Prayer is opening one’s heart into the presence of God, living and breathing inside the life of God and inside the community of those whom God embraces, and prayer changes the one who prays. Even God.

Pr. Joseph G. Crippen
The Seventh Sunday of Easter, year B
Text: John 17:6-19

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace to you, and peace in the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Why do you suppose Jesus commanded us to pray for our enemies?

Jesus said, “I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” (Luke 6:27-28) These are huge asks, even for Jesus. Love even enemies. Give good for hate. Return curses with blessings. Everything that’s counter to our instincts.

But that final command is the critical one. “Pray for them,” Jesus says. Pray.

This says as much about prayer as it does about our enemies. Often we think of prayer as just our talking to God. We wonder if prayer “works,” if we get what we pray for. But Jesus understands prayer so much more deeply and richly, a blessing that would change our lives, if we could grasp it.

We see this in this astonishing moment on the night of his betrayal. God the Son prays to God the Father, inside the life of the Triune God. God prays to God for us. For you.

The thought of God praying to God is pretty confusing. We don’t know how that even works.

How can God ask God for things? Doesn’t God the Father know everything God the Son knows? Isn’t God the Spirit there? Why would prayer be necessary?

Prayer as we often call it – asking for things – wouldn’t be. But God understands prayer very differently, and we see that clearly today: prayer is opening up one’s heart into the presence of God. Jesus, who has loved these women and men for nearly three years, opens his heart and puts them in, and in prayer opens God’s heart and carries them into the life of God.

Prayer is the atmosphere of relationship, where love and grace between beings lives and breathes. Between people we don’t call it prayer anymore, though older forms of English did. We call it communication, loving, embracing. Listening, empathy, sharing. Joining with others in loving relationship, from those closest to us to the stranger we love on the street who is Christ, this is prayer we have between each other.

And here God’s Son prays us into the very life of God, and shows us that the same life we find with each other is a life we can have and do have with God. In prayer, Jesus has wrapped us all up together and surrounded us in God’s embrace, God’s life, God’s joy.

Such an opening of the heart is bound to change the one who prays.

Loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, and blessing even those who curse us, that’s more than we can imagine doing. Many times I’ve not only struggled to do such things, I didn’t want to.

But everything changes when you pray. It’s easy to keep hating someone, to return evil for evil. It’s impossible to do either while carrying that person – their life, their well-being – into God’s heart. Your heart opens to them by the mere fact of your carrying them to God. Now that person – whether loved one or enemy – is embedded in your heart. How will that not change you?

When you open your heart to anyone, whether it’s to you yourself, or to another person, then lift yourself or them into God’s heart, your heart expands. Your empathy grows. Your love deepens.

And this is true for God, too. Such prayer as we hear from Jesus today expands God’s heart, opens God’s life, brings more into the dance and joy of the Triune God. God is changed.

Prayer draws us into community – inside God and between us.

When we pray, we open our hearts to God and to each other and to the world. Prayer keeps us from thinking faith is a personal, private thing. Prayer is how we live and breathe and love our faith with God. How we live and breathe and love in community with each other in Christ. How we live and breathe and love in community with those who are Christ out in the world, those we don’t know, those we think hate us, even those we’re pretty sure we don’t like either.

Prayer pulls us away from being exclusive about being surrounded by God’s love. From thinking that our little sheepfold is the only one, and everyone else is outside. Or at least certain people or groups we don’t like. As Jesus told you a couple weeks ago, you belong to a Shepherd who has other sheep and sheepfolds you don’t know about or control. Being drawn into God in prayer, and drawing yourself and all others into your heart and God’s heart in prayer, removes all barriers of exclusion. God will and does surround all.

Realizing prayer removes walls and barriers between us and God and us and others means new realities, new vision, new experiences.

That’s scary. What’s your world going to be like with all the fences removed? What’s your heart going to be like with no one to fear or hate? Won’t it be dangerous?

But that’s the grace of this particular prayer Jesus prays today. God lifts you up to God to be protected and cared for as you live in this frightening world. Not that pain and suffering be prevented: Jesus says they’re guaranteed on this path. Maybe not a cross, but you’ll be vulnerable. You’ll be hurt at times.

But Jesus prays that you are surrounded always by God’s love and life so you are never alone. Living in community with the world as Christ, and living inside the communal life of God: what better joy could you have? Do you think anything can ever really harm you inside such love?

So let us pray. Really pray. And watch God draw all things together.

In the name of Jesus.  Amen

 

We might say we love people in theory, but loving them in practice is much harder. It’s what Peter experienced when the Holy Spirit sent him to Cornelius, and what we experience whenever God challenges us to love someone outside our comfort zone.

Vicar Jessica Christy
The Second Sunday of Easter, year B
Texts: Acts 10:44-48, John 15:9-17

Where are the limits of your love? How far are you willing to go, and how much are you willing to lay down before you draw the line? Who are those people who you pray that God loves, because you don’t think that you can?

Today we see the early Church wrestling with the limits of its love. Our reading from Acts is the culmination of a story in which Peter visits the home of a faithful centurion named Cornelius. But the apostle doesn’t go there of his own volition; both he and Cornelius’ household are guided by the Holy Spirit. Peter is staying in a nearby city when he has a strange vision of a giant sheet descending from heaven, filled with all manner of unclean animals – four legged creatures and reptiles and birds. And he hears a voice saying, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” Now, because Peter is Peter, he fights back – not once, but three times. He objects that he has never eaten anything impure, and he has no desire to start now. To give Peter his due, the problem isn’t just that he thinks that eating a lizard sounds gross. He objects because he loves the law. It’s a fundamental part of who he is. The teachings of Moses were how Peter and his people stayed faithful to their God in a world that constantly threatened them with extinction and assimilation. And now God is instructing him…to let go of that? To turn away from the sacred teachings that have meant not only ritual purity but identity and survival and a sure relationship with God? What God is asking of him is terrifying. God is telling him that he must die to himself in order to be reborn as something new.

Then three men appear and tell Peter that an angel has instructed them to bring him to the home of a Roman officer, and Peter understands what God is asking of him: in order to carry the Gospel where it needs to go, he has to break bread with Gentiles. He will need to lay down his life as he has known it in order to serve others. He goes and announces the good news of Christ to all of Cornelius’ household. And before he’s even finished talking, the Holy Spirit comes down on his audience. That same Holy Spirit that descended on Peter and the believers in Jerusalem on Pentecost now comes to this Roman household. There’s no difference. In this moment, there is no more us and them, just one Spirit-filled people. Peter’s companions are astounded by this sight. They can’t believe that God would come to these foreigners.

Now, this shouldn’t be news to any of them. Peter traveled with Jesus, saw him heal people of all faiths and ethnicities and walks of life. On Pentecost, he quoted the prophet Joel saying that God’s Spirit would be poured out on all flesh – all flesh, not just some. Peter and his followers knew that God’s love could extend to Gentiles, at least in theory. But as we’ve been hearing these past weeks, love isn’t love when it’s just a theory. Peter had proclaimed the expansive love of the Spirit, but embracing the physical reality of what that meant, that was something harder. When he was asked to make that love incarnate, to see it and touch it and eat it, his first instinct was to fight back. He wanted God to love all people, but he hadn’t been ready to do it himself.

And isn’t that what we always do? In this place, we are bold to proclaim God’s limitless, unconditional love for all people. We strive to create a community where everyone can find warmth and welcome, and to live lives that carry God’s mercy into the world. But believing in God’s love is much easier than being God’s love. In reality, there people with whom we’d rather not share fellowship. There are places we’d rather not go. There are differences we’d rather not work to overcome. So who are you afraid to love? Who do you wish you could love not just in theory but in practice, but don’t know how? Is it people with different political beliefs? Is it people of different nationalities or languages? Is it people of different social classes? People whose bodies look or work differently from your own? Who makes you want to leave the room, or look away, or cross on the other side of the street, and say, “sorry, God, but this person isn’t for me.” I wish I could say that my answer was “nobody.” I wish I could love all people without reservation or qualification. But if I said I did that, I would be lying. I believe that God’s love is for everyone, but faced with the flesh and blood reality of what that asks of me, I often shy away. All the time, I choose to love people who are easy and comfortable and safe rather than allowing the Spirit to lead me somewhere new.

But the Holy Spirit is not about what is easy. She pushes us out of our safe, comfortable places and challenges us to be more, to believe more, to love more. No matter how big we think God’s love is, it will always be bigger than that. When we see its incarnate reality, it will leave us astounded. The immensity of God’s love breaks us open and shakes us out of what we know. Sometimes that comes at a real price. Like Peter, we might be asked to rethink who we are and what we believe. We might need to let go of things we cherish – good things that have served us well, but cannot take us where we need to go next. We might need to lay down parts of our lives so that we can recognize new people as friends. This can be scary and painful, so thanks be to God that we don’t do it alone. The Spirit goes out before us and does the real work. She brought Philip to the Ethiopian official, and Peter to Cornelius, and she shows us where we need to go now. She is the one who inspires, and who baptizes, and who brings new life. Our job is simply to follow along, to recognize what the Spirit is doing, and to not withhold the water.

The best way – and indeed, the only way for us to know God’s love is to love each other. Christ says that we abide in the love of the Trinity when we keep God’s commandments, and the ultimate commandment is that we love one another. There are times when that love can only emerge through sacrifice, even loss. But Christ tells us that the love that lays itself down is the greatest and most godly love of all, and he promises that the feast that awaits us at God’s great banquet is far better than whatever meals we eat at our own tables. It is only natural that we feel some fear when we let go of the familiar and venture into the unknown. There’s nothing wrong with trepidation, so long as we hold to God’s truth that perfect love will cast out all fear. If we follow where the Spirit leads, yes, we will astounded, but on the other side of that astonishment is the fullness of the body of Christ. On the other side of that astonishment is God.

Amen.