12 May – Whose are we?
Easter 7
12/5/2024
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
John 17:6-19
Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood
It is Mothers’ Day, and so long as we know who our mothers are, we can be pretty sure how we belong in our families. Because we know who mum is we know we don’t belong to the family next door. Because we know who mum is we know a lot of things about ourselves – why our skin is the colour it is, why our language and accent is the way it is – all sorts of things.
But we don’t just belong to a mother. We are not just members of our families. We are members of all kinds of groups. We are keenly aware of some of our groups when the national anthem plays or the football siren sounds. I remember an American preacher, James Glasse, explaining how he knew who he was by knowing who he wasn’t. He and his friends told stories about the black people. That’s how he knew he was white. They told stories about the Catholics. That’s how he knew he was Protestant, and so on.
One of the strong messages I have received through my formative years and beyond is that we are all members of the human race, all equal in the sight of God, all destined under his mercy and good favour. It was pretty easy to be convinced of this, living in an upper middle class suburb of a city equal in wealth and sophistication to any of the great cities of the modern world – pretty easy living during a post war migration scheme under a white Australia policy – pretty easy living under a policy for Aborigines that advocated assimilation, a policy that my church went along with. Under that policy I joined church work parties to build houses for Aboriginal families in country towns through NSW.
Then things became confused for me. People my age were going to university and were seeing Australia’s involvement in Vietnam differently from how the government saw the conflict. A petition did the rounds of my church objecting to the visit by the rugby union Springbok team from South Africa. I was confused. I didn’t know what apartheid was. Suddenly it was not as easy as it had all seemed. Brotherly love was not going to sweep through the world and make us all God’s loving children. (I hadn’t heard about sisterly love yet.)
But at least the church was on the right track, surely. There was talk of church union. Of three denominations coming together in Australia. This must surely be an irresistibly good thing to do. To my dismay the church was divided over the issue. I was a member of the NSW Assembly, and to my horror the vote went ‘no’ and the moderator could scarcely contain his joy and I saw the sorrow on the faces of the ministers and elders who had voted for union as they lined up at the table to record their dissent from the majority decision.
It wasn’t easy any more to hope for peace and goodwill in the world or in the church. The church and the world is departmentalised.
Now, as I read the scriptures I discover it was ever thus. In Jesus’ prayer for his disciples in John’s gospel there is a distinct them and usness about it. Jesus is praying for his disciples and not for the world. The disciples are in the world but they have been given into Jesus charge and he has not lost one of them. Jesus is in the world too but he is soon to be removed from the world. The disciples will remain in the world but they will not be of the world because the world hates them, so Jesus prays that the evil one, who is of the world will not bring them to harm.
Why couldn’t John say that Jesus prayed for the world too? What was going on in John’s church that prompts the recording of this prayer? In John’s church as in any group of people, there are those people who do not live up to the group’s ideals. When some of these people aspire to leadership in the group then you get political conflict. This causes uncertainty in the group. In the church, when there is uncertainty over ideals, it calls in question our certainty of our place within God’s loving care. John’s gospel is at pains to assure the faithful that they are in God’s loving care. The problem is that within the community of God’s care there are those who don’t really belong. Among the disciples there was one – Judas Iscariot. There he was in the community of the faithful, but until his betrayal, the faithful did not know that he did not really belong.
In John’s church there were people who left the community during time of persecution. How could this be that the community of faith could have members that were not true to their membership? It was as if the true church was invisible, known only to God, for only God can read the heart. These are conclusions that a church under persecution came to so they could understand the apparent inconstancies of life around them. The church is the safe place where God’s love and care is known. The world is hostile to the church so how are we to understand God’s presence in the world? And how are we to understand signs of the world in the church? Answer: the true church is invisible except to God. The sign of the faithful will be those who love Jesus and you can tell those as the ones who keep his commandments, and his commandment is to love one another. So the church is visible in as much as we can see love in the church, but its edges may be very blurry.
Is that the only way to think about these things? Well, no. Paul saw the church as being perfectly visible. He saw sinners in the church, all they needed was a good talking to by his good self, they would change and all would be well. The church is full of saints and sinners and they all belong within God’s good grace.
The world is different today, and so is the church. The world and the church are still pretty blurry around the edges. The signs of the church are still the same. Jesus’ followers can still be told apart from the ones who love enough to obey his commandments of love. But if ever we thought that love would be restricted to within the community of the faithful, that time is not now. John taught his church that Jesus prayed for the church, and so he does, but the loving work of an inclusive church is to pray for the world.
Families will gather today to honour their mothers. They will have a sense of a particular belonging. Churches gather to honour Jesus. They have a sense of a particular belonging as they gather around the Lord’s table. They are mindful of their love for Jesus and Jesus’ love for them, and of God’s love for all creation.