Day: May 12, 2024

May 12, 2024 First Congregational Church in Auburn (MA) UCC

John 17:20-22

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you 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. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one. . . 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer.  Amen.

Easy for Jesus to say that we are all to be one — and oh so hard for us to do.

As I write this I’m watching the dog agility competition at the Westminster Kennel Club – on my computer, I didn’t go to New York!  

Dog agility is really so much fun to do – when I lived in Grand Rapids, MI, my springer spaniel and I did it. You train your dog to navigate jumps and tires – and various other obstacles and at the competitions those parts are put together in various ways. No two courses are the same, and the dogs don’t know what will come next.  Here’s the thing – no matter how well trained the dog, no matter how skilled the human being, no matter how well they work together, stuff happens.

Westminster calls the best to come and compete.  Every dog who enters the “Masters Agility” Competition has won repeatedly at courses all across the country.  And  in every class, there’s a dog or owner who screws up.  They are literally the best of the best, and there they go – off course, running the wrong obstacle, going backwards… one I saw totally lost his concentration and ran around the ring trying to cuddle up to the ring steward, the photographer and a random guy walking alongside the ring.  

Doing what’s expected, what you’ve trained for, doing it again and again, right every time, is hard stuff…. Hard for dogs, harder for humans.  We have so many more distractions than they do!

I saw another example of this sort of complicated life on my way home last Wednesday.  My route takes me through the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University campuses and on Wednesday there was a student demonstration in front of one of the main RISD buildings.  They’d found a place where traffic is always stopped, so they had maximum visibility.  They were loud, but didn’t try to block traffic. It was clear that the demonstration had been well planned.  

And yet, I really doubt that many of them had any idea how complicated the history of the Middle East is.  I doubt that many of them knew how complicated the idea that RISD would divest itself of any Israeli-owned stocks was in practice.  

And I’m sure that many of us, even those of us who do have some sense of the complexities, didn’t really get how upset the students are by our world today.  These demonstrations are gathering together feelings about a whole lot of things and focusing them on the Middle East.  

And here’s one last example of the complicated life:  today is Mother’s Day.  It’s a day to honor Mothers and those who are mothers to us; it’s a day when we all hope to be with our moms or our children; it’s supposed to be a day of joy.  But it’s not always what we hope and dream about. 

It’s not just that our moms may have died, but that perhaps they were never what we might have hoped for in a mom.  And maybe we have children, but we’re alienated from one another… or we’ve never had children and it’s a constant source of pain.  So for many this is a day of joy, but for others it is a time of excruciating pain.  It’s so complicated.

Now back to Jesus, back to our Scripture for today.

Today’s lesson is part of what is called the “Farewell Discourse” – or the last words of Jesus to his disciples.  It runs from chapters 14 through 17 in John’s Gospel; today we’re only reading part of the last section. And the key verses here for us today is this one:  I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.   

It is our unity that matters most in this verse… despite the complications that threaten to pull us apart.  This is not a unity that depends on us all thinking the same, doing the same, believing the same.  If you think about it, that’d be too easy.  It’s much easier to demand uniformity than it is to recognize and appreciate the ways in which we differ.  In Galatians 3, Paul writes that our differences do not, cannot matter:  So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

He’s not saying that we cease to be those things.  We are still male and female, but we are not separate.  We are still either Jews or Gentiles, but those differences no longer separate us. And in God’s world, we are still mothers and not-mothers, we are still Palestinian, Israeli, we are still  good dogs who do it all well and the goofy ones who run backwards through the obstacles.  

God loves us all, as we are.  All God asks of us is that we love one another the same way.  It is love for one another and for our world which unites us across all the dividing walls of humanity.

On this day dedicated to the love of mothers, let’s make our mothers proud as we practice the love that binds, breaking down the walls of ignorance and hate, bringing together people of all genders, all orientations, all races, clans and classes, all across the world.

Amen.

© 2024, Virginia H. Child