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A Congregation Of The "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen |
From April 20, 2008 Today's gospel lesson reminds me of a pork chop. Not just any pork chop but one I once ordered at Cynthia's on a fancy date; it came stuffed with gorgonzola cheese and other kinds of deliciousness. Not only was it rich, it was substantial enough for four or five people. Most of that chop went home in a doggie bag and nourished me for the better part of a week. Today's gospel lesson is like that pork chop. Jesus says so many important things this morning, all of them so rich and generous, but it's almost too much. Just a bite or two from the fourteen verses that are ours today would be more than enough. Our choices are many. "If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it." "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me….I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also." What makes our reading this morning so rich, so generous isn't simply what Jesus says, though, it's when he says what he says. You see, Jesus is gathered with his disciples in Jerusalem. Having taken a room somewhere in the city, this is the last time they'll be together like this--and Jesus knows it. Everything they've done together, all the travels and the crowds and the miracles and the controversies, has led to this. The culmination of Jesus' ministry. Lovingly, tenderly, thoroughly, Jesus prepares his disciples for what is coming next. With death on his mind but love in his heart this last night they are together, Jesus kneels and washes the feet of the twelve who have journeyed with him. Men whom Jesus hand-picked for reasons of his own. Men who are, to state this kindly, a motley crew. Men who have tried, and regularly failed, to understand and assist in Jesus' mission of love. Men who, in spite of everything, Jesus loves and longs even now to serve. So Jesus bends low and carefully washes the disciples' feet, even those of his betrayer. He will be handed over to death, he tells them after the ritual ends, and where he is going they cannot go. Imagine trying to absorb that news. Imagine how your pulse would quicken and how confused your thinking would become. Imagine how your head would spin and your heart would ache and how lost and confused and afraid you would feel. "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me," Jesus says seeking to comfort and reassure his friends. Words that comfort and reassure us, too. Rabbi Jesus continues carefully and lovingly. Like a good teacher before the final exam, he touches on all the essentials while he still can. Essentials that to our ears can sound so mystical they confuse us or so exclusive they concern us. But everything Jesus really means to say in his farewell speech boils down to this: God is here, now, loving us and relating to us, a God who is alive in and working through Jesus. A God who wants us to know that love and love alone--the kind that in life guided Jesus' every step and word--this love is the truest of realities and the only way to live. As meaty and mystical as Jesus' words are, they can be too much for us. So much, in fact, that we often miss what I think qualifies as the most loving and most frightening thing Jesus ever says to us: "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these…." Greater works? Did Jesus say greater works? Yes. That's precisely what he said. A number of years back, I referred to this in a sermon and suggested that we ought never underestimate ourselves because Jesus surely didn't. Afterwards a devout parishioner stopped me at the sanctuary door and quizzed me on this. A humble man and a life-long student of scripture, he was certain I had taken liberties. That I had snuck in a personal opinion and attributed it to Jesus. But no, it's there in John 14, verse 12, Jesus really does say that. "The one who believes in me will also do…greater works than these." Remember who this Jesus is, now. This is the guy who healed lepers and welcomed sinners. This is the man who confronted the Pharisees and taught with more divine authority in one day than they might be given in a lifetime. This is the one who walked on water and raised Lazarus from the grave. This is the leader who knelt down and gently cradled, then washed, the feet of the man he knew was about to betray him. Greater works, says the Galilean who didn't just talk about God, but, by his words and his ways, consistently showed us who God is and what God is really like. Greater works we will do, he insists, just hours away from his death as an innocent man. That's a whole lot to chew on, now isn't it? We could dismiss it, if we wanted to. We could call it hyperbole. Or optimism born of pure love, kind of like the mother who likes introduceing her 10 year-old daughter as the next President of the United States. Or maybe Jesus knows something about us that we don't. I'm going to tell you a story that might sound too much like something a woman from California would tell. But I'm going to tell it anyway. A number of years ago, I had a dream. Now you need to know something right off the bat. When this dream came, I was not a part of any church nor did I have any interest in being part of any church. I thought I had outgrown Christianity. I believed it had nothing new to give me, nothing fresh to teach me, that it wasn't alive enough, immediate enough, or satisfying enough for me. So the dream. Walking the grounds of the university where I had studied and worked for many years, I came upon the fountain that sat proudly in the center of the campus. As the water rose up toward the sky and fell back down to earth, it took on a luminous, other-worldly quality. Then from the middle of the fountain, up, up, up, rose Christ himself. The one risen from the grave. The head of the church. Eternal Savior. Second Person of the Trinity. This is what I saw. And this is what I said: I simply cannot relate to this! I resent this intrusion on my dream! This must stop! Instantly, this image vanished and I found myself standing a few steps from a man I had never seen before. An exceedingly peaceful man. A man who seemed to know me better than I knew myself, if this was even possible for a stranger. This is no man, this is Jesus, I decided in a flash. Nothing about him caused me to be intimidated or self conscious or shy. We stood there for a moment, just looking into each other's eyes, when he stepped just close enough to lightly elbow me in the ribs the way friends do when they playfully tease each other. "You can do this too, you know," he said in a voice that demanded nothing and yet was confidently hopeful. "You can do this too, you know." But before Jesus could tell me what he meant by this, he was gone. And I was left both peaceful and puzzled, not entirely sure what he meant. Only that this was not something in particular but rather a way of life. If given a choice, I always prefer the earthy, very human Jesus of Mark or Luke to the other-worldly, almost-halo-headed Jesus of John's gospel. Certainly that down-to-earth Jesus is the one who visited me in my dream and invited me to a life like his. Which is exactly what a savior-guy like that would do. Which is why, if you think about it, Jesus' comments to the
disciples--and us--are so astounding. In John's gospel Jesus walks
around saying things like "I am the Light of the World. I am the
Resurrection and the Life. I am the True Vine. I am the Way, the Truth,
and the Life." We're nothing like him. We're like the disciples that last week in Jerusalem; we mean well but we get it wrong, we fall asleep on the job, we deny our affiliation with Jesus, we betray him, we run away when we're frightened. And yet knowing all this about them, about us, still Jesus says with a heart full of love and all the confidence in the world: "The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these." How? How could this be? Jesus tells us: "I will do whatever you ask in my name…if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it." If our works are greater, it's only because we're working alongside the greatest. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel |
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