After I Am Gone

After I Am Gone

If there is something powerful about National Day of Prayer, it is watching the community gather for prayer without a thought of who belongs to which church. As I stood at the foot of the Courthouse steps on Thursday morning and on the lawn surrounding Birdsong Amphitheatre on Thursday evening, waiting for my turn to pray, I thought about the unity that Jesus longed for us to have as a community of faith, I was moved by the profound thought of what a powerful witness we would be to the unchurched peoples of Erath County if we could just learn how to do this well. Yes, there are far more unchurched people in Erath County than those who actively participate in any church. Pastor Ed Dittfurth and I agreed that, if all of the unchurched peoples in Erath County showed up for church one Sunday, we would not have enough pews in all of our churches put together to seat them all. What at wonderful problem that would be!

This passage of scripture is called the “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus, for he prays to his God for many things on behalf of his disciples. In many ways, it is like a “Last Will and Testament” for the disciples… and for us… for it shares with us a vision of what Jesus wanted for his disciples after he was gone. As we in the Bryant family are learning, documents such as these are important ones for learning the hopes and dreams of our loved ones after their death. [As an aside, today is “Wills Emphasis Sunday” and I would encourage each of you to make a will, if you have not done so. Melinda Ward is working on mine right now.] Jesus’ final prayer is a prayer of intercession and one of the most beautiful prayers in the Bible, for it opens to us the intimate nature of the relationship between Father and Son… an intimacy – a oneness – that Jesus longed to experience with his disciples and wanted them to share with each other. It is an intimacy that we are invited to share when we come to the Table today. For in the breaking of bread and the sharing of the cup, we celebrate our adoption as children of God and our unity as the body of Christ in the world. We share this feast with all the saints in every place… Christians of all denominations, Christians living and dead… everyone who glorifies the name of God. Each Sunday that we celebrate communion, I cannot stress enough the one sentence that I say at the beginning of our communion liturgy: “This is not a Presbyterian table, it is the Lord’s table and our Savior invites all who trust in him to share the feast,” for we are all one in Him who died that we might live.

Today, we honor those who are graduating. In our congregation, we do not have any who are graduating from high school, but we have several who are graduating from college or are attaining an advanced degree. We want to recognize their amazing achievement… their hard work… and the sometimes lonely struggle to achieve this objective in their lives. We also… painfully… need to acknowledge that this milestone in their lives may take them far away from us… to places we cannot even imagine. What can we offer to them? What can we say that will reveal the high esteem in which we hold them… acknowledge the power and might of the God we worship… and give them something to contemplate in the months and years that lie ahead them as they begin this new chapter in their lives? What I would offer to them… and to you… is this prayer of Jesus for his disciples… a prayer he prayed knowing that he would not be with them… that they would soon be scattered across the known world… and that their future work would be work that could glorify God and build up God’s kingdom in this world… if God were in them as God was in him. And so, to Erin… to Amanda… to Misty… to Amy… to Julian… and to all of you, I commend this prayer.

As I commend it to you, there are three things that I will suggest that you do with it. First and foremost, pray the prayer yourself… for you cannot pray this prayer without lifting up those for whom you pray and asking, for them, the very best that the Christian life has to offer. In the two dozen verses we read, Jesus asks God:

To make God known to the disciples
To protect them in God’s name
To make Christ’s joy complete in them
To protect them from the evil one
To sanctify them in the truth
To unify them… to make them all one
To have them be in Christ and in God, so that

The world may believe
The world may know that God sent him
The world may know God loves the disciples just as God has loved him

To have the disciples be with him where he is
To have God’s love be in them
To have Christ be in them

Can we ask anything more for those whom we love… for those whom we send into the world … for those who serve in Christ’s name? So, I urge you to pray this prayer for these graduates… and for those whom you love. To do that, simply take someone’s name and substitute it for the words “they” and “them” in this prayer. Let me give you an example of what I mean, beginning at verse fourteen: “I have given Erin your word, and the world has hated Erin because she does not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take her out of the world, but I ask you to protect her from the Evil One. Erin does not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify her in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent Erin into the world. And, for her sake, I sanctify myself, so that she also may be sanctified in truth.”

What becomes immediately apparent as we pray this prayer… for whomever we pray this prayer… is that the prayer demands a significant amount from us… as well as asking things of God. So the second thing that I suggest that we do with this prayer is to study it… for each sentence provides opportunities for each of us to improve our understanding of Christ’s role in this world… as the Word of God revealed to us… and the opportunities for us to examine our own lives as followers of Jesus Christ. If we are to be what Christ was… if we are to live up to the label we carry… the label of “Christian”… we have a challenging and complex duty to God… to ourselves… and to all those to whom we minister in God’s name. We need to ask ourselves, who are those whom God has given to us? What is the work that God has given us to do? What still needs to be done? What does it mean to sanctify ourselves… to make ourselves holy? How do we do that? What quickly becomes evident is that we cannot do these things without a knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ that we can only find in scripture. So the word of God becomes our instruction book for how to become the person we see in Jesus Christ. And, as we study this prayer, we will find the answers that we seek in God’s word.

Finally, we need to live the prayer… for, as followers of Jesus Christ, we need to aspire to live the life that he lived and to do the work that he did. The prayer becomes a checklist of all that we strive for in this life. Each day, we can ask ourselves whether we have glorified God by competing the work that God has given us to do? Have we made God’s name known to all whom God has given to us? Have we given God’s word to them? Have we sanctified ourselves? Are we in Christ as he is in God? Are we one with all who profess God’s name? It would be enough, I think, for us just to live the answer to one of these questions… but to live all of them is a challenge that will keep us busy for the rest of our lives.

So, to you – our graduates – and to all who worship here today, I challenge you to pray this prayer… to study this prayer… and to live this prayer. In it, may you find a richness of life in Christ that is all that Jesus prayed for when he prayed this prayer for you. Amen.

John 17:1-23