sermon for easter 7B

Revd Lis Mullen, Minister, Carver United Reformed Church, Windermere

John 17.6-19

Prayer

Prayer comes in all shapes and sizes -
a burst of gratitude,
a cry of pain or joy,
open and silent listening,
or a slow chant spiralling deep into stillness.

As a child, I can remember well each night saying my prayers out loud to my mother or sometimes my father. It was usually:

“Thank you for the world so sweet,
thank you for the food we eat,
thank you for the birds that sing,
thank you God for everything. Amen.”

I am also aware that lots of children recited this:

“This night as I lie down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

I hope they don’t recite it anymore!  It doesn’t really give God a very good image: someone who comes into the house to take away your soul before you wake up.  An alternative Father Christmas!  I cannot remember ever learning how to make up my own prayers, or being taught anything about prayer – except perhaps at our Christian Endeavour meeting where we had a ‘chain prayer’ each week.  We had to go round the room, and in turn, pray for someone or something.  Each of us had our own particular favourite cause which we dutifully churned out, often with self-conscious giggles.  Certainly with no understanding of what was going on as we said the words, or any hope that it would achieve anything.

We certainly didn’t know that these sort of prayers were called Intercessions: the kind of prayer we pray when we want to bring our concerns for other people to God.  Nor did I understand that when I was praying my ‘thank you’ prayer for the world so sweet that I was following the old traditions of thankfulness for God’s creation.  I seem to remember thinking that prayer was usually about asking for things:

‘Ask, ask ask and it shall be given you…’

and I would hazard a guess that in our time, most of us had certain selfish priorities when we addressed the Almighty.  And perhaps still do.  We prayed because we wanted something.  Maybe there were times when we wanted something for someone else, but mostly, it was probably for ourselves.  Perhaps for success in some way – in school, in exams, in relationships, in getting through a hard day.

Or it was often for our bodies: John Bell speaks of a post card he once found in an Anglican bookshop which showed a young girl on her knees saying:

“Dear God, thank you very much for giving me a nice face,but is there something you could do about my fat bum?”

He also describes a time when he was rushed into hospital with the blue light flashing. It did not cross his mind then to be praying for Northern Ireland or Iraq, or the hungry people of Ethiopa.  No, he was very busy praying for himself and his own life, which might not last much longer.  Of course he was, and I expect anyone of us would do the same.

Which makes Jesus’ prayer, the one we have heard read today, very different and unexpected.  You see,  Jesus said this prayer not long before his arrest.  He said this prayer as part of a long speech of farewell after he had washed his disciples’ feet at their last supper together.  He said this prayer while his enemies were keeping their fingers crossed that he would soon be delivered to them and Judas was on his way to do just that.  He said this prayer knowing that within 24 hours he would be arrested, tried, found guilty, sentenced and executed.

And in this extreme moment, in these dire straits does Jesus pray for himself?  For success?  His soul or his body?  No.  He prays for his disciples, and for all those people who will put their trust in him because of what the disciples will go on to say about him.  He prays for all those people who will become Christians through the disciples: through the likes of Peter and then Paul, then all the great saints and the humble saints.  For you and me.  On his road to death, at that very moment when everyone prays for what they think is really important, Jesus reveals what is really important to him – his disciples.  His community of followers which existed because they were chosen and called to represent Jesus and continue his mission.

So, he prayed for us.  He talked to God as his Father and close friend. The words are spoken comfortably, and although they make for quite difficult reading the first or second time, they do become clearer on more readings.  That’s often the trouble with reading passages from the Bible.  We read them once and don’t find it clear or comprehensible, so then we don’t bother again, unless it’s a familiar story and then we zip through it with the comfort of that familiarity and fail to look for new things.

Am I right?  Or am I the only one that does this?  Jesus, in his prayer,

which is actually the whole of ch 17, prayed that God would protect and guard his disciples, his community.

‘Holy Father, protect them in your name… While I was with them, I protected them in your name…  I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost…’

He was speaking of Judas, of course.  Jesus was saying that because they had followed him and learned from him, the disciples, (and that includes us) are different in some ways from the rest of the world.  Not so different though that we are out of this world.  Quite the opposite in fact.  It is important that we are very much in the world and part of it.  But that has its own dangers and so Jesus prays for our protection  He says:

‘I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from  ‘the evil one’.”

This does not mean a personification of the devil, or satan, but that because Christians live within a world that has rejected Jesus, to live distinctively as Christians is a risky business and we need God’s protection.  Jesus said to his father:

‘I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.’

The Christian  community then, is one which poses a threat to many of the old evil certainties in life -
-          like unequal power;
-          war;
-          trying to get ones own way over on someone else.

These are always a threat.  So security is far from assured, and Judas’ capitulation to pressures from such a world shows just how easily it can happen.  The evil one can then be understood to be those pressures that threaten to undermine our faith, that threaten our willingness to serve, that threaten our concern for justice throughout the world.  Those pressures that could prevent us from being distinctive.

This prayer then, that Jesus prayed for his disciples can be seen as a model for intercessions.  A prayer for others.  It is also a model of openness and vulnerability, for Jesus is opening up his heart and soul and really expressing his concerns in detail.

I am sure that the disciples felt both worried and comforted by Jesus’ prayer.  And it is a comfort to hear people pray for you.  It is a strengthener too.  And it is a comfort to know someone has prayed for you, or is praying for you.  But strangely enough, prayer often alters the person who prays, too.  I hope you won’t get tired of me talking about the Iona Community, but they have a pattern that each member of the community is prayed for by name one day every month, both in the Abbey and by every other member.  It is a wonderful thing to know that hundreds of people are praying for you, but also, the effect is that each person who is doing the praying remembers actively the others and may be moved to ring them or write to them. To act.

They have been changed by the fact that they have prayed.  So the act of praying with or for someone is a wake up call for us to act ourselves.  In this way, prayer is like the Spirit, bringing new life.  Perhaps this is a pattern we could adopt?  We have a list of names, our directory, and it divides quite neatly.  With 6 names on each page, if you divide each page in two, starting with the first 3 names on the 1^st of each month and the next on the 2^nd and continue through, each person will be prayed for specifically by the 27^th of each month.  On the last 3 days, we could pray for the staff at the Windermere Centre, the staff at the Synod office, and the staff at central office.  Who knows what this might do for us all as a group of disciples?

Jesus was moved to pray for his friends at a time of great personal stress.  He prayed for them to be protected and strengthened as they continued his work for the kingdom in an uncertain world after he had left them behind.  He didn’t want them to be left gazing up into heaven after him, he wanted them to have their eyes fixed firmly on Jesus Christ as seen in other people.  He gives us an example of how to pray, and why we must, so let us follow him.

Amen

Tagged as: being a community of prayer, carver united reformed church, discipleship, easter 7b, intercessions, jesus' high priestly prayer, jesus' practice of prayer, john 17: 6-19, Lawrence Moore, learning to pray, personal prayer, revd lis mullen, the united reformed church, The Windermere Centre