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The Church's One Foundation Text:
John 17:1-11 Things are really changing. The polls are in. But the surprise is that June Cleaver (from the ancient TV show “Leave It To Beaver”) has been demoted to the number 2 “best mom.” Number 1 this year, if you can believe it, has gone to the animated Marge Simpson! Things are really changing. What is the echoing refrain of the hymn? “Change and decay in all around I see.” Even Mother's Day has changed, at least for people like me and my wife, Alice. For, a little over two years ago we bid farewell to our Moms, Lila and Ruth. Suddenly, when this nearly sacred day keeps its annual appointment, I'm relegated to the smaller section of Mother's Day greeting cards, those that begin with the words, “To My Wife.” Orphans we are, and now we are left to be but on the receiving end of Mother's and Father's Days.
Beside the fact that these kind of holidays are great for the economy and those in the “Mother's Day” business of everything from greeting cards to flowers and other appropriate gifts, these kind of holidays do help us mark and count our blessings, focus on the things that are really more important, namely, our relationships. Marriage and the family is the chief and most important building block of any society. It is a godly thing blessed and elevated by God himself when he commanded not just to love or even merely to respect and obey, but to “Honor your father and mother.” There is no higher status in the human family than this. All other authority in society stems from this basic authority of mom and dad and the family.
Yet life has its way of interrupting even the most noble of our values, frustrating our highest hopes and bringing past joys crashing down all around us, leaving us afraid, anxious, despairing and feeling quite alone. For dreaded death continues to stalk every one of us and claims its victims relentlessly, one poor soul at a time, and the rest of us are left a little more lonely than we ever were before.
Our text for today has a word to speak to us in that regard. These are the words of the Lord who promises, “I am with you always,” and “I will not leave you are orphans,” and “I will come back to take you to myself so that where I am you may be also.”
On this Sunday we are with our Lord's first disciples, between his ascension into heaven this past Thursday and now waiting in Jerusalem, as he commanded, waiting for this “promise of the Father,” the Holy Spirit who would be poured out mightily next Sunday on the Day of Pentecost. But for these ten days in-between we busy ourselves with the little details of daily life, biding our time, maybe fighting off the dark feelings of loneliness. Indeed, these ten lonely days are like all our days today, living as we do in-between our Lord's ascension and his promised coming again on the Last Day. And what do we do in these in-between days and months and years and decades and centuries and millennia?
It is for days precisely such as these that our Lord prayed what has come to be called his “high priestly prayer.” His first disciples heard this prayer, very probably after that Last Passover dinner, that First Lord's Supper was concluded on the night in which he would be betrayed; maybe before they had sung the last hymn and went out to the Garden of Gethsemane.
On the night before his cross, Christ prayed for his disciples—his disciples then–these men with whom he had been so intimately related for three long years and who were now to be sent forth like sheep amid the wolves to a mad world—and he prayed also for us, his disciples now still wending our way through the often confusing, always threatening passageways of a world where the darkness of the shadow of death seems to loom ever deeper. Tomorrow he would leave them to offer his redeeming sacrifice, his spotless life as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world. Tomorrow he would hang upon the cross, despised and rejected of men and forsaken of God, bearing the damnation of our guilt, reconciling the world to God, securing forgiveness at the only price forgiveness can be secured. But in this hour his vision swept beyond the cross, past his ascension and through the ages beholding the multitudes who would be drawn to Calvary in faith by the preaching of the Apostolic Word, the Gospel of the Crucified, Risen and Ascended One. “I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name.” He prayed for them and for us. He pressed us into his heart in love as he pressed us on the heart of his Father. Our names were in the catalogue of his concern that night. We are the objects of his care, his love.
These words of our Lord's Prayer mean to tell us that we are not lost in the crowd, forsaken or at our wit's end. We are not alone! The very Christ who created us and who redeemed us holds us in the bosom of his concern to this day. One day when the famous choral conductor Robert Shaw was rehearsing his singers, he became distressed and angered because they didn't watch their eighth notes carefully, and finally in his despair he stomped his feet and shouted, “Eighth notes are little people; and little people, count!” In the music of God's eternal love for us, little people count. We have been given the bath of blood that washed our sins away. This prayer he spoke the night before his sacrifice was also for us. Now ascended to the throne of God again, Christ lives, and the intercession of his prayers continues in the presence of our Father. If anyone sins we have an advocate, a lawyer in the heavens, and his name is Jesus Christ. We are important in the heart of Jesus. Little people count!
But now notice the central concern of his prayer for us: “that they might be one, even as we are one.” There are two kinds of oneness among Christ's followers, his Church. The first is the oneness and unity of faith that exists because there is only one faith, one Lord, one baptism, one God and Father of us all. This is the oneness that cannot be seen and therefore of which we confess when we say those words of the creed, “I believe in one , holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” The sort of oneness for which Christ here prays, however, is that illusive, outward, observable, demonstrable oneness of the Church in her life and witness and mission to the eyes of the world. This sort of oneness needs to be worked for, fought for, prayed for. For what do the world's wondering eyes behold of those who call themselves Christ's Church but anything and everything but oneness and unity. At best, the most charitable word the world has come up with to describe this “Church” scarred by her divisions is “denominations” in hopes that there is at least some basic, fundamental shared truth for all the other divisions and disagreements that exist. Yet even this has changed with some Christians trying to just ignore the divisions and calling themselves “non-denominational.” And today's world has less and less charity, turning even now to outright persecution of Christians. It is my prayer that you not acquiesce to worldly excuses for our sad divisions. For Lutherans refuse to see themselves as merely a denomination of anything. For we truly believe, teach and confess that we have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
But then there are the increasingly hot divisions threatening even our closest fellowship called The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. I have never seen such deep and angry division among you Missouri Synod Lutherans as we see today. Jesus' prayer is that unity may find expression, that our differences may be erased for what they are, the result of sin. True unity can only result from obedience to his Word of truth. We will not be asked before the bar of judgment whether we were Baptist, Methodist or Lutheran, whether we were Missouri, ELCA, WELS or ELS, but we will be judged by our obedience before his Word. This applies, as you might expect, also to our fellowship within our congregation, to our unity of faith within our parish by the demonstration of our love for one another. If we sit here Sunday after Sunday content to hear about the unity of faith and then not to practice it, if we isolate ourselves to a line of print in the membership directory and to a 22-inch island on the pew we occupy, or if we insist on just getting lost amid the crowd, then how can we love, or be loved? He that does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? This is the Savior's prayer, that they may be made perfect in oneness.
Finally, notice that these words are not commands directed toward us, though we are to overhear them. They are words of prayer directed to God the Father. The outward unity of faith, while it is something that takes time and effort and work, is the work of God by his Word operating in the ears and hearts of his people. This unity is not created by great and impressive mergers of large and national church bodies—indeed, almost never, as has been proved time and again. It is created by the Spirit in the Word and in the hearts of those who are obedient before the Word.
Why pray? Why be concerned? Why work for unity, for concord of confession of the faith? Our Lord says, it is in order that the world may believe that God has sent him. This is our commission, to be witnesses to the love of God and that forgiving grace by which we have been brought into the fellowship of the Father's family with one another. The world will never be impressed by a man who speaks of unity but sows only disunity, who speaks of love but sows only suspicion. We are not commissioned to the world as individuals, but as his Church, the Body of Christ, and each of us a member of that Body. That many may believe, may it be our fervent prayer, our earnest labor, that we may all come “to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” [Ephesians 4:13 (ESV)]. For,
The Church's one foundation Is Jesus Christ, her Lord; She is his new creation By water and the Word. From heav'n he came and sought her To be his holy bride; With his own blood he bought her, And for her life he died. [LW 289:1] ____________________
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