Jesus’ farewell discourse has shifted.  He was talking TO the disciples about being faithful  to God.  Now he's talking to God about the disciples.  He's praying for them.  Jesus prayed  for his friends, and we should too.  We should pray for each other, like he prayed for us:  with our grown-up glasses on; seeing the world as it really is; and us in it, as Jesus means  us to be.  ​As my Father has sent me, so send I you. 

​ God sent Jesus.  Jesus sends us.  Here in chapter 17, the disciples – whom Jesus has promoted from servants to friends,  remember – are ​overhearing​ Jesus talking to someone else.  Dr.  Fred Craddock was the  first homiletics scholar to notice and study deeply Jesus' habit of seeming to teach one  group or person, while clearly intending a more pointed message for someone else –  usually disciples or Pharisees.  And that pointed message was almost always, the  outrageous love/grace/justice of God. 

The way Jesus was smuggling the gospel into that overheard message is sort of like how I  used to puree vegetables into spaghetti sauce and sloppy joes when Emy was a little kid, 
so that it was still technically spaghetti or sloppy joes.  Here, technically, Jesus IS just  praying.  Hard for them to argue what he says, since they’d have to admit they were  spying.  Jesus is leaving them, remember.  He’s soon to be arrested, tortured, killed.  Then  rise.  Forever after that he'll be with them in Spirit, far closer than they've known him so  far.  But they can't fathom that.  Only that he's leaving them. 

He’s leaving them like when we leave our kids at college.  To our parent eyes, they look  like toddlers in a tiny room floating in a sea of boxes.  It seems nuts to leave them in  charge of themselves.  Jesus is leaving his friends in charge of the kingdom of God in this  world.  Depending on the kid, leaving a toddler to run the world seems nuts.  But what is  the alternative?  Take them home and make their lunch for forty years? 

Jesus cannot stay.  The one thing left that he can do, he can only do alone:  die.  And so he  prayed for them, in that overhearing way of his, that we'd be wise enough and brave  enough to see this world as it really is – and make our lives and our life together in it as  Jesus means for us to be.  First, first, first, Jesus means his friends to overhear that We.  Belong. To. Him.  Verse 6:  ​“I have made your name known to those whom you gave me  from the world.  They were yours, and you gave them to me." 

​ Verse 10:  ​“All mine are  yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.” 
We Are His.  The moment we know it, it is the most true thing about us.  We spend the  rest of our lives learning to live our faith in it, whatever happened to us before that  moment we first knew it; whatever someone else said about who or whose or what we  are; whatever story we carry about who we were or how we came to be.  Maybe  somebody said you weren't much.  Maybe you overhead somebody important say you  were nothing but a bother. 

No matter who it was that said it, whatever you've heard said  about you up to this very moment, hear this:  The Lord God of heaven and earth says,  You.  Are.  Mine.  You don't belong to anyone in this world more than you belong to me.  Another thing Jesus says to God ​about ​his beloved friends is that we are very, very well  endowed. 

We are rich as rich can be in all the things that make a human being rich.  Verses 7 and 8:  “​Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the  words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in  truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.” 

We do love our things, don’t we?  Northeast Arkansas is full of Hmong people, immigrants from Vietnam after the war.  The people who came and their children have mostly  worked in the Tyson chicken factories there.  The third generation, however, are now  entering college.  My oldest friend, Angela, works for Student Services at U of A in  Fayetteville.  A couple of years ago she was with a team of students moving freshmen  into their dorm rooms.  Just like IU, some students literally need a U-Haul to move into  half a dorm room. 

But in the sea of U-Hauls and minivans was a young Hmong man.  And all he had was his backpack, one enormous suitcase and a 50-pound bag of rice.  He  said he tried to explain the dorm cafeteria, but his grandmother could not fathom a place  you could go for a year and not have to take any food with you.  Angela saw him later in the school year and asked about the 50 pounds of rice.  He said he and his roommate  found lots of uses for it, including a launch into the top bunk and a beanbag chair. 

If believing I already have everything I need to be faithful isn't the hardest part of being  Christian, I am sure I don't know what is.  Some days I spend more energy ​wanting
​ and  needing​ than actually working.  Or imagining ​what I could do with what I don't have
​ than  doing what I can with what I do have. 

​ We don't need to know what we have, to believe  we have it, any more than a child needs to know what's in the pantry to know he'll get  fed.  That's faith in God's goodness, born of God's faithfulness to us.   

Listening, we overhear Jesus tell the Lord that we belong to them, apparently they've  been trading us back and forth like aunties at Thanksgiving.  We've forever belonged to  one or the other.  Whom we have never belonged to, Jesus says in verse 16, is the world.  “​They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world." 

​ We live here.  We  are not from here.  This world is not home.  God wants us here, for now. 
One time when I was in Seoul, Korea, I decided to ride the subway to a far neighborhood  and walk my way back to our hotel.  I walked through markets and parks and Temples.  Then I got really hungry.  Street food is easy in Seoul.  You point to what you want and  pay for it.  Nicer restaurants are pretty easy, as we know a few Korean dishes we like and  can always order.  Bibimbap or bulgogi or kimchi.   

I thought, "I wonder if I can order fast food?"  Do I know the Korean word for ​hamburger? ​ I do not.  Can I read Korean?  I can not.  The menu board had no pictures, and  the drinks were none I recognized.  It was just like fast food here, people behind me in  the line with kids wanting me to hurry up.  I had to point and pray there was no octopus  involved.  I learned I like mustard and mayonnaise mixed together.  I knew I wasn't in  the U.S.  It didn't seem like I was in Korea.  I didn't even feel like I was inside my own  skin.  Inside my own skin, I'm competent.  And literate. 

Every human wants to feel at home, at ease, comfortable in their skin.  Jesus' friends are  NOT supposed to be at home in this world.  Jesus’ friends are at home where peace  reigns.  Jesus’ friends are at home where justice rolls down like water.  Jesus’ friends are  at home where righteousness flows like a never-ending stream.  Jesus’ friends are at  home where rich and poor feast together and none are turned away, where children rise  up in joy and fall asleep in safety, forevermore.  And that is not this world, friends. 

How  could the friends of Jesus ever feel at home here?  And yet, here we are.  Sent and blessed  by Him with everything we need to run the kingdom of heaven this side of heaven.  ​The  world won't love ya for it, either, the disciples hear him say, more or less.  He asks God to  protect them,​ suggesting that this world's dangerous. 

I have three children.  All three could walk down the same sidewalk at the same time  and only one of them faceplant into a tree.  He was always looking one way and walking  another.  The sidewalk wasn't dangerous.  He was.  This world is dangerous, or we're a  danger to ourselves.  But either way, we aren't safe without the Lord.  Even Jesus thinks it's so.  More dangerous for some than others.  Into that divide Jesus sends us, between  the ones for whom it is and the ones for whom it isn't.
 
For whom is this world most dangerous?  for the weak and poor?  Yes, but only  marginally.  I’d say for the ones not watching where they’re going; the ones who think  this is all there is:  what they can see and hear and experience here, this side of eternity.  And the danger, it seems to me, isn't death, but hopelessness.  Despair, the greatest  poverty of all.  And in that economy, friends, we are the rich ones.  The ones who have  lived to discover that to be human is to be beloved.  Beloved by the Creator of the  universe.
 
And either we believe it’s the gospel that has been the difference or we don't.  What we  are doing here is not a game.  We have not gathered to pacify ourselves about the rest of  our selfish lives.  We have gathered as people who know in our deepest selves and in our  life together, that we are the beloved of God and that we have been sent into this world  to share this news with our friends.  All seven billion of them.  We have gathered to rest,  restock and receive new orders for this life we have in Christ.  Those orders are here, in  this text, as Jesus takes his leave of us, to do what we can never do. 

What are those orders?  Go.  Be the beloved in this dangerous world.  And don't expect it  to be otherwise.  Go, greet every person as a friend and love them like a brother or sister.  But don't expect them to love and admire you all the time.  Expect them to hate you, Jesus  says, in his overhearing kind of way.  Expect to have trouble.  Expect to suffer.  Expect to  feel uncomfortable, awkward, out of place, left out and marginalized, like you are in a  foreign country where all they eat is octopus. 

And when all that happens, do NOT whine  like you've been mistreated; do NOT retreat like you are besieged by some enemy of the  Lord.  Because you haven't been.  But rather, go.  Go be like Jesus the best you can.  Go be  a good and helpful guest in this world.  Go with the gospel in your pockets. 

Go, knowing,  trusting, believing that, in the midst of all the ordinary human things that make your life  a life – growing gardens and keeping houses; making babies or making a living – it's the  delivery of hope which is your highest and best calling. 

Peace/justice/mercy/grace in all we say and do, speaks more of Christ in us than a  thousand Sunday sermons.  This world is not our home, but all the same, here we are.  May the world overhear the gospel in our lives and in our life together.

People with whom we share no DNA.  People we like.  People with whom we have things in common:  things; experiences; or hobbies; or commitments.  That teensy, tiny fraction of the human population whose company we enjoy.  These are the people we generally think of as our friends.

If you can find it, I recommend a British TV show called “The Secret Life of 4, 5, and 6 Year Olds."  The producers give kids a set-up activity, then put secret cameras on them to watch them play.  My favorite is one where two sets of 6-year-olds, each a boy and a girl, are given a doll and a bunch of doll accessories to pretend they are taking their baby to the park.  Neither group knows the other couple is coming.  Nor do the kids know that the doll can be made to cry remotely.

At first the kid couple works together to try to calm the baby.  The boy gets bored really fast and quits playing, while the girl gets more and more frustrated.  She's partly upset because their baby is upset.  She's mostly upset because the baby-daddy, who is supposed to be helping, doesn't care that their baby is crying.  She bounces it and checks its diaper and asks him to help her.  He tries to explain it's not a baby – that it's a doll, probably broken, maybe they should try kicking it.  She nearly loses her mind and starts crying, so he wanders off.

The camera goes back and forth between the couples, who aren't paying that much attention to each other at first.  Then one baby stops crying (or doll, depending on who's telling the story).  Can you guess what happens?  The two girls who don't know each other become friends and partners in working to soothe the crying baby, while the boys go off to kick trees or something.

In this world, for good reason, our friends are people who see the world like we do.  They are the people who take and receive the service and activity we need and offer, in the ways we want to receive and give it.  It was always a game to the boys, so they were just happier with people for whom it was also a game.  It wasn't just a game to the girls, so they were happier with people who understood the gravity of taking good care of pretend children.

But it isn't really about happiness so much as it's about thriving.  Good friends are the people toward whom we gravitate to help ourselves live like we most want to live.  Friends sustain one another.  And while the subject of friendships is a deep and interesting rabbit hole into which to fall – probably more for women than for men – I won't.  I won't, because no matter what the social science answers are for why we choose the friends we do, Jesus’ definition of friendship is other.  If we are to love one another as Jesus has loved us, two shifts of understanding are in order:

• Who our friends are;
• How to be a friend.

Simply said, our friends are human beings.  All seven billion of them, potentially.  Because, unlike the way friendship works when Jesus isn't defining it, we don't choose.  If we are to others as Jesus is to us, how people treat us is of no relevance.  I don't know that Jesus had ever had a relationship talk with the disciples until here, in John 15.  But here He says, I no longer call you servants; instead I call you friends.

Sounds good.  But let's not be quick to dismiss the advantage of the master-servant model.  At least we know what our job is, right?  Jesus tells us what to do, and we do it; but Jesus is the one in charge.  Always.  We just follow orders.  The master is always the master.  The servant is always the servant.  May not be fun, but at least it's clear.  Nobody has to figure anything out.

Friends isn't so clear.  Now who's in charge?  Sure, Jesus is in charge of me and you; but between me and you, who is in charge?  Well, according to Jesus, you are.  But only if Jesus is talking to me.  If Jesus is talking to you, then I am.  Right?  Because Jesus’ definition of friendship centers on submission.  Submitting to everyone else.  (More on this in a minute.)  Sticking with the question of who our friends are:  the church thinks of the disciples as heroes.  But they weren't, here in John 15.  They are still mostly knuckleheads.  And Jesus decides to love them here and now, before they are anything like the men and women they eventually become.

As if to say “who your friends are” – this is Jesus speaking in my imagination here – “has nothing to do with what they can do for you or might ever do for you.”  The apostle wrote about this in Romans 5:  When we were still sinners, Jesus died for us.  The Lord didn't wait for us to get ourselves together and be His good friend in order to be our good friend.  God chose to be better to us than we deserve.  Therefore, choose to befriend one another – not because the other deserves it, Jesus says, but because you didn't deserve it either.  And I chose you.  We are friends of Jesus, because God first loved us.  We are friends to others, because God first loved us.  It's not complicated at all.

A teenager I spend time with is the most bossed-around person I have ever known up close.  Incarcerated people are probably no more bossed-around than her.  Once when she didn’t know I was close enough to hear, she sighed and said, "God, I hate people."  It was so deep-down honest that it made me laugh.  Can you so relate to her?  The adults in charge of her had the wisdom to get her a dog, a mutt named Lady.  An unconditional relationship and someone for both of them to care for.

To love one another because God loved us isn't complicated at all, and yet feels nearly impossible as a way of life.  Because, aren’t people just the worst and the best of every single day, amen?  Sometimes I also think, “God, I just love people.”

And great is the temptation, for those of us with the power to do so, to surround ourselves with the ones who help us be the selves we most want to be.  If I could, I would surround myself with people like my nephew Parker, because he and I each think the other is a comic genius.  But to such a definition of friendship, Jesus says, No!  Stop being so selfish.  If you would abide in me like I told you to, five verses ago, you'd know how loved you are already, and you wouldn’t need 50 daily Facebook Likes to keep your heart up.  Go find some under-loved people for me to love through you.

I know why we don't do it.  We're afraid.  We're afraid because we don't abide.  We don't abide because we're lazy.  And easily distracted.  And afraid.  Scott Simon told me yesterday morning about two suicide bombings in Kabul this week.  Journalists got killed.  More journalists than any day since the Taliban days.  Scott had a different Afghani journalist on to talk about the ones who died.  Some of them were his colleagues, his friends, he said.  And he's brokenhearted now.  

And now, because they have names and families and a story, my heart hurts a little too.  And sadly, my first impulse is to say that my heart hurts because I didn’t turn the radio off in time, like I sometimes do when sad, sad news comes on.  Having seven billion friends will break your heart every single day.  Guaranteed!

Loving people hurts.  And now Jesus tells us we have to love everybody – no matter what they've done or haven't done for us.  No matter what they've done TO us.  Who needs hurt like that?  The right question, of course, is who needs love like that?  The world, of course.  All seven billion of us.  If we knew that, and lived like we knew it, all manner of things would be well.  But we don't.  So they aren't.

The second shift in understanding Jesus’ way of friendship is how to be a friend.  By laying down your life.  Again, not complicated, but practically impossible.  The last time Jesus used this language was in John 10 – the Good Shepherd text.  17 “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.  18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.  I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.  I have received this command from my Father." 

Of course when He said it first, these disciples might have imagined Jesus dying, a martyr; a hero; in a battle, maybe.  A sheep to the slaughter they'd never have imagined.  This non-resistant, compliant, submissive goat to the great enemy of Israel.

It's a complicated saying.  On its face and in context, it seems that Jesus means dying.  Dying as He died.  Putting one's own walking, talking, breathing body between my friend and my friend's enemy, absorbing whatever treatment my friend's enemy directs at my friend – which, not to make light of such a calling, seems slightly easier in that it must only be done once.

How does a disciple follow Jesus by doing something she can only do one time?  And when Jesus says He has the power to lay it down and take it up again, does He mean the one death and resurrection, or some repetitive way of living?  Something we can mimic in this befriending others as Jesus has befriended us?  

I do not imagine discipleship as one long exercise of planning for which friend and in what moment Jesus expects me to die.  It doesn't make sense to me.  Not as much as the possibility that Jesus intends me to see this life of mine as something I lay down every day for the friends who cross my path.  Not so much by my breath and blood, although it might come to that, but rather by my time and energy and will.  Day in and day out.  For years.  Decades. 

Because, honestly, what do we guard most closely?  What do we protect from others?  Time.  Talent.  And Treasure.  The STUFF of my life that I consider MINE.  And even when we itch to give it away, we want to give when and where we know it will be ____(what?)________?  Appreciated.  It's just good stewardship, we say.

But is it good discipleship?  we should also ask.  Does it mimic Jesus’ example of laying down one's life for one’s friends?  The friends you've never met, who will never say thank you, who may never be grateful.  Even now, I don't like this sermon.  I don't like it for the inequity embedded in the language, the sense that we are empowered to do for others what others cannot do for themselves:  Loving the underloved.  I don't like the smack of that language, as if we have something others don't.  We don't.

Insofar as we have not yet accepted our undeservedness of the love of God in Christ Jesus, we above all people are in need of Jesus and His grace.  And now is the time for us to continue to abide in Him and Him in us.​

Our love for one another is the hard proof of God's presence in the world.  ​“Our”
​ refers to  all human beings, not just the Christian ones, since all love is from God.  Love refers to  respectful, graceful, just regard and treatment of every human being – regard and  treatment based not on what a human ​deserves
​ , but that he ​is
​ .  God loves us, because we  are God's.  We love others, because they are God's.    As for proof – well, proof is what humanity is starved for, isn't it?  Meaning.  Purpose.  Some sense of why we exist at all.  We exist to love and to be loved.  When we find  ourselves loved – adored – by the Creator, the Sustainer, of the universe, our lives  become a circuit of that love.  Or a ​circus
​ , which also works.  As God is in us, so are we in  the world, being love.  We who have bound ourselves to Christ have made loving others  the central purpose of our lives.      Such a life bears much fruit, Jesus said.  If you can pick it, what fruit do you hope to  bear?  The fruit I hope to bear is joy.  And peace.  And justice.  And decency, kindness  and grace.  I don't, mostly.  Mostly I fail – because I'm slothful.  And timid.  And  gluttonous.  I suspect Jesus minds, a little.  But not so much that he won't work with me,  that he doesn't keep inviting me to try.  The bit I know about this life convinces me that  it's the trying that makes a life.  And relationship with Christ is about the running, as  Paul said, though I wish he'd been a knitter rather than an athlete.    That Christ is with us is what keeps us in the race, the fight, reaching for the prize.  John  15 is smack-dab center of Jesus' farewell discourse:  his most intimate conversation with  his inner-circle disciples at the last supper, just before he's arrested.  He's preparing 
them, not just for his death, but for the new relationship to come:  absent in the body,  present in the Spirit.  A relationship that will require new effort and intention from  them.  And faith.  Lots and lots of faith.  Bags and bags of faith.  ​Abide
​ is the word for  such faith – here and all through John's writing, actually.     4
​ Abide in me as I abide in you.  Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides  in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. 
​ 5
​ I am the vine, you are the branches.  Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do  nothing. 
​ 6
​ Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such  branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. 
​ 7
​ If you abide in me, and my words  abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.  As the Father has  loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 
​ 10
​ If you keep my commandments, you will  abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.  Lots and lots of ​abiding
​ .  • Abide means “Stay.”  • Just stay.  • Don't go over there,  • or up there,  • or down there,  • or back there.  • Stay.  Right.  Here.     Stay in the loving, safe, all-knowing, ever-graceful presence of God.  Stay here mentally.  Stay here emotionally.  Stay here physically.  Stay here morally.     Here's the opposite of abiding:  my phone chimes that I have a text.  I'm driving, so I can't  check it.  Instead I take mental inventory of my six most important people and three  most stressful projects.  I conjure a possible disaster for each one of them.  This takes five  seconds, tops.  Eventually I check the message – it's not a disaster, naturally.  I spend  another minute or two flogging myself mentally for being so dramatic.  Then I go back to  what I WAS doing before.  Probably something like fretting about the Russia scandal or  what a mess my house is.  Or how many carbs I've already eaten that day.     All my life I've been told being Christian means praying a lot; giving my money and time  and energy; feeling guilty for not giving away enough money, time or energy; going to  church a lot.  But hardly anybody ever talked about ​abiding
​ a lot.  And Jesus seems to be  really big on it.  He seems really big on us trusting him no matter what.  Abide in me.  Stay right here.     To have any hope of being the people who bear evidence of God's presence in this world,  we must decide to abide in Christ.  First and most of all, abiding is a work of heart and  mind, a discipline that demands as much practice and self-denial as any athlete or artist  perfecting her craft. 
   It takes a lifetime, even to begin:  day in and day out, rejecting the world's terribly low  standard for decency and mercy and justice; insisting to ourselves and to one another, as  brothers and sisters in Christ, that God's expectation is entirely other and inevitably  demands sacrifice.     Abiding begins quietly, seriously, deeply, with the decision to desire what Christ desires  regardless of what our bodies or emotions ache for, day to day.  Abiding is coming to  terms with the fact that wanting what Christ wants doesn’t come naturally just because  we are His.  It is learned, practiced, and prayed-for behavior.     Abiding is long and tedious and awkward.  Sometimes scary.  Sometimes boring.  Sometimes hilarious.  Sometimes fun.  The company is usually good.  Because abiding  happens only inside relationship, in communion with God, in fellowship with each other.     Since January, I've fallen off the exercise wagon.  Fortunately I landed in my recliner, so  no one was injured.  I love that we actually buy chairs called Lazy Boys; we don't even  try to hide our slothfulness.  But I'm back at it, after going in for what is called another  “session for success."  Like asking a professor to let you take her class over again and  promising to do better.  One change is that I have a new trainer, Brandon.  Brandon is a  quiet man who doesn't look super fit, just normal tall and lean.  But he can do 1,000  burpees in an hour.  Then, not only does he not die, he can finish his workday.  He's  patient as a saint and as attentive as a mother hen.  He laughs at all my jokes, except the  self-deprecating ones.  He always encourages.  He's always kind.  He asks after my aches  and pains.    He's really good to me, but only if I'm there.  If I miss twice, he'll email me to see if I'm  dead.  But he doesn't come over.  He doesn't drag me out of the Lazy Boy to drive me to  the gym and puppet me through my workout.  That would be creepy.  And it wouldn't  work; this body is my project.  And so is my faith.  As much as Jesus wants to love me,  and love the world through me, without my volition – without my active, intentional  participation – Jesus will wait.  Or, more accurately, Jesus will go on without me until I'm  ready.     Friends, either life with Christ is a life we want, or it isn't.  We can pretend it's something  less than Jesus demands, make it one of our interests like gardening and fitness and  chickens.  Jesus may even appear to abide our pretense.  But either our lives bear the  fruit of the Spirit or they don't.  And if they don't, we aren't ​useless
​ creatures.  But neither  are we the disciples Jesus was talking to in John 15.  The ones who thought themselves  devoted, called, willing to go the distance as his followers.     In that group, there wasn't room or time for deadweight.  Jesus talks more than once of a  pruning, purging and fire, always to promote greater and greater growth, more and  more fruit; more grace, more justice; more joy, more peace.  For lots of years I only heard 
this text preached as judgment – against people who don't believe in Jesus – rather than  the more plausible interpretation, which is that firewood is a natural consequence for  dead branches.  At least as firewood, dead branches are still useful.  Is Jesus really  judging or is he explaining how adult relationships work?  Which is:  ​everyone  contributes; ​everyone
​ puts in.    I AM the vine
​ is Jesus seventh and last “I AM” statement in the gospel of John.  We've  been over nearly all the others since Christmas, two last week.  Do you remember them?     I AM:  The bread of life (chapter 6)  I AM:  The light of the world (chapter 8)  I AM:  The gate (chapter 10)  I AM:  The good shepherd (chapter 10)  I AM:  The resurrection and the life (chapter 11)  I AM:  The way, the truth and the life (chapter 14)     I AM is the oldest and most important part of God's name for God's self since Moses.  God's shameless, audacious, outrageous pursuit of us – ​like a jilted husband chasing down  a cheating wife
​ – is the picture painted by the prophet Hosea.  Chasing humanity in hope  we might know how completely and forever loved we have always been, by this one who  calls themself, I AM.  Seven times Jesus reduces I AM to some smaller word we might  understand:  bread, light, gate, shepherd, vine, any one of which will do, so long as at  least one of them snags one of us and we discover ourselves the beloved.     Once snagged, friends, by this love that never checks a resumé, that regards us worthy of  grace, dignity, kindness and respect by virtue of our being-ness, by virtue of being God's,  and the more of this goodness and grace that we soak up like vines soaking up sunshine  and water, the more in love with humanity we will also fall; the less able we will be to  tolerate the terror and injustice inflicted by our brothers on our sisters, by our sisters on  our brothers, and by the systems of this world that enrich some by exploiting others.     Injustice and oppression:  they ought to feel like injury or poison to the Spirit of God in  us, injury that prompts change, treatment, healing:  the activity of love in the world –  that hard proof of God's presence, the purpose of our lives and our life together.

Grace wins.  Grace always wins.  Even when it takes forever to see grace win, grace still wins.  In the meantime, we live by faith, knowing that by his rising, grace has won.  God chose to love and keep us, when God had every right and reason to give us up for good, to abandon us to ourselves and one another:  we humans; we children; children who destroy what the Parent-God-Creator offered freely – and in the process destroy each other, destroy ourselves.  
But rather than punish or abandon, which surely would have been easier, God absorbed the offense; surrendered the anger; stayed and loved, full of grace and mercy, for our weakness and our fear and for the cruelty we commit as a result.  By God’s choice, God’s will, grace wins.

Grace always wins.  By grace, the world is set to rights.  By grace, justice rules.  By grace, death dies.  Life wins.  God reigns.

Have you seen the movie Wonder Woman?  Where she’s in the trenches in France with three seasoned soldiers:  an American, an Irishman and an Indian?  The shelling is constant.  The soldiers explain stalemate to her.  It’s gone on two years, they say.  She’s horrified.  Someone has to do something, she says.  We can’t, they say.  But she’s Wonderwoman, there to do what humanity cannot, and will not, do for itself.  She climbs up and over the edge of stalemate, charging into the destruction,  defeating the enemies, rescuing a village.  The Christology starts breaking down fast, but for that one moment it shines.

Humanity at war with itself for so long, we cannot conceive of how not to be.  Jesus enters the trenches where everyone else is paralyzed with fear and also hopelessness.  Jesus does for us what we humans cannot do for ourselves, and the backbone of death is broken, once and for all.

Mary Magdalene doesn’t know it yet.  She’s headed for the tomb, the graveyard.  To do what, John doesn’t say.  To grieve?  To tend Jesus’ body?  What we know for sure is that Mary Magdalene assumes he’s dead.  She went to the cemetery, after all, not his house, his friends’ houses, the Temple.  She went where dead people are and fully expected to find him there.

For some the graveyard is a place to visit our dead, knowing full well the dead are no more there than they are anywhere.  Yet, for some of us, the graveyard is a particular spot on the earth for marking their absence in all the rest of our lives, somewhere to go when we cannot be WHERE we most want to be – that is, with them.  We know they aren’t there – and yet knowing their bodies were once there somehow makes the trip seem worthy. 

Still, none of us go expecting our loved ones to be waiting there for us, ready for conversation.  Mary finds the grave is opened, the body stolen or moved.  She fetches Peter and John.  They see burial clothes, folded of course, because it’s Jesus.  We’re meant to remember Lazarus waking up and walking out still all wrapped up.

Jesus’ rising was intentional.  He did his laundry, as I like to say.  Mary saw none of that.  Only that his body’s gone.  His DEAD body.  I personally can write a backstory to any situation in about 20 seconds.  And the backstory I write is always the worst possible scenario.  Being Mary, I’d have assumed the chief priests paid someone to steal and hide the body to cover up the whole thing so his followers couldn’t make a martyr of him.

Peter and John go home; Mary stays; angels arrive.  They ask why she’s crying.  She explains her grave robber theory.  And keeps crying.  Now a man comes along.  A gardener, she thinks.

Whom are you looking for? He wants to know.  A sensible question in a graveyard; markers can be hard to find.  Except he’s not the gardener.  Nothing ever means just one thing in the gospel of John, and we’ve heard this voice ask this question before, in chapter 1.  Two disciples of John the Baptist peeled off to follow Jesus.  He felt them behind him, turned and said, “What are you looking for?”

The whole gospel starts over in chapter 20.  Now we can read everything in the right light.  The light of his resurrection, where nothing now means what it meant before.

He’s not the groundskeeper.  He’s the Creator of the universe, and he knows her name.  From the graveyard, from the void, from the place beyond all hope, he calls her own name.  “Mary,” Jesus says to her.  “Rabbouni!" she replied, which means “My teacher!”

I don’t know the words to do this story justice, I can no more preach this story than I can hit a mid-court shot blindfolded.  Yet you still know what I’m aiming for.  But in my mind’s hearing of the text, there is such a looooong silence between verses 16 and 17.  The long silence of him letting her hug him and of him holding her.  Until he has to peel her off him.  “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.  But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘ I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”  And she does.

But I can’t imagine it was easy, being her first act of faith and all.  Because I get wanting to hold on.  I REALLY get seeing Jesus after thinking she’d never see him again, and the temptation to imagine all the horror and fear and grief of the last five days was just a nightmare, and now that Jesus was back everything could go back to the way it was before.  Everything could just be great again, like it was in Galilee.  All that sunshine and seashore.  Picnics and open air revivals with hundreds of people following them.

But all of life wasn’t Galilee, was it?  Jesus wouldn’t let them stay in Galilee forever.  He decided to go back to Jerusalem, where people were determined to kill him.  And nothing any of them could do would stop him once he’d turned his face in that direction.  

All the world is not Galilee in springtime.  Bullets and bombs and people living in trenches are just as real.  The stalemate of war and disease and poverty that grinds people into hopelessness this side of the graveyard, where people are helpless against our own fear and weakness; where human beings destroy each other and ourselves, barely even trying.  It’d be awesome to pretend all the world was Galilee.  But Jesus tells her no, that she has to let him go again.

Mary knows he’s risen, and now she’ll know he didn’t rise just for her.  Go and tell my brothers too, he says.  I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.

And so she let go of Jesus, again.  And in some ways forever.  The Jesus she had known so far; the one who walked and talked and was her teacher; the one who ate with them and preached to them; who healed the sick and fed the hungry and talked theology with women; who said God loved the poor and the prisoner and the foreigner; who said the Romans were to be treated as kindly as a neighbor – he was awesome and wonderful, and Mary left her life for him.  But he was still just the Jesus she had known so far.


Don’t hold on to who I was, Jesus tells her here.  Who I was is not who I came to be.  Or what I came to do for you.  For everyone.

Friends, all this Lenten season we’ve been holding back for this very moment.  He is alive. Not “still” – but rather “again.”  He was dead.  Now he’s alive.  But even death is under the command and direction of the Creator of the universe.  The universe of death is contained within the universe of the Creator.  Death takes its bidding from the Creator.  Death is something smaller than, contained within, Life itself.


I can’t explain it.  I can only say it.  And words are too small and too few to say it perfectly.  What Mary learned first is this:  death does not have the last word in this world, in the order of things, when what we were sure was a hopeless, lifeless, dead-in-the-grave, over-and-done-with, broken-for-good situation, God was all along, alive and watching over us, with our own names on the tip of God’s tongue, calling us to himself again and again and again, Easter after Easter after Easter, for as long as we need to muster the faith that it takes to know Him risen, alive, and with us right here, right now, and forever.​