MOST RECENT SERMON

Sermon. Easter 7. Year C. John 17.20-26 Helen Keller June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968

As well as being the last Sunday of Easter, today is also the anniversary of the death of the inspiring deaf-blind activist, Helen Keller. This is fortunate, because examining her words can help us understand our convoluted and challenging Gospel.  More on this, and on Helen, later.

Today’s Gospel is at the very end of a three chapter long farewell discourse by Jesus. Today’s verses are the very culmination of this discourse and the culmination of a very long prayer of Jesus for his followers. We can therefore expect conclusion and even summation.

And this is what we get – though it may be hard for us to accept, or hard for us to ever think we can enact or be part of the mystery Jesus is directing us towards.

Straight off we hear:

“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one”

That they, that we, may all be one.

Here we can easily reflect on the socially created differences and barriers we enact in the world. Jesus’s call to oneness can legitimately be interpreted as collapsing the painful and exclusive oppositions we humans so love:

Male or female; rich or poor; gay or straight; Aboriginal or settler; Christian or Muslim; conservative or liberal; sinner or saved.

We could go on … and of course any genuine social reconciliation is wonderful.

But something different is called for here. Our Gospel continues: 

‘that they – the disciples –  who believe through their word – may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”

The disciples who believe – us, ALL of us here right now, are called to be one, called to unification by being IN both God the Father and being IN Christ – since they, father and son are one in each other.

We are called to unity, to inner, spiritual union with God.

There is no mistaking this, no getting around it. As strange and as mystical as it may seem, this, for John, is the heart of the Gospel. For other Gospel writers it is different – preparing for the age to come for example. But in John, we are being allured and enticed and commanded towards spiritual unity.

But how may this unification occur? Our beautiful and brilliant text is clear. Jesus prays:

“I ask not only on behalf of these – those disciples who are with him at the Last Supper -  but also on behalf of those  - US - who believe in me through their word.”

Believe in me through their word.

Our belief in Christ should be through our word.  This is not referring to keeping promises or being true. Belief for John, is not just moral or principled adherence to the teachings of Christ. It is about the word.

In John the spiritual concept, logos, translated as Word, has a particular and powerful meaning. We hear at the start of the Gospel.

“In the beginning was the Word, [meaning Christ], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, or was divine”.

We are to believe, commit to, give our lives to, Christ through our logos, through our personal divine, rational creative power. The logos is imaged in us, because we are images of God, and therefore images of Christ. We are to believe in Christ through our own inner Christ-nature.

By applying this inner nature, this inner divine capacity, we enter the unity of Christ and God.

But there is more … there is always more.

Verse 23:

I  [Christ] in them – us, the disciples,  and you, the Father, in me, that they, us the disciples, may become completely one,

May become completely one. This could suggest grades of unity – half, three quarters and full or complete unity. But what is ‘completed’ here, what is fulfilled is not unity, but the disciples. A more literal and better translation is ‘that they may be perfected in unity’.

Perfected, completed, in unity.

The Greek for perfected here, telos, refers to the purpose, the end, or goal of someone, of us. It is the "final cause" that guides our existence and actions. Our telos, our purpose, our end is perfection, union with God, having come from her and being destined to return to her.

To achieve union with God is why we exist.

Again, we may find this a bit out there or mystical, or simply impossible, but it is the heart of our faith.

And this brings us to someone who did unite with Christ - the  brilliant author, disability rights advocate and political activist,  Helen Keller, who died on this day in 1968.

All Helen achieved, despite being deaf-blind, by her own report was only possible because of her Christianity, which she described as “the Light in my darkness and the Voice in my silence.” 

But, like our Saviour, Helen transgressed the expected and defied the many because her Christianity was Swedenborgian. This is a mystical-esoteric based form of universalist Christianity which views the Bible as divine instruction for the staged transformation and eventual union of the soul with God - regardless of, and even contrary to, church membership.

Helen once wrote, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.”

The heart Helen refers to is not the heart of valentine’s day, the heart of emotions. It is a more ancient understanding of the heart as a spiritual mode of perception and action. It is the heart, not the brain, that is the traditional seat of our personal logos, our Inner Christ, the image that when we activate and believe through can lead us to unity.

And it is the heart that is the seat and focus of a range of spiritual practices that we broadly call Christian meditation. We will soon be offering opportunities to explore, and deepen, in meditation. We will talk more about these in the coming weeks – but for now please do not think it’s not for you – because it can help us towards the unity that Jesus, in our Gospel calls us to.

Finally, unless we still think this talk of meditation and perfection in unity in God is all a bit out there or mystical, let’s use an argument by authority – C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, as stolid Anglican as you can get, beloved of evangelicals. In reference to our call to perfection in unity, we quote Lewis from ‘Mere Christianity’:

“The command ‘Be ye perfect’ is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. God will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy  and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine … He meant what he said:  those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect … perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, and immortality.”

Amen.