Acts 1: 6 – 14; 1 Peter 4: 12 – 14, 5: 6 – 11 John 17: 1 – 11
Have you heard of the test of whether a Church is productive or not? It must not have its head so far in the clouds that it is of no earthly use. Alternatively it must not have its feet so firmly on the ground that it is of no heavenly use. Where do you think we fit into this spectrum?
We’ll come back to this again by the end of the sermon but to begin with I invite you to come on a journey to look at the last night of Jesus’ life before he was arrested, falsely convicted and crucified. The night before he died. Just three nights before he rose again from the dead.
We’re thinking about the prayer that Jesus prayed just after the end of the Last supper, after Judas had left to fetch the thugs who were to arrest him. That dark night. It’s chapter 17 of John’s Gospel and we heard the first part of it in our Gospel reading this morning. This is John’s honest approximation of what Jesus prayed for of course, John was there at the time. Jesus was at the end of three years living with his beloved friends, the disciples and this is his prayer for them.
‘And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.’ He’s praying for our protection.
I want to let you into a secret. I find this passage rather dense. I hear the words and they all make sense individually but when I try and put them together I just get confused. However I discovered this week a good thing to do that brings it all to life for me and makes it much easier and that’s to draw connections between Our Lord’s Prayer of Jesus which we heard in the Gospel, long, full of riches, and rather dense and the other great prayer of his which Matthew and Luke major on which is The Lord’s Prayer, short, pithy and just as full of riches and which I guess everyone here knows by heart.
Think of some of the key words from Our Lord’s Prayer and find them in The Lord’s Prayer. Here’s a lightning tour. ‘After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come’ – Our Father who art in heaven. … ‘glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you. And of course ‘glorify’ is a very similar concept to hallow. ‘Hallowed be thy name’. And God’s name is hallowed, is glorified because Jesus prays in our Gospel reading, ‘I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world’, and again, ‘Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me’. And what is protecting if it is not delivering us from evil in The Lord’s Prayer? … Jesus prays, thanking God for the ‘eternal life to all whom you have given him’. Whereas John talks about ‘eternal life’, Matthew, Mark and Luke talk about the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom of God. And we pray, ‘Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That’s ‘eternal life’ in John’s language and we’re praying for its completion so that the fallen earth we walk upon is once again the Kingdom of God it was designed to be because Jesus disciples ‘are in the world’. It is their job, and therefore our job, to pray for and work for and spot the Kingdom of God on earth, glimpses of heaven on earth and that’s ‘eternal life’, here and now. And that is truly glorious. And it helps me to get my thick head around where today’s passage is pointing us. And that’s a bit glorious too.
For Jesus’ prayer speaks a lot about glory. Five times in the first five verses. We’ve had a couple of them already but the last three give great riches. Jesus prayed, ‘I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.’ So here is Jesus praying, before he completes his great life work by allowing himself to be crucified and killed out of love for the broken world he came to save, and calling that ‘glory’. The ‘glory’ of the cross which he is saying was all part of God’s grand plan for creation, planned before the creation of the world when he was gloriously in the presence of God his Father. So Jesus is saying that both life and death, both joy and suffering are all part of God’s plan and that God wants to share in all the joys and pains that afflict human beings like you and me. Wow! That’s some sharing God. That’s a glorious thought. And it’s another glorious thought that God has overcome the everlasting power of death by Jesus, his Son, gloriously bursting out of the sealed tomb of death on Easter Day. That’s quite a lot of barriers blown to smithereens in one fell swoop. The barrier between death and life. The barrier between sin and forgiveness. The barrier between heaven and earth. The barrier between God and human beings. ‘protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.’ The barrier between loneliness and community. That’s what Jesus was praying about in Our Lord’s Prayer which we heard today as well as in The Lord’s Prayer which we pray frequently.
Jesus’s prayer is a prayer about past, present and future both his and ours. For his own future he prays for, ‘So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence’, and he surely talking about his homecoming, back to be with his Father and for that and its effect on us we need to look briefly at the Acts reading.
Here St Luke has the disciples, those same eleven disciples with Jesus after the end of the Last Supper, on the Mount of Olives just outside Jerusalem in a scene which poor language cannot even begin to convey as Jesus ‘was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.’ And he ascended into heaven. Which we celebrated last Thursday on Ascension Day. I can’t even have a bash at understanding what that must have been like and St Luke, who almost certainly wasn’t there at the time, clearly struggled with the same issues. But what I can identify with is the open-mouthed amazement of the disciples ‘While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven’ Stupified and shocked with presumably all sorts of mixed emotions going on inside them as their beloved friend and leader whom they had only just got back from the gates of death disappeared from their lives once again.
But here’s the thing. Read on a little further. ‘suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.  They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven?’’ Think back to my opening gambit. The test of whether a Church is productive or not. It must not have its head so far in the clouds that it is of no earthly use. Alternatively it must not have its feet so firmly on the ground that it is of no earthly use.
The disciples could have kept their focus on this heavenly vision. Heads upwards. Mouths open. Minds occupied by another dimension, wherever Jesus had gone. A religion focussed on the past. What had been and to some extent on the future, what they hoped would be, but certainly not on the present, what is, and what is going on all around them in the desperate world which formed their daily lives. For after all, Jesus had gone, what possible use could he be now?
But the angels around them have other ideas. ‘This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’ This could be a vague prediction of the second coming of Jesus, but I find it much more helpful to link it with the presence of Jesus inspiring their lives through the coming of the Holy Spirit. And they only had ten days for the Feast of Pentecost to wait for him. So ‘they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet’ and continued life with their feet on the ground of Jerusalem in all its brutality and danger but also with their heads still in heaven as they ‘were constantly devoting themselves to prayer’, waiting for the Spirit to come.
So where does this whirlwind tour leave you and me in the pleasant or not so pleasant environs of Church on a Sunday morning in 2026?
Well, if John and Luke are to be believed, the Kingdom of God, ‘eternal life’, is just as must all around us now, today, as it is in the future or far away in heaven. If John and Luke are to be believed our role now is to pray and live in and extend the Kingdom, the ‘eternal life’ that they talk about and which Jesus prays about. And if John and Luke are to be believed, that Kingdom, that ‘eternal life’ transforms the whole experience of human and earthly life and not just keeps separate the nice clean presentable bits.
Jesus is just as interested in transforming the drug addict swallowing some more Ketamine as he is in enabling a Church choir to sing praises in choral Evensong. He is just as loving towards the refugee we want to keep the other side of our borders as he is about the semi-detached homeowner who’s just paid off their mortgage. He’s just as concerned about the child worker in the stone quarry in Asia as he is about the Year 6 child in Arlesey who’s just finished their SATS and is worried about their PGL trip. He’s just as concerned about the high levels of microplastics in the oceans as he is delighted with the sight of a glorious sunset over a ripening field of corn. And if we can in some sense hold together the same concerns and priorities then we will be building the Kingdom, living ‘eternal life’, keeping our feet firmly on the ground whilst our heads are directed towards heaven and trustfully, hopefully being of service to both and bringing them a little closer in the lives of the people we are concerned about.
How well do you think you succeed as an individual and as a Church in this awesome and glorious responsibility?
As we prepare to celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit of Jesus in our own celebration of the feast of Pentecost next week, prayer that the Spirit will show you how you are living your life bringing heaven to earth and hope to a wounded world.
Amen.
