John 17:1-11a

Driving from Boston to any location on the North Shore of Massachusetts via Route One is a unique experience with which we Brothers, and many of you, will be quite familiar. Route One is the most direct way to get back and forth between our monastery here in Cambridge and Emery House in West Newbury. Most of us – especially those living at Emery House for any length of time – have driven this route dozens, if not hundreds of times. Though I do have a soft-spot for some of Route One’s distinctively kitschy landmarks – a fiberglass orange dinosaur, a replica of the leaning tower of Pisa, a steakhouse sign in the shape of a gigantic cactus – I confess that on many days I find the barrage of retail chains and languishing motels tedious and vaguely depressing. A New England tourism website describes the Route One experience with appropriately mixed emotion: “Years have passed and Route One is still one of America’s hideous, tacky gems –with its odd charm still shining at us in its neon, kitschy glory.”

That line begs the question: What does the word glory mean? What does it mean to you?  What does it mean to glorify something or someone? Is Route One, by any stretch of the imagination, glorious? We use the word glory in our shared lexicon of prayer, scripture and liturgy almost as often as the words Amen and Allelujah. So often, in fact, that in our least attentive or impatient moments, it has the potential to become just another fiberglass dinosaur on our daily commute to God. Fortunately, we hear of glory often enough and in such varied contexts that the ears of our hearts have constant opportunity to re-awaken and to rediscover this powerful, dynamic, utterly significant and mysterious word. The great prayer that Jesus offers to his Father in John’s Gospel is a culminating moment in his life and mission, a prayer that uses the words glory or glorify eight times. This prayer is a crucial moment of pause and clarification before the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, which in John form a single arc or processual movement simply referred to as his glorification. But this final glorification simply distills and amplifies a theme that is present even in the gospel’s prologue and surfaces again and again in each chapter, the sure conviction that “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”[i]

Massive books have been written about the word “glory.” My words will barely scrape the surface. For this evening, I want to share just a few thoughts about the glorifying energy of corporate prayer. God’s glory is mediated to us in a physical and interpersonal way in the presence of Jesus especially as he prays for us to his Father. As we partake of the glory of the Son of the Father, God’s glorification in us takes root and blossoms wherever Christians are a praying presence, since the glory of God is always a glory shared.Our participation in a community of prayer makes the glory hidden in the work of Christ manifest to the world, so that all who are drawn to him through us may “see and believe.”

In Christian tradition, God’s glory might be understood as the visibly manifest, revealed, interpersonally mediated presence of God. It is something physical and available to our senses that opens us to God’s loving gift of Godself, the “godliness of God.” For us, Jesus Christ is the supreme mediator and embodiment of God’s glory, and the Holy Spirit communicates and grounds us in that glory even while leading us ever further into its Truth. In Christ, we participate in glory now and are being translated into greater glory as we follow the Way. Though not from the Johannine corpus, one of my favorite passages in all of scripture conveys the irresistible adventure of this transformation. In his second letter to theCorinthians, St. Paul writes:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is fre[...]

Saint Francis famously called every little part of creation brother or sister. As with people or plant, tribe or terrain, a language or at least perspective of fraternity invites listening rather than restricting, honor rather than control, a sober humility pointing back to our common loving Creator.

The earth, in the words of the Franciscan eco-theologian Leonardo Boff,

“is crying out.” Crying out against its destruction by the creature meant to till the soil and make it fruitful.

Helen Keller once said I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.

Transforming Unjust Structures: The Fourth Mark of Mission

For the past several weeks we have been considering the Mission of God in the world by looking at the Anglican Communion’s “Five Marks of Mission.” We have been asking ourselves, “What is it that God is doing, in our lives and in the world?  What is God’s mission and purpose?  What does God care about most passionately?”  This evening we examine the Fourth Mark of Mission, which is “to seek to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind, and to pursue peace and reconciliation.” 

Transformation is at the heart of the Gospel message.  God is transforming us individually, making each of us a “new creation” in Christ (II Cor. 5:17).  But God is also transforming us collectively, along with the whole Creation: “Behold, I make all things new,” says the One seated upon the Throne in the book of Revelation (Rev. 21:5).  God’s work of transformation, then,is personal and spiritual, and it is communal, social and political.[i]  God cares about us as individuals, but God also cares about our life together.

The Bible has plenty to say about God’s passion for justice and about God’s vision for our life together:

It speaks of the goodness and order of God’s Creation (“God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good”-Gen. 1:31), and of the rebellion and disobedience that plunged us into the bondage of sin.  It holds out to us God’s promise to restore the Creation and reconcile all things in Christ (Col. 1:20)

The pivotal story of the Exodus reveals God’s compassion for God’s people, and God’s desire to free them from oppression.   We read that the Egyptians were exploiting the Israelites’ labor, restricting their freedoms, and rendering them powerless; this is what dominant political and social systems do.  The liberation God wins for the people of ancient Israel is political and economic, as well as religious.

In the giving of the Law, God establishes communal norms that protect the poor from exploitation and limit the power of the rich.  God’s laws are designed to create a common good, and to allow it to flourish.

When the people stray from these laws, God sends the prophets to challenge their unjust social-political structures and to re-focus the attention of the people on God’s vision for them. The prophets cry out against the human suffering created by unjust systems imposed by the wealthy and powerful.

Similarly, the Good News preached by Jesus is not only personal and spiritual, but also communal, social and political.  Jesus comes announcing that “the kingdom of God has come near” and urging people to “repent and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15).  The repentance he requires is not just a turning away from personal sin, but the transformation of social and political systems that elevate some at the expense of others.  “Kingdom” is a political term, and although Jesus could have spoken of the “family of God” or the “community of God,” he chose to speak of the “kingdom of God,” a kingdom that stood in stark contrast to the kingdoms of Herod and of Caesar, with which his hearers were very familiar.  He taught his followers to pray that God’s kingdom would come “on earth” as it already is in heaven – he meant right now, in this life, not just in the after-life.[ii]

In this kingdom, this transformed community, the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up; the hungry are filled with good things while the rich are sent away empty (Luke 2:52,53).  In this kingdom, the poor are blessed and those who weep learn to laugh (Luke 6:20,21).  Jesus tells us that it is for this reason that he was sent into the world: “to bring good news to the poor,” “to proclaim release to the captives,” “to let the oppressed go free,” “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18,19).

Jesus not only teaches about this new kingdom, he embodies it by befriending “tax collectors and sinners;” by associating with[...]

The long-time religion editor of Publisher’s Weekly, Phyllis Tickle, wrote in her book The Great Emergence that every five hundred years or so, the Christian faith holds a “rummage sale.” The church sifts and sorts through beliefs and practices that have grown old, decayed, or died, to make space for what wants to emerge.  That’s every five hundred years.  This sifting and sorting process occurred with the Great Collapse of the Roman Empire (around year 500 ce), the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches (around year 1000), and the Great Reformation (around year 1500). Now, she proposed, we are in the Great Emergence.  What is emerging?  This is a crucial question when it comes to our topic for this evening – Teaching, Baptizing, and Nurturing Believers – not only because it is “politic” to know our constituency; it is also a faithful response to the work of God’s Spirit, whom Jesus says will teach us everything and remind us of all that [Jesus] said to us.”[i] What are we being taught and reminded through God’s Spirit, and where do we look?

One place to which we cannot look solelyis to the Bible, and for two reasons.  For one, the Bible is not universally credible, and, at the very least, is interpreted in very different waysby practicing Christians, don’t we know.  A recent Gallup poll shows about 75% of Americans believe the Bible is in some way connected to God, but how the Bible is connected ranges a wide gamut; and about 20% of Americans now view the Bible as ancient fables, legends, history written not by God but by biased, sometimes ill-informed humans.[ii]  Secondly, we cannot look to the Bible alone for the Spirit’s leading because the Bible “offers us no clear categories for many of our most significant and vexing socio-ethical questions.”  I’m quoting here from the author and post-evangelical pastor Brian McLaren, writing about A New Kind of Christianity.[iii]  McLaren says that, in the Bible, “We find no explicit mention, for example, of abortion, capitalism, communism, socialism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism, systemic racism, affirmative action, human rights, nationalism, sexual orientation, pornography, global climate change, imprisonment, extinction of species, energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, genetic engineering, space travel, and so on – not to mention nuclear weapons, biological warfare, and just-war theory.”  That’s what is missing from the Bible.

So we can’t look just to the Bible.  We need to seek out God’s Spirit, whom Jesus says is “like the wind that blows wherever it chooses.”[iv]  The Anglican formula for discerning the leading of God’s Spirit today is a kind of faithful, expectant synergy: a kind of dialogue between:

the Bible;

and then tradition, i.e., how people were led by the Spirit in the past. The early Church survived and thrived for about 200 years before there was what we call the New Testament, the New Testament Canon of Scripture.

and then use our reason, because we have been created in the image of God with minds and memories. We are not robots; we are not blank tablets.

and then, lastly, we draw on our experience. What is my experience of God?  What is your experience of God?  It’s a crucial question, not just so we bequeath dignity to one another – which is important – but also because we understand that God’s Spirit doesn’t just work around us and through others, but within us, in our own life’s experience.

And I’m saying “us.”  This isn’t about me; this is about us.  There is no private faith in Jesus; it is always a public faith: personal yet public.  Jesus always worked with groups.  He spoke to groups, he fed groups, ate with groups, healed people in groups.  When we read he encountered individuals, they were representatives of a group, or he sent these individuals back to groups.  Saint Paul said these groups of Jesus’ followers were like a body: very diverse parts – a foot is very different from an [...]