May 14, 2015
Who comes next?
This is one of our biggest human problems. Continuity. Next in line. We could think of evolution as one huge biological answer to this. We can also conceive of politics as the same struggle for continuity. Two billion dollars will be spent on the 2016 presidential race, and how much of that will be utterly annoying commercials that make us want to throw something at the TV. “I approved this message.” And we think, “Yuck, that’s exactly the problem. You did.”
The Scriptures give us different kinds of continuity this weekend. One is ministerial continuity, as we see the first followers of Jesus come together and elect someone to take the place of the one who betrayed Jesus, Judas. They wanted someone as close as they could get, someone who had been with Jesus during his earthly ministry. This would work for a generation or two, but after a while others would have to come along, folks who stood on the shoulders, and the testimony, of those who walked with Jesus.
The other kind of continuity Scripture gives us is the continuity of experience. Jesus came to impart to us the experience of God’s love. He lived that love, and lived in that love, so completely that he imparted it to his followers – to everyone who was able to gaze upon Jesus in love. For to know Jesus’ love is to know the Father’s love. To know their love is to know the Holy Spirit. As Jesus knew his Father’s love, as Jesus knew the Spirit, so Jesus wants us in that same experience, in that same relationship.
Jesus prays for his disciples, not that they leave the world, but that they remain in the world as his followers. He consecrates them, and asks them to consecrate themselves to his truth – the truth of God’s absolute love for us. As he came into the world to bring God’s love to it, so his followers remain in the world to bring God’s love to it. This is our mission, to continue loving the world in the Holy Spirit until it is swept into God’s complete love.
I know it was this message of love that moved me to live the vocation I have. After I discovered that love, how could I live for anything else? But as I bless God for my vocation, I trust that each of us can bless God for the vocations we have received – and we will if we see all of our callings as living out Christ’s commandment of love. It’s not an easy commandment because Christ’s love is not chocolate or wine. It’s the joy that comes from giving oneself, for that is how God is, and that is how God loves. The Trinity is this: the three persons that are God living completely for each other and, as we learn from Jesus, living completely for us as well.
In Medieval thinking, they had this thing called the Great Chain of Being, where lower beings were related to higher ones, until the top one related to God. Everything fit. I think a greater claim can be made for something expressed differently: The Great Chain of Loving. We can see its links go back to creation, get unbreakably strong in Jesus life and death, and multiply like crazy with the coming of the Spirit. In fact, I see those links coming right here, right into our community of worship, right into the community of love. Don’t break the chain, says Jesus. It’s this chain which allows the next one to come to know God’s love.