Jesus' Prayer for Us
John 17:1-11
May 4, 2008 Pastor Kathie Rhyne
Congregational Church of Topsfield

When my husband Bill went through his battle with cancer of the larynx, we both were able to experience what it was like to be prayed for by someone else. We also had many people visit us and pray with us. The power of this kind of prayer is indescribable. Bill and I will always remember the sense of comfort and encouragement we felt from all of those prayers. Every week we receive prayer requests from all of you and many of them are added to our Notes and Notices so that we can all pray for your loved one who is in need. There is a huge blessing when the church comes together to pray for others in need as we do each Sunday in worship. We receive great strength from the prayers of others on our behalf.
That is the power of today's Gospel lesson. Jesus is praying for us and we are witnesses to that prayer because John carefully recorded it for us. When we encounter Jesus this morning as He begins His prayer, He is in His final moments with His disciples before being arrested. For at least three years, these disciples have been His closest companions. They have journeyed together through difficult trials and wonderful joys. But now they are facing the moment that Jesus has told them was coming. Judas has left them to begin His betrayal of Jesus. Jesus knows that He will be leaving this world soon. As we listen in on this intimate conversation Jesus is having with God, we witness first hand the deep and abiding love He has for His followers and His joy in knowing He will soon return to be with God. Jesus is praying for His disciples and all those who follow Him. He knows that He is leaving shortly so He prays to God to help prepare His followers for what lies ahead. Jesus prays earnestly on behalf of His present and future followers for our protection, our consecration for service and our unity.
In our time together this morning, we will focus on Jesus' prayer for our unity…that we may all be one. We will dig deeper and see what this unity would actually look like if we indeed displayed it as a Christian community. We will seek to understand what contributes to and helps build up that unity among us. We will uncover what is the greatest obstacle to our unity. And finally, we will learn what makes it possible to overcome this obstacle and achieve Jesus' deep desire for us: that we may all be one as He is one with God.
The Rev. William Sloan Coffin served as the Senior Minister of the influential Riverside Church in New York City where he was a powerful voice for conscience and change. Here is how he described what the church looks like when we approach the unity that Jesus desires for us:
Church is where all hearts are one so that nothing else has to be one. Church is where there's such a climate of acceptance that each of us can be his or her unique self. Church is where we learn to be free, strong, and mature by sharing with one another our continued bondage, weakness, and immaturity. Church is where we so love one another that it becomes bearable to live as solitaries.

What an incredible vision for our church!
A year ago, I preached a sermon series based on the book of Acts. For those of you who were here, you recall that we learned that our early Christian brothers and sisters displayed a profound sense of unity. They practiced a total, unreserved sharing of everything with one another. In Chapter 2, verse 44 we read, "All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need." This is Jesus' prayer for us. As Jesus watches over us today, this is what He deeply desires for us as the Christian community. The members of the Christian community in Acts 2 made their own personal choice to share. They responded generously from grateful hearts. Jesus expresses this in His relationship with God in verse 10 of our passage this morning, "All mine are yours and yours are mine."
As we emulate the early church followers of Jesus, we acknowledge that we share a common journey together. We share common joys and gifts. We share common difficulties and a common desire to build a better world. During our time together this year in Lent as we prepared for Easter, eighty of us committed to meet in small groups. As we experienced these six weeks together in the groups, we each received a taste of Jesus' desire for us. We shared our joys, our difficulties, our dreams and our gifts with each other. We learned from each other, cared for each other and found a new unity with many we had not known before.
General Colin Powell often shares this story that goes to the heart of our longing for community and unity. "ABC correspondent Sam Donaldson was interviewing a young African-American soldier in a tank platoon on the eve of the battle in Desert Storm. Donaldson asked, "How do you think the battle will go? Are you afraid?"
"We'll do okay. We're well trained. And I'm not afraid," the GI answered, gesturing toward his buddies around him. "I'm not afraid because I'm with my family."
The other soldiers shouted, "Tell him again. He didn't hear you." The soldier repeated. "This is my family, and we'll take care of each other."
During these past few weeks, we have had a number of people in our congregation going through difficult times. People are personally battling with life-threatening illnesses, precious family members have died, and young people have faced a challenging illness for the first time in their lives. I just have to tell you all how overwhelmed I am by the wonderful way you have been caring for each other. You have always done this since I arrived a year ago and have a long tradition of caring for each other. But these past few weeks, I have seen you caring in wonderful and thoughtful ways, over and over again. I can't begin to tell you what it means to those who are in need at this time. As you care for each other, you are living out each day Jesus' deep desire for you. And you are caring deeply for those in need in our community. You met the challenge, purchasing, packing and blessing 500 bags of school supplies for needy children around the world. Many of you have shared your individual stories with me of your personal acts of service in the community. I do hope you will be in worship with us next Sunday, as Janet Ierardi shares her personal story of helping children with the Aids virus in a two week camp on Cape Cod. We here at the Congregational Church of Topsfield have personally experienced important aspects of what this unity Jesus is praying for actually looks like in a church.
As followers of Jesus Christ, we want to give Jesus His deep desire that He reveals in His prayer to God: that we may all be one. So what can we individually do to continue to build up the unity within our church community? One of the most important things that we need to recognize is that it is possible to have unity and still have differences of opinion. We can display the unity that Jesus is praying for and still experience conflict in our congregation. The challenge for each of us is to accept and appreciate our differences.
As we have been having conversations with candidates for our open positions on the church staff, I have explained to them that this congregation is very diverse theologically. Some of you have heard me describe this as "a very wide theological bandwidth". That does not preclude us as a congregation from exemplifying the unity that Jesus desires in us. However, we must begin with an appreciation of each other and our differences. We must listen respectfully to each other and sincerely seek out the unique wisdom each one of us has to share. One of the gifts of our small group experience this past Lent is that groups formed primarily based on a convenient day and time for the members of the group. Consequently, our small groups were populated with folks that came from different theological perspectives. This provided each of us with a wonderful opportunity to grow and stretch as we pondered different points of view from our own. Every one of you here has something to teach me and you already have. Each of you has beautiful gifts to share with this congregation. In order to receive them, we need to cultivate an openness of spirit so we don't miss out on a new insight or perspective. We need to offer each other mutual respect as we share our differences and speak with each other in love.
We also contribute to the unity of our body when we pray for and care for each other. So many of you are doing this and we thank you for your contribution to our unity.
Finally, just as the early Church followers described in the Book of Acts, we need to share with each other the many blessings we have personally received from God. An important way that we build our unity is to work toward tithing or giving ten percent of our income to support the church. Our sharing in this way enables the church to meet the needs of all those who come to the church as well as those God calls us to serve in our surrounding community, in the nation and in the world. Those of us who have been richly blessed with financial and material security are called upon to share generously so that all who have need may be served. Our generous giving also allows us to reach those in our community who don't know Christ and share the Gospel with them. As we listen respectfully to each other, appreciate and learn from our differences, cultivate an openness of spirit, pray for, care for and share with each other, we help build a strong unity in our Christian community here in Topsfield.
As we strive for unity in our body, we often run smack into a big obstacle: our very own selfishness. Jesus came to help us deal with this issue. Many of the parables and teachings of Jesus point to this issue as He tries to deliver us from our obsession with ourselves. He often has to chastise the 12 apostles as they jostle with each other for His favor.
Before we can submit ourselves to living in unity with others, we need to learn to humble ourselves and put others and their needs above our own. As one pastor put it so well, "Until that matter is dealt with in our lives, we will be frustrated about the lack of attention others give us, offended by the lack of appreciation we receive from others. This is where our relational problems originate. Your biggest problem, my biggest problem, is not your spouse; it's not the church; it's not your boss. It is the selfishness in our own heart. Living in community is not always easy. Sometimes we get our feelings hurt. Sometimes we have to yield our desires and rights for the benefit of others. Sometimes we hurt others and have to ask for forgiveness. It's humbling to ask for forgiveness. And sometimes we have to just bear with the weaknesses of others. That's what community is like. It's like the group of porcupines that the famous philosopher, Schopenhauer, once used to illustrate a point. A group of porcupines were marooned in the middle of a frozen field during a terrible blizzard. There was no way they could escape the biting wind. They could not burrow into the frozen ground. As they huddled together to keep warm, their sharp quills began to pinch and hurt. The closer they moved together, the more the pain increased. Some of the animals could not bear the pain and drew apart to sleep. In the morning, those had frozen to death. There is a temptation to withdraw and isolate. But withdrawal is not the unity Jesus wants for us. That is contrary to His desire for us and is dangerous for our spiritual well being."
As we consider the tremendous obstacle our own selfishness can be to creating unity in the Body of Christ, we begin to realize that we cannot do this on our own. Our unity comes as a result of our oneness with Jesus. In our lesson this morning, Jesus clearly says that the oneness we experience with Him should lead to a oneness we experience with one another. As we spend time in worship, confession and prayer seeking Jesus together, we will see that it is easier to find common ground in our lives together as Christians. As one Biblical scholar put it, "But this love and unity is not a moral effort powered by human energy; it is an outgrowth of the union Christians will enjoy with Jesus himself…a union modeled on the oneness of the Father and the Son…a union born when the Father and the Son indwell the believers when they are given new birth."
We cannot achieve this unity of the Body based on our own steam. Our unity comes as a result of our staying focused on Jesus as we seek a profound spiritual intimacy with Him. A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God asks, "Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So one hundred worshipers (meeting) together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become "unity" conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship."
If all of us here at the Congregational Church of Topsfield can strive together for this intimate oneness with our Lord and with one another; if we can seek to build unity in our community through mutual respect, caring and sharing; if we can humble ourselves and put others' needs above our own, then we can reflect God's love and glory to all we encounter in this community. If we can show unity in our Body born from a shared intimacy with God, our testimony will astonish the world. May it be so.