . .

legal rights and privileges of the individual as more important than communal rights . . . . [all ] exacerbate the problem.

In other words, our culture tell us, he says, "whatever we believe; we don’t need to belong..... " In the church sometimes, we don't always believe the same things, but we still belong.

These words of Jesus are a prayer, they are also going away words.

The Acts text tells us of the Ascension of Jesus. Jesus, in a sense, becomes one with God the Father.

That they may be one as we are one.

The triune God, we say, is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. One God but with three persons who are not the same. Within the Trinity, God belongs. When people are married, we say they are one. But, of course, they are not the same. Even people in same sex couples are not the same.

What does this "One but not the same" look like in the church? I think it is when belief and belonging come together.

We were gathered in our own upper room, so to speak, in Odessa Ukraine. A few days before I was to come back back to the states... to talk about our work with kids in orphanages and shelters and there was some planning to do. A few minutes before we started I realized I was going to have to make a kind of speech to them, because we were starting this new initiative, or project, we call Peacemaking and Reconciliation, not just with kids but with adults..... It is our attempt to work toward a one-ness with those who are not the same in the city of Odessa. I didn't need to tell them what to do. They know what to do.

These are people, some of whom I have spent hours with in buses or trains, traveling to small villages, and sharing rooms in the cold dormitories of orphanages and shelters in the countryside of Ukraine. You can't do that and spend hours in class rooms with kids doing exercises that create trust and talking about trust and friendship and what's important in your life without learning to trust. These are people I trust. As estranged and fearful as I felt in that burned out building, here I felt at home.

"This is my favorite time here in Odessa. Here with you. You with whom I feel most at home, for whom I have the greatest respect. I talk about you often, in my meetings with Americans. I think about you when I am on the road with hours of driving ahead of me, when I am on the plane with the inflight magazines, or a book in front of me. I look down the highway or past the magazine and out the window and think of you here in Ukraine, doing this work. You are beautiful because of what you do. You are important to me because of what we share: the desire to help youth and children find their way, find themselves, learn to live with love in community others, to share, to trust. Now a new thing is before us: the work of peacemaking and reconciliation between people who have learned too much about violence, distrust and revenge. You know what to do and how to do it. I am only reminding you how of important it is and the hope I have for you in it. This is why you will succeed: because you share what you believe, and because you have each other."

In a similar way, John tells us we find this “oneness” in the words of Jesus. “The glory, [or you could say the presence] that you have given me,” Jesus says, “I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me . . . that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. This is what they are to believe and how they are to belong.

And It strikes me that this here is my favorite time. this pulpit, these last few minutes of a sermon, this place with you, with whom I feel most at home, for whom I have the greatest respect. You know what to do and how to do it. I am only reminding you how of important it is and the hope I have for you in it.

You are beautiful because of what you do and how you belong. We are important to each other because of what we believe and we share.

If Jesus prays to God on behalf of those given to him, he prays on our behalf. We believe and belong to him, even as he believes and belongs to God.

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