Easter 7B, John 17: 6-19
Saint Mark’s 5 pm May 12, 2024
The John’s gospel this last Sunday of the Easter season is part of Jesus’ high priestly prayer to God just before his arrest. He prays on behalf of his disciples and us. “They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world. Sanctify them in the truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” //
Every evening, we surf channels CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS viewing what is happening in the outside world. We peek beyond our isolated world to that larger world where Jesus sends us.
The news details differ every evening, but significant themes recur./ There are always wars. In the Middle East, Ukraine, Africa. People fight for control, power, revenge, and freedom on our streets here at home.
The news always involves some search for peace. Heads of state meet airing old grievances and considering new possibilities for compromise. Muslims sit down with Jews and Christians. Labor sits down with management./
The world is also always hungry. People starve all over the world, and a great majority are children.
That leads to the last recurring theme, homelessness. As a child, we only saw people sleeping in the streets when we visited the Bowery in New York City or the French Quarter in New Orleans. This evening, people sleep on sidewalks all over this country,/ even in well-manicured streets./ Even in Little Rock, they lie in doorways and sit on church steps. They are dispossessed and forgotten./ Home is the place where, if you must go, they will take you in, but these people have no such place anywhere in the world. They have been taken out of the world./
War, the search for peace, hunger, homelessness. Every evening, we recline in our living rooms and watch the same events in our world. What we choose to do about it, where our money goes, who gets our votes, and what issues we support are all important, not just for the world where we have been sent/ but for the world of our own lives.
So, we change channels from the outside world to the headline news story in this our private inner world.
Buechner believes the best time to view this private news channel is when we turn out the lights and lie in the dark waiting for sleep. It is a time to look at the wars we have engaged in for the last twenty-four hours, or twenty-four years, because we all wage war,/ if only with ourselves. We also search for peace.// For real peace is our nightly/ high priestly prayer. As we lie in the dark, what battles should we no longer fight, and which should we fight more bravely instead of surrendering? We are churchgoers. Nice people. We fight well camouflaged. We are snipers rather than bombardiers. Our weapons are likely chilly silences than hot words. But our wars are no less real, and the stakes no less high.
“I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19). We identify with Paul’s words to the church in Rome as a powerful summation of our private wars. These are the world wars that go on within families and marriages, the wars we wage openly, but more often so hidden that even at the height of the battle, we are hardly aware of what we are doing. These are the wars that go on between parents and children, between people who at one level are friends/ but at another level are adversaries, competitors, strangers/ with a terrible capacity for wounding each other/ deeply, painfully/ because the wounds are invisible and the bleeding is primarily internal. Sometimes, we fight to survive, sometimes to be noticed, let alone be loved. Sniping, skirmishing, defensive maneuvers, subversive aggression are part of our lives.
Ken Burn’s television series on the Civil War describes a remarkable scene in the 1913 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg when what is left of the two armies stages a reenactment of Pickett’s charge. The Union veterans on the ridge take their places among the rocks. The Confederate veterans start marching toward them across the field below,/// and then something extraordinary happens. As the older men among the rocks rush down at the older men coming across the field, a great cry goes up.// Only instead of doing battle as they had a half-century earlier, they throw their arms around each other, embrace, and openly weep.///
As we lie in the dark looking back over the daily news of our world, if only we had eyes to see what those older men saw as they fell into each other’s arms on the field at Gettysburg. If only we could see that the people in the world we are at war with/ are less to blame for the bad blood between us than we are./ Often, the very faults we find so unbearable in them are versions of similar faults we are blind to in ourselves./////
Hunger on our private channel, in the literal sense, is unknown to us as a news item. But we do hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our skins. We hunger to be known and understood for all our good and bad times that make us who we are. Being in the world may mean/ we realize we ALL have the same good times and bad times. This truth is why there should be no such thing in all the world as someone who is not our neighbor./ Jesus sends us out into this world not just for our neighbors’ sakes but for our’s. Not helping to feed those who are starving to death is to have some sacred, sanctified part of who we are/ starving to death with them. When we ignore the hungry, we take ourselves out of this world. When we do not give ourselves to our neighbors, starving for what we have in our hearts and souls to nourish them, we take ourselves out of this world.//
We lie in our beds in the dark.
It is still difficult to see being homeless as a part of our newscast. There is a picture of our children on the bureau. Our clothes hang in the closet. When the weather is bad, we have shelter. When bad things happen to us, we have a place to retreat/ to pull ourselves back together again./
For us, to be homeless, not to belong to this world, is to have homes all over the place but not feel truly at home in any of them. To be really at home is to feel at peace./
Our lives are so intricately interwoven with our neighbors that there can be no real peace for us until there is real peace for all of us./
This is the truth that sanctifies and makes our world holy, our dealing with wars, hunger, homelessness in our outside world, and the search for peace. This is the truth that sanctifies and makes our daily lives holy, dealing with the wars, hunger, homelessness, in our inner life, and the search for peace./
May our own high priestly prayer tonight be for all of us to find that peace.
Frederick Buechner, “The News of the Day,” Secrets in the Dark, pp. 245-250.