Here is a link to listen to the sermon by The Rev. Edwin Chinery on May 26, 2019, the Sixth Sunday of Easter. There is also a link to the scripture for this Sunday and the text of the sermon below.

Lessons

You can read the scripture for May 26, 2019, here.

      Sermon - May 26, 2019

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In our gospel passage for today, Jesus talks with the disciples about the time after “his hour” – after he goes to his father. Jesus doesn’t speak about his passion in John’s gospel anywhere near the way he does in the synoptic gospels. Oh there’s frequent mention of his detractors wanting to kill him, but he mostly talks about going to a place where “you cannot come”.

We’re in that long conversation between the Last Supper and Gethsemane. Jesus has washed everybody’s feet and he’s given the new commandment to love one another. Then his speech becomes even more confusing than usual – with circular language that seems, at first, only puzzling – meant to knock both his disciples and us a little off-kilter. He even sort of acknowledges it himself, “You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you’”. God’s tendency to speak in paradoxical ways through the fourth evangelist is, understandably, difficult to get comfortable with. That might be the whole point. There really isn’t any walking away with an easy understanding we can neatly tuck away and move on feeling resolved. No. This stuff wants to stay with us. And if we stay with it, we begin to understand the poverty of language – it’s inability to capture, contain, or clearly describe to our brains the points Jesus tries to make – the points he seems to know must land in our hearts if we are to know him in our lives. Sticking with him – keeping his word – is a little like encounter with poetry or music. If we don’t try to impose meaning on his words, sometimes what begins to float up through them are little glimmers of impressions about God. And if our approach is very generous, we might begin to perceive that Jesus is referring to what will always be a powerful and unfinished encounter with God – that this encounter is not exclusive to himself – and that it transcends linear time, physical presence, and even language. This is not so much about brain learning. It definitely wants to be more about heart and spirit.

Some time ago – this past Ash Wednesday, actually – we talked about giving up contempt for Lent. We reflected together on how it’s become apparent – politics being the point around which our observations moved – that large parts of our national and world cultures promote a dynamic grounded in something called “motive attribution asymmetry”. That’s a very fancy way of saying that my ideas are based in love and yours in hate – where I believe I’m driven by benevolence and you by evil and animosity; therefore, you are an enemy with whom I cannot negotiate. We also explored what it means to think no so much about eliminating disagreement, but removing contempt from it so that we might “disagree better”.

I confess I came away from the pulpit that day feeling pretty good. Not because I’m so brilliant – far from it – but because it felt like I’d been able to say out loud what’s...