John 17:6-19
May 24, 2009
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
For many people in our society, whether they go to church or not, their religion is essentially a private matter, between them and God. At best, the church is like software providing people with a way for accessing God. And as we know about software, when a newer version comes along that’s more interesting or works better, we would try another church to access God. We are free to believe anything we wish in our society and to go anywhere we choose to have a private religious experience.
In our Gospel this morning, Jesus is giving his farewell prayer to his followers. Soon they will have to learn to go on without Jesus being around them in the way they’d been used to. As Christians, the world they’ll be called to be a witness will be a tough one, in which they’ll meet stiff opposition—just as Jesus did. Because Jesus cares for them, he wants to be reassured that they’ll be all right. He wants them to have help from God to fight the good fight like he did.
You can see that life with God isn’t a private thing here. While the people who follow Jesus belong to God, they are still in the world. Jesus said, “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15). As a visible community, they have a collective role in taking Jesus’ mission forward and Jesus is asking God to help them to do it.
Living in the World
A cursory reading of our text suggests a vision of the ideal Christian community as a tight-knit fellowship. Everyone seems to be on the inside track with Christ and the Father, in sole and perfect possession of the truth, drawn warmly together in mutual love and joy, protected by the Messiah against the “evil world” outside. Does that sound like our church?
I hope not. I am not so sure I would go along with such a definition of a church like this. It’s cozy and feels like a lot of warm fuzzies, but it would make me nervous. It would make me nervous to feel so set apart from the world, absorbed in the intimacies of such an exclusive religious fellowship. Imagine all the temptation that such exclusiveness might bring. We might indulge in a sense of superiority or theological certainty or insulation from the rough and tumble of life with its ambiguities and complexities or pious indifference to the world’s suffering, injustice and violence!
But before we write this passage in John off as irrelevant or too limited, we need to look at the world from John’s point of view. John’s “world” as mentioned in this lesson is not God’s good creation. Rather, it is the “evil,” the corrupted, distorted, and destructive aspects of things. It is the world of greed, lust, selfishness, domination, violence, and under the influence of the Roman Empire, a defiance of God’s plan for his creation.
Seen in this light, our text today makes more sense. Rather than idealizing a perfect and private, withdrawn and pious community, it argues for a courageous, clear-eyed realistic recognition of the power and pervasiveness of systemic evil in the world. Therefore, this passage reminds believers to be deeply centered and grounded in the power of God in their attempts to live redemptively in such a world.
The fellowship of the believing community and its intimacy with God leads it not to retreat from the world but empowering the community of believers to be in the world in order to effectively challenge the destructive power of evil with the saving word of divine truth, love, forgiveness, and life.
Evil One
We tend to believe that the evil of the world are such things as racism, sexism; a violent and abusive government; the plundering of the natural world; the neglect, abuse and exploitation of the politically and economically weak by the mighty. We believe that they must be confronted solely through human will and commitment, moral courage, intelligence and political savvy. This is in some part the reason why many of us are more confident about the future now in America with President Obama to be able to bring about positive change in the world. We like to believe in this “Yes, we can” attitude.
The problem with this is that we underestimate the spiritual nature and transcendent power of evil. In Ephesians 6:12, we read, “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against cosmic powers of present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” This Pauline language is John’s world—a vast system of dehumanizing, destructive moral and spiritual power encompassing and perverting human history and society.
The NRSV reading of this passage, John 17:15 translates the term for evil as “the evil one,” not in the abstract form as just “evil.” Evil here has a face, suggesting not a natural or impersonal process but a perverse intentionality and immoral agency. Today, we would do well to take this insight seriously by interpreting the “evil one” not so much as some metaphysical idea, but in concrete, social, systemic, and historical terms as a pervasive immoral bent, arising from our human condition (from ourselves) that is deceptive, destructive, dehumanizing, and death producing.
So what is the evil ones that we see today? We can see this in the power behind the immense economic and political forces driving the horrors of today’s human trafficking, drug trade and sexual abuse. We can see this in rogue governments that allow pervasiveness of individual and genocidal violence. We can see and feel this in the destruction of our natural environment by high-tech industrial economies. We can see this in the massive disregard of human rights and the resort to violence and repression by governments around the world. We can see this every day when we read in the papers or on the internet the list of U.S. soldiers who gave their lives in Iraq or in Afghanistan as we remember them this Memorial Day Weekend.
As a church with our zeal for social righteousness, we often fail to recognize such evil ones in the world. The struggle against evil is a struggle against a wide range of social, economic, and historical powers to be sure. But in the last analysis, it is also a spiritual struggle against the “evil one” that is very much found in ourselves. Our attempts to redeem and restore human life and the life on the planet that depends solely upon rational, political, and human efforts, but lack the spiritual depth, will ultimately be naive, frustrating, and futile.
Visible Community
Now that we recognize the kind of world that John was talking about, the disciples are not called to disengage from the world, not to be self-preoccupied with themselves, not to have a chummy fellowship with God but to deal with the world by truly being alive and victorious in the world, reclaiming it as God’s and thus redeeming it. To counter the pervasive and reality of the “evil one,” we are called to become a visible community, God’s redeeming work in the world.
The only hope to defeat the “evil one,” is our communion with and participation in the life and power of God, and only in and through the human fellowship that we know as the church. Any realistic hope of challenging and overcoming evil and creating a world where justice, love, truth, and God’s healing presence can begin to prevail is in the church. The only real hope is to recognize and acknowledge through true confession that we are the “evil ones” when we fail to follow Jesus.
The challenge for us is how to create this world where justice, love, truth, and God’s healing presence can happen. This only happens in particular situations. In actual human situations when we find our faith challenge is when God’s love is made concrete and real.
There’s a picture of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The photo shows her in advanced age, yet she is bending over a small bowl of water as she is washing the feet of one of the people she picked up from the streets of Calcutta. She does not know this person, and really that does not matter. To her, he is Christ. And although the person she is helping may very well die soon, and the situation seems very dire, she brings a glimmer of joy to him. In her small way she is contributing to the great quest to conquer all evil. And by doing all this, she is spreading the good news of the gospel. We are called to preach the gospel wherever we go and only when it’s necessary, we can use words.
It’s providential that we have Jerry and Wilma Mishler visiting our church today. They symbolize for us visible witnesses of God’s good news in Cambodia and wherever they may be serving in Jesus’ name. When they go out in the name of God, they have already confronted their own personal “evil ones” so that they are able to engage in the quest to conquer all evil.
For 3 years now, we have been selling Lanna Coffee to stop human trafficking and prostitution. It may not sound like a lot when we drink a cup of coffee. But if you can just imagine how every sip you take, you are making it possible for girls and young women to stay in their villages and not run the risk of working as domestics in Bangkok and then possibly drawn into human prostitution, we are overcoming the evil in the world. We understand that every action we take can have global impact on the safety and survival of others on the other side of the world.
I often wonder how we as the church act as the visible community of Christ in the world. Two weeks ago when we were driving to the seminary commencement in Oakland, we passed by the new Cathedral of Lights near Lake Merritt. I noticed that the grey concrete blended nicely with all of the other office buildings on the same block. I was looking for something that would identify this was a church. I couldn’t see a church name at least from Grand Avenue.
I look at our church and I am happy to see that we have our church name visible both in English and in Chinese, both at the corner of the street and in the front of the church. I’m happy that we have these unique clinker bricks that set us off from other structures and that even the SF Chronicle has noticed it. I’m happy that for the most part, all our visitors can find us on our church website and that we have a street address and that we have a church phone number. We are not invisible but we are clearly a visible community.
But being a visible community that is a sign and a foretaste of God’s reign to come is much, much, more than what our church building is.
When Jesus prayed for his disciples in the seventeenth chapter of John’s gospel, he didn’t pray that they be holier than other people. He didn’t ask God to make them perfect and virtuous. He didn’t grant them power to judge others or to act superior to those who don’t believe as they do. No, Jesus asked God that he might protect them and sanctify them and guide them. Jesus asked God that he might teach them and strengthen them and make them one with each other and with God. Jesus asked God to watch over them as they move forth to consider the work of Christ.
As the visible community of Jesus Christ, I believe that we are encountering and overcoming the “evil one” in our world when we are transformed into his faithful disciples. When we as a church value and practice our bilingual, bicultural, and multi-generational unique-nesses and gifts without the fear of suspicion and judgment, we are overcoming the evil of dominance and disrespect.
When we welcome the stranger and how we struggle to keep on welcoming the strangers who are so different from ourselves, we are overcoming the evil of economic inequalities that exist in our society and our own prejudices.
Even when we voted last week to not be content with our elected leaders in Sacramento to act as if everything is okay and that it’s time for them to take responsibility to correct our statewide fiscal problems, we are overcoming the evil of governmental irresponsibility and overspending and perhaps a willingness on our part to share in paying more taxes to have a healthy commonwealth.
As God’s gathered visible community on earth we are far from perfect. But we are the church, a sign and a foretaste of the great Church to come, which will be nothing less than the final homecoming of our whole human family, at peace at last, with each other and with God. That’s what heaven is about, that’s what ultimately what the church is for—to be a sign of the future for the human race, a future more profound than just individual or personal peace, a future more wide-reaching than just personal spirituality, a future more environmental, more cosmic, more connected than any conventional private religiousness we can attain to.
This is what Jesus was praying for his disciples to do after he leaves them. We are God’s visible community with God’s energy and imagination and our commitment to try making a difference in the world by the way we live our lives. Jesus said to God, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (17:17-18).
Let us pray.
Almighty God, strengthen us with a faith of courage rooted in the love that we know in Jesus Christ, your Son and our savior that we may be your visible community of love, hope, justice and peace in the world. Lead us out of the privacy of our church building and into the streets and highways of life so that in our discipleship, we may participate in conquering all evil in your name. Grant us your mercy and protection. Amen.