I listened to an interesting study the other day about how people underestimate how much they will change in the future. Psychologists call it the “end of history illusion,” this idea that the person I am today is essentially the person I will be ten years from now. Yes I may have a few more gray hairs, but by and large my identity, values, personality, etc. will all remain largely the same. Daniel Gilbert, the psychologist who studied this, noticed this fact about himself. Thinking about himself at fifty-five, he was pretty sure he was who he would be. This was despite the fact that when he reflected back on who he was at forty-five, he could see all the ways he’d changed. He wondered if this was true for others. So he and some colleagues questioned almost twenty-thousand people about how much they had changed in the past ten years, and how much they thought they might change in the next ten. The study found out that regardless of age, people from teens to seniors could look back and see change, but when they imagined forward they saw themselves staying the same. The psychologists concluded that we never stop growing, changing, learning new things and becoming new people, we just think that we do. Yes it slows, someone in their teens changed more than someone in their sixties, but everyone does change with time, and changes more than we expect.
I got to thinking about this study when I was reading our Gospel text for this morning, when Jesus told the disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” To recap, we’re still where we’ve been for the past few weeks, in the Farewell Discourse, Jesus’ final words to his disciples before he went to be crucified. And I think it’s interesting that Jesus said the reason he couldn’t finish all the things he needed to say wasn’t because of his impending death, but because the disciples weren’t ready yet to hear them. Time wasn’t the limiting factor, the disciples’ preparedness was. We might wonder, or even fault the disciples for their lack of readiness. After all, they’d been with Jesus for three years by this point. They’d traveled with him, studied under him, seen him work countless miracles, what could he possibly have to tell them that they weren’t yet ready to bear.
But they hadn’t been to the garden with him. They hadn’t stood at the foot of the cross. They hadn’t seen him laid in a tomb, or returned to find the tomb empty. They hadn’t put their finger in the mark of the nails in his hands, or put their hands in his side. They hadn’t seen him ascend into heaven, standing gap-mouthed into the emptiness as two angels told them, “why do you stand looking up to heaven?” They hadn’t heard the rush as of a violent wind of the Holy Spirit descending on, among, into them. Without those experiences, that presence, they could not understand, could not bear, all of the hope and heart and promise that Jesus had to say. Yes, they had been told, but there is only so much we can learn through listening. There are things that can only be known through experience, wisdom that can only come when we stand on the far side of the shore looking back at the rapids across which we came. Jesus knew this, he knew the disciples weren’t, couldn’t absorb all that he had to share with them. They couldn’t know what it would be like when the twelve would become a movement. When devout Jews of every nation under heaven would hear them speaking of God’s deeds of power. When three-thousand would be baptized in a day. When Paul would turn from persecutor to proselytizer and would start bringing gentiles into the community. They could not, when they were nothing more than twelve men having dinner with a beloved mentor, have ever comprehended how much more was in store for them. Jesus knew that, and that’s why Jesus promised to send the Spirit. So that as each of these changes occurred, as they faced each new challenge and learned each new lesson, the Spirit would be there as a guide.
And that’s something else that struck me in this passage. Jesus said that the Spirit of truth would come not to tell them the truth or to give them the truth, but to “guide them into all the truth.” What this tells me is that even with the Spirit there’s evolution of understanding. Truth itself doesn’t change, but our understanding of it, how far along the path we have been guided into it, does. Just because we think we know something today, doesn’t mean there is not more to know.
This Wednesday was Loving Day. Loving Day, if you’re unfamiliar, is the annual celebration of the Supreme Court’s June 12th, 1967 decision in the Loving vs. Virginia case, striking down all state laws that banned interracial marriage. Mildred and Richard Loving were an interracial couple who were sentenced to a year in prison for, and I quote, “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” When I was reading about the case, my favorite thing I read was a message Richard Loving gave to his attorney to be read to the Supreme Court. Mr. Loving said: "Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can't live with her in Virginia."
Racism, obviously, still a huge problem in our country, but I think at least in this room, we all agree that laws against interracial marriage are unfair, unjust, and even unfaithful. But
I bring it up in this sermon because the arguments made against the Lovings case were in many times scriptural. Good, faithful, God-believing Christians cited scripture to argue against Richard and Mildred’s marriage. The texts haven’t changed, the Bible they read in the 60s was, is, the same Bible we read today. What’s changed is how we understand the text. God hasn’t changed, truth hasn’t changed, but we have. We have grown from a narrow-minded ethnocentric read of scripture to one that more fully captures the incredible richness of creation. And the Loving case is just one very recent example of how people of faith, through prayer, study, conversation, and most importantly, the guiding of the Holy Spirit, can find ourselves led more fully into God’s truth. This movement seems not unlike the change Martin Luther made when he found in scripture the promise that we are saved by God’s grace alone, and not by the purchase of indulgences. Or even what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” Fulfillment it turns out, takes a long, long, long time. Much longer than we, time-bound mortals, want to admit or can even imagine, but the promise of our Gospel text is that for as long as it takes, the Spirit of truth is with us, guiding us further along into the truth.
Is this challenge? Yes, it most certainly is. It means we’re going to have to do some soul-searching, going to have to admit that we’re probably wrong about a whole lot of things. That we probably don’t understand near as much as we think we do about God, who God is, and how God wants for us to be. But, the good news is, this also means that how things are now is not how they will always be. And I can’t even tell you how hopeful that makes me feel. We are not stuck in this reality. The “end of history illusion” is just that, an illusion. Because the Spirit of truth is here, is with us, has been sent to us to “guide us into all truth.” This Spirit knows we cannot bear all things now, but has promised to declare to us, as we can bear it, “the things that are to come.” Thanks be to God who is unchanging, and yet who helps us to change. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Monday, June 17, 2019
Monday, June 10, 2019
You Are Loved, Go Love - A Pentecost Sermon on Genesis 11:1-8 and Acts 2:1-21
It’s Pentecost Sunday and Pentecost always feels like a day for experimentation, so I want to take a direction I don’t normally take here and talk about the first reading about the Tower of Babel. Weirdly nestled within the genealogies in Genesis, I admit I’ve give very little thought to this story before, but I read a commentary this week that interpreted it in a way I’d never considered before and that interpretation helped me see really all of creation in a new light, so I wanted to share that with you.
Quick recap for those of you who, no judgment but, checked out during the first reading since I just about always preach on the Gospel. We’re still super early in the existence of humanity, just a handful of generations after Noah and the story tells us that “the whole earth had one language and the same words,” meaning there was no language barrier, everyone could talk to everyone else. Not that language is the only barrier of understanding, but for the sake of the story, let’s says that it is. So this super connected group of people, because they could all communicate openly with each other, decided for whatever reason to make some bricks and build a giant tower that reached all the way to heaven. And God saw this giant tower and was like, nope. These humans are getting too smart. We need to confuse their language and scatter them all over the world. A Word for God’s People. Thanks be to God?
It’s a weird little story. And as weird little stories can, it’s got a pretty problematic history. Including use by South African theologians to justify apartheid, that God desired for different languages and cultures to be kept separate from one another. Or that diversity was a “problem” that needed to be “solved” by the Spirit at Pentecost. Theologian Sara Koenig offered three different interpretations on what was meant by the Tower of Babel. The first was that this was a story about the danger of pride. The people attempted to build a tower to “make a name for themselves” rather than trust in their God-given identity. Another possibility is this is a critique of empire. The city name, “Babel” is the same Hebrew word as “Babylon,” the empire which eventually destroyed Judah and forced the Israelites into exile. And one of common tricks used by empires to force obedience is to implement a common language. A third understanding of this text was the problem was not the people’s unity itself, but how that unity made them want to stay together in one place instead of fulfill God’s mandate at creation to “spread out and fill the whole earth.” God scattered them because God desired more diversity, not less.
So I was thinking about these and I was thinking about unity and diversity, and then I started thinking about one of my favorite guilty pleasures, which is the TV show Survivor. The basic premise is eighteen or so people are stranded in the wilderness where they vote each other off one by one, until the last one left wins a million dollars. If you’ve seen the show, you know there’s a lot of lying and trickery and gameplay to keep your fellow contestants from not voting for you. One of the ways people protect themselves is to create alliances with other players to agree to vote together for someone not in the alliance. And the best way to break up an alliance is for those outside the alliance to remind those inside that, yeah, everyone’s all friendly now, but someone is always on the bottom of an alliance, and if that someone is you, maybe you should break rank now and make a “big move” before the rest of your so-called alliance votes you out. Sure everyone is “Kamu strong” today, but if you’re the bottom of the Kamu, they’ll have no problem cutting you later.
The game of Survivor is a made for TV example of the classic truth of humanity, unity is not always all that unifying. If someone is preaching the glory of unity and uniformity, it is always good to ask ourselves the question, who benefits? Who benefits from us all being the same? Who benefits from things staying status quo? Who is at the top if we keep things as they are, and who is at the bottom? Something unity can be a great thing, we can come together and accomplish way more than we could have apart. But sometimes unity can just be a convenient way for those at the top to remain at the top, and to keep others at the bottom. Reading the Tower of Babel story through Koenig’s critique of empire lens makes me ask the question, who benefits from the construction of this tower? And whose labor, whose lives, may have been sacrificed, whose voices silenced, whose needs overlooked, in pursuit of this project of reaching to heaven?
Flash forward to Pentecost when the disciples were “all together in one place.” In other words, not out “proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sins… to all nations” as Jesus had instructed them to do before his ascension. But despite this oversight, conveniently, they just happened to be “all together in one place” in a place that had “devout Jews from every nation under heaven” and with “a sound like the rush of a violent wind” the Spirit came over them, and they “began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” And this crowd of people from every language and culture, heard the word the disciples were proclaiming each in their own native language. That, I think, is hugely important to understanding the Pentecost story. The crowds did not hear the disciples speaking the same language, they heard them speaking in different languages, in their own language. The Spirit did not bring everyone together under one universal tongue, the Spirit made the disciples adaptable, able to reach others and communicate with them not in the way the disciples knew best, but in the way that those being reach out to could best understand.
And, and this should probably not surprise anyone but, this speaking in a bunch of different languages thing made some people uncomfortable. It’s much more comfortable, easier, if everyone sounds like us, speaks like us, thinks like us. But that’s not what the Spirit did, the Spirit made the disciples able to communicate differently to a bunch of different people. Because yes, in uniformity there’s less confusion, less opportunity for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. But there’s also less space to be challenged, be changed, to grow and learn from others. There is less young men seeing visions and old men dreaming dreams, less sons and daughters prophesying, less Spirit poured out on all flesh.
And that friends, is I think both the gift and the challenge of Pentecost. God created each of us different because the world needs us to be different. The world needs us to speak in many languages, to transcend many cultures, to communicate in many ways. And let’s be clear, I’m not just talking about languages here, though certainly language is a part. But also life experiences, socio-economic backgrounds, orientations and opportunities. I try to be pretty open and adaptable, but at the end of the day, I’m a straight, middle-class white clergyperson in my mid-thirties. As hard as I might try to be different, I speak a very particular language and there will be people who won’t be able to hear me. But they may be able to hear you. Who you are, what you know, what you bring to the table, your visions, your dreams, your prophesies of a different future, the world needs you, God needs you, to be that, to share that.
So that’s the good news. The challenge is, God doesn’t need you to build a tower to heaven, God needs you out in the world. The whole we could even build a tower to heaven theory breaks down pretty quickly anyway. And the entirety of our theology as Lutherans can be summed up in the promise that we can never make ourselves great enough to get to God, nor do we need to because in the person of Jesus, God came down to be with us. So we don’t need to reach God, but you know who we do need to reach? Each other.
That, my friends, is the message of Pentecost. The Spirit is upon you, you are loved by God. So go and love others. Amen.
Quick recap for those of you who, no judgment but, checked out during the first reading since I just about always preach on the Gospel. We’re still super early in the existence of humanity, just a handful of generations after Noah and the story tells us that “the whole earth had one language and the same words,” meaning there was no language barrier, everyone could talk to everyone else. Not that language is the only barrier of understanding, but for the sake of the story, let’s says that it is. So this super connected group of people, because they could all communicate openly with each other, decided for whatever reason to make some bricks and build a giant tower that reached all the way to heaven. And God saw this giant tower and was like, nope. These humans are getting too smart. We need to confuse their language and scatter them all over the world. A Word for God’s People. Thanks be to God?
It’s a weird little story. And as weird little stories can, it’s got a pretty problematic history. Including use by South African theologians to justify apartheid, that God desired for different languages and cultures to be kept separate from one another. Or that diversity was a “problem” that needed to be “solved” by the Spirit at Pentecost. Theologian Sara Koenig offered three different interpretations on what was meant by the Tower of Babel. The first was that this was a story about the danger of pride. The people attempted to build a tower to “make a name for themselves” rather than trust in their God-given identity. Another possibility is this is a critique of empire. The city name, “Babel” is the same Hebrew word as “Babylon,” the empire which eventually destroyed Judah and forced the Israelites into exile. And one of common tricks used by empires to force obedience is to implement a common language. A third understanding of this text was the problem was not the people’s unity itself, but how that unity made them want to stay together in one place instead of fulfill God’s mandate at creation to “spread out and fill the whole earth.” God scattered them because God desired more diversity, not less.
So I was thinking about these and I was thinking about unity and diversity, and then I started thinking about one of my favorite guilty pleasures, which is the TV show Survivor. The basic premise is eighteen or so people are stranded in the wilderness where they vote each other off one by one, until the last one left wins a million dollars. If you’ve seen the show, you know there’s a lot of lying and trickery and gameplay to keep your fellow contestants from not voting for you. One of the ways people protect themselves is to create alliances with other players to agree to vote together for someone not in the alliance. And the best way to break up an alliance is for those outside the alliance to remind those inside that, yeah, everyone’s all friendly now, but someone is always on the bottom of an alliance, and if that someone is you, maybe you should break rank now and make a “big move” before the rest of your so-called alliance votes you out. Sure everyone is “Kamu strong” today, but if you’re the bottom of the Kamu, they’ll have no problem cutting you later.
The game of Survivor is a made for TV example of the classic truth of humanity, unity is not always all that unifying. If someone is preaching the glory of unity and uniformity, it is always good to ask ourselves the question, who benefits? Who benefits from us all being the same? Who benefits from things staying status quo? Who is at the top if we keep things as they are, and who is at the bottom? Something unity can be a great thing, we can come together and accomplish way more than we could have apart. But sometimes unity can just be a convenient way for those at the top to remain at the top, and to keep others at the bottom. Reading the Tower of Babel story through Koenig’s critique of empire lens makes me ask the question, who benefits from the construction of this tower? And whose labor, whose lives, may have been sacrificed, whose voices silenced, whose needs overlooked, in pursuit of this project of reaching to heaven?
Flash forward to Pentecost when the disciples were “all together in one place.” In other words, not out “proclaiming repentance and forgiveness of sins… to all nations” as Jesus had instructed them to do before his ascension. But despite this oversight, conveniently, they just happened to be “all together in one place” in a place that had “devout Jews from every nation under heaven” and with “a sound like the rush of a violent wind” the Spirit came over them, and they “began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” And this crowd of people from every language and culture, heard the word the disciples were proclaiming each in their own native language. That, I think, is hugely important to understanding the Pentecost story. The crowds did not hear the disciples speaking the same language, they heard them speaking in different languages, in their own language. The Spirit did not bring everyone together under one universal tongue, the Spirit made the disciples adaptable, able to reach others and communicate with them not in the way the disciples knew best, but in the way that those being reach out to could best understand.
And, and this should probably not surprise anyone but, this speaking in a bunch of different languages thing made some people uncomfortable. It’s much more comfortable, easier, if everyone sounds like us, speaks like us, thinks like us. But that’s not what the Spirit did, the Spirit made the disciples able to communicate differently to a bunch of different people. Because yes, in uniformity there’s less confusion, less opportunity for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. But there’s also less space to be challenged, be changed, to grow and learn from others. There is less young men seeing visions and old men dreaming dreams, less sons and daughters prophesying, less Spirit poured out on all flesh.
And that friends, is I think both the gift and the challenge of Pentecost. God created each of us different because the world needs us to be different. The world needs us to speak in many languages, to transcend many cultures, to communicate in many ways. And let’s be clear, I’m not just talking about languages here, though certainly language is a part. But also life experiences, socio-economic backgrounds, orientations and opportunities. I try to be pretty open and adaptable, but at the end of the day, I’m a straight, middle-class white clergyperson in my mid-thirties. As hard as I might try to be different, I speak a very particular language and there will be people who won’t be able to hear me. But they may be able to hear you. Who you are, what you know, what you bring to the table, your visions, your dreams, your prophesies of a different future, the world needs you, God needs you, to be that, to share that.
So that’s the good news. The challenge is, God doesn’t need you to build a tower to heaven, God needs you out in the world. The whole we could even build a tower to heaven theory breaks down pretty quickly anyway. And the entirety of our theology as Lutherans can be summed up in the promise that we can never make ourselves great enough to get to God, nor do we need to because in the person of Jesus, God came down to be with us. So we don’t need to reach God, but you know who we do need to reach? Each other.
That, my friends, is the message of Pentecost. The Spirit is upon you, you are loved by God. So go and love others. Amen.
Monday, June 3, 2019
Muscle Memory - A Sermon on John 17:20-26
Last week I was swimming at the Y. Not the time with the scuba class, for those following along on Facebook, but a different time. Anyway, the guy in the lane next to me was doing this really strange stroke where he was sitting cross-legged in the water with his head up, perfectly straight, almost like he was meditating, moving his arms in like a sculling motion to pull himself across the pool. It looked hard and, well, weird. But I knew the guy is a swim coach and a pretty serious swimmer, so I knew there had to be a reason for it. So when he got back to the end of the lane, I asked him what was the point of that.
“It’s to get used to the feeling of my arms gripping the water,” he explained. “By moving my arms like this, I get used to the feeling of using my whole arm to move myself through the water, not just my hand. Swimming is very technical; it’s all about building up the neuropathways in your brain to create muscle memory. The goal is to do something again and again, to lay down the pathways so that when you’re fatigued and your mind wants to shut down, your body will be able to take over and just know what to do.”
Muscle memory is a funny thing. We can do a thing so many times that our bodies just take over and our minds sort of shut down. I’m guessing it’s not just me that’s had the experience of trying to go somewhere different via a route we take to go somewhere familiar, and ending up at the wrong place because repetition takes over. This is a very millennial experience, but several years ago a friend and I hauled out an old Nintendo 64 from her basement, and discovered we still knew every hidden bonus in Mario 64. One of us would be playing, and would suddenly pause, turn sharply, and disappear into where what looked like solid wall was really where an extra life, or bonus coins, or a secret passageway was hidden. “How did you know that was there?” “I don’t know, my hands just automatically turned the controller there.” My piano teacher’s insistence that practicing scales over and over would teach my fingers to remember turned out be to be true not with piano keys but with mid-nineties video games.
I was thinking about my swimming friend’s comments about repetitive motion and building up muscle memory this week with our Gospel text for this morning. Because I’ll tell you, the first time I read it, I thought, this is going to be a beast to memorize! And, I won’t lie to you, it was. Stories are easy, there’s a logical narrative flow to follow. But the teachings of Jesus, and especially ones like this morning’s, where he seems to just be repetitively rambling on and on, those are hard. But what I got from the effort was this sense of the indwelling relationship between Jesus, the Father, and us. All the I in you and you in me and them in us, your glory is my glory is their glory, over and over and over again started to lay in my mind the pathways not of understanding, but of promise. Jesus and the Father are in each other, and through Jesus’ resurrection and ascension we too are a part of that entwined relationship.
I think that setting down this muscle memory of promise within the disciples to sustain them when they could no sustain themselves is exactly what Jesus was trying to do here. What we read this morning, John chapter seventeen, verses twenty through twenty-six is the very end of the Farewell Discourse, Jesus’ very last words to his disciples before they enter into the Passion. Remember how the Gospel on Good Friday starts, “After Jesus had spoken these words, he went with his disciples… to a place where there was a garden.” The “these words,” they’re these words. The words we read this morning. The words that end: “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Jesus said that, and then he made that love known to them at the cross. This Farewell Discourse we’ve been reading these past few weeks, like I’ve said, I definitely encourage you to sit down and read if you like a good love letter. Because what these four chapters are is a love letter from Jesus to his disciples in the final moments before his death. John chapters fourteen through seventeen are beautiful and poetic and powerful, and, let’s face it, very very repetitive. I think because Jesus wanted to take the last time he had to try one last time to drum into the disciples minds the promise that they were his, that they were loved, that he would never leave them, that they would never be alone.
And these promises are true not just for Jesus’ disciples, but for us. In John chapter seventeen Jesus is praying to the Father, asking that the Father be with them, guide them, protect them, and… Did you catch verse twenty? “I ask not only on behalf of these—the ones in the room, the ones who heard his prayer—but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word.” Jesus was praying for those who did not yet believe, but who would. Friends, let me say this one more time, let me repeat it again and again, so that it builds muscle memory in your brain, on the night Jesus was betrayed, in the moments, literal moments before he went to the garden to be arrested, Jesus prayed for you. Jesus prayed that you would have peace, that you would know his glory, and, most importantly, that you would be loved. Jesus died, resurrected, and ascended into heaven with you on his mind. Not because you believed, but before you believed. This is the love that Jesus has for you, the relationship that Jesus has created, is creating in you, with you, for you.
Christianity is a faith tradition that is based on belief. And I admit, I can get hung on up on the belief thing at times, at what it means to believe in Jesus, what specific beliefs are or are not required. But passages like this feel like belief is less head knowledge then it is heart knowledge. It is the motion that keeps us coming back to this place, it is the curiosity that drives our doubts and questions, it is the feeling we can’t quite shake. I read somewhere that doubt and faith are twins, and I think it’s because of this muscle memory of belief as heart knowledge. You have to believe to doubt. You have to believe to question. Not intellectually, maybe, but I think Jesus is that internal maybe that drives us to wonder what else could be out there.
Muscle memory is also why, if you come to me and tell me you’ve not been coming to church because you’re struggling with your faith, I’m going to be inclined to encourage you to come to church. Not because church is some sort of magic faith making potion, Mother Teresa is reported to have doubted for most of her life, and she was in church a lot, but because I really believe the repetition of it is important. I believe we do this church thing for each other. I believe the act of going through the motions does indeed change us. It has been my experience that God gave me church to lay down those neuropathways of belief so deep within me that they’re just there.
My grandmother, I think I’ve shared, developed dementia at the end of her life. Who I was, who my mom was, even who she was, those things faded away as the disease took more and more of her mind. I’ll close with a quick story about Jesus as heart knowledge that I learned from watching her. I saw this first with her, but have since experienced countless times in my own ministry. Someone from her church came to bring her communion. My grandmother didn’t recognize the woman, whom she’d known for forty years, but she was always amiable to visitors. Mary read the Gospel reading for the week, in the middle of which my grandmother stopped her. “Who’s Jesus?” she asked. Mary stumbled a surprised answer, to which my grandmother calmly responded, “he seems like a nice man.” Mary agreed, yes, Jesus was certainly a nice man. Then they got to the Lord’s Prayer. And my grandmother, who couldn’t tell you the name of the woman sitting next to her, what she had for lunch, or even her own name, immediately joined in, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
Dear friends in Christ, Jesus is in the Father, and the Father is in him, and you are in him, and he in you, and nothing, nothing can ever separate you from that relationship. I hope you believe that. I hope I can say it often enough, I hope you hear it often enough, that you believe that. Not with your mind, because minds fail, memories fade, we can’t reason our way into this. I hope you believe it with the memory of repetition. Because here’s the thing friends, here’s the promise. Jesus is in you, with you, through you, already. You are God’s. Amen.
“It’s to get used to the feeling of my arms gripping the water,” he explained. “By moving my arms like this, I get used to the feeling of using my whole arm to move myself through the water, not just my hand. Swimming is very technical; it’s all about building up the neuropathways in your brain to create muscle memory. The goal is to do something again and again, to lay down the pathways so that when you’re fatigued and your mind wants to shut down, your body will be able to take over and just know what to do.”
Muscle memory is a funny thing. We can do a thing so many times that our bodies just take over and our minds sort of shut down. I’m guessing it’s not just me that’s had the experience of trying to go somewhere different via a route we take to go somewhere familiar, and ending up at the wrong place because repetition takes over. This is a very millennial experience, but several years ago a friend and I hauled out an old Nintendo 64 from her basement, and discovered we still knew every hidden bonus in Mario 64. One of us would be playing, and would suddenly pause, turn sharply, and disappear into where what looked like solid wall was really where an extra life, or bonus coins, or a secret passageway was hidden. “How did you know that was there?” “I don’t know, my hands just automatically turned the controller there.” My piano teacher’s insistence that practicing scales over and over would teach my fingers to remember turned out be to be true not with piano keys but with mid-nineties video games.
I was thinking about my swimming friend’s comments about repetitive motion and building up muscle memory this week with our Gospel text for this morning. Because I’ll tell you, the first time I read it, I thought, this is going to be a beast to memorize! And, I won’t lie to you, it was. Stories are easy, there’s a logical narrative flow to follow. But the teachings of Jesus, and especially ones like this morning’s, where he seems to just be repetitively rambling on and on, those are hard. But what I got from the effort was this sense of the indwelling relationship between Jesus, the Father, and us. All the I in you and you in me and them in us, your glory is my glory is their glory, over and over and over again started to lay in my mind the pathways not of understanding, but of promise. Jesus and the Father are in each other, and through Jesus’ resurrection and ascension we too are a part of that entwined relationship.
I think that setting down this muscle memory of promise within the disciples to sustain them when they could no sustain themselves is exactly what Jesus was trying to do here. What we read this morning, John chapter seventeen, verses twenty through twenty-six is the very end of the Farewell Discourse, Jesus’ very last words to his disciples before they enter into the Passion. Remember how the Gospel on Good Friday starts, “After Jesus had spoken these words, he went with his disciples… to a place where there was a garden.” The “these words,” they’re these words. The words we read this morning. The words that end: “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Jesus said that, and then he made that love known to them at the cross. This Farewell Discourse we’ve been reading these past few weeks, like I’ve said, I definitely encourage you to sit down and read if you like a good love letter. Because what these four chapters are is a love letter from Jesus to his disciples in the final moments before his death. John chapters fourteen through seventeen are beautiful and poetic and powerful, and, let’s face it, very very repetitive. I think because Jesus wanted to take the last time he had to try one last time to drum into the disciples minds the promise that they were his, that they were loved, that he would never leave them, that they would never be alone.
And these promises are true not just for Jesus’ disciples, but for us. In John chapter seventeen Jesus is praying to the Father, asking that the Father be with them, guide them, protect them, and… Did you catch verse twenty? “I ask not only on behalf of these—the ones in the room, the ones who heard his prayer—but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word.” Jesus was praying for those who did not yet believe, but who would. Friends, let me say this one more time, let me repeat it again and again, so that it builds muscle memory in your brain, on the night Jesus was betrayed, in the moments, literal moments before he went to the garden to be arrested, Jesus prayed for you. Jesus prayed that you would have peace, that you would know his glory, and, most importantly, that you would be loved. Jesus died, resurrected, and ascended into heaven with you on his mind. Not because you believed, but before you believed. This is the love that Jesus has for you, the relationship that Jesus has created, is creating in you, with you, for you.
Christianity is a faith tradition that is based on belief. And I admit, I can get hung on up on the belief thing at times, at what it means to believe in Jesus, what specific beliefs are or are not required. But passages like this feel like belief is less head knowledge then it is heart knowledge. It is the motion that keeps us coming back to this place, it is the curiosity that drives our doubts and questions, it is the feeling we can’t quite shake. I read somewhere that doubt and faith are twins, and I think it’s because of this muscle memory of belief as heart knowledge. You have to believe to doubt. You have to believe to question. Not intellectually, maybe, but I think Jesus is that internal maybe that drives us to wonder what else could be out there.
Muscle memory is also why, if you come to me and tell me you’ve not been coming to church because you’re struggling with your faith, I’m going to be inclined to encourage you to come to church. Not because church is some sort of magic faith making potion, Mother Teresa is reported to have doubted for most of her life, and she was in church a lot, but because I really believe the repetition of it is important. I believe we do this church thing for each other. I believe the act of going through the motions does indeed change us. It has been my experience that God gave me church to lay down those neuropathways of belief so deep within me that they’re just there.
My grandmother, I think I’ve shared, developed dementia at the end of her life. Who I was, who my mom was, even who she was, those things faded away as the disease took more and more of her mind. I’ll close with a quick story about Jesus as heart knowledge that I learned from watching her. I saw this first with her, but have since experienced countless times in my own ministry. Someone from her church came to bring her communion. My grandmother didn’t recognize the woman, whom she’d known for forty years, but she was always amiable to visitors. Mary read the Gospel reading for the week, in the middle of which my grandmother stopped her. “Who’s Jesus?” she asked. Mary stumbled a surprised answer, to which my grandmother calmly responded, “he seems like a nice man.” Mary agreed, yes, Jesus was certainly a nice man. Then they got to the Lord’s Prayer. And my grandmother, who couldn’t tell you the name of the woman sitting next to her, what she had for lunch, or even her own name, immediately joined in, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
Dear friends in Christ, Jesus is in the Father, and the Father is in him, and you are in him, and he in you, and nothing, nothing can ever separate you from that relationship. I hope you believe that. I hope I can say it often enough, I hope you hear it often enough, that you believe that. Not with your mind, because minds fail, memories fade, we can’t reason our way into this. I hope you believe it with the memory of repetition. Because here’s the thing friends, here’s the promise. Jesus is in you, with you, through you, already. You are God’s. Amen.
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