SERMON FOR MAY 16, 2021, SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER.     TEXT: JOHN 17:6-19
     The contemporary Christian musician Sara Groves wrote and recorded a haunting song entitled “Generations.” It begins: “I can taste the fruit of Eve/I’m aware of sickness, death and disease/The results of her choices are vast/Eve was the first but she wasn’t the last.” After each verse comes the refrain: “Remind me of this with every decision/Generations will reap what I sow/I can pass on a curse or a blessing/To those I will never know.” Before the final repetition there is a bridge, in which Sara calls out, “To my great, great, great granddaughter/Live in peace/To my great, great, great grandson/Live in peace/Oh, live in peace.” Then she offers the challenge one last time, “Generations will reap what I sow/I can pass on a curse or a blessing/To those I will never know.” 
     We don’t just live in the present. Our choices and actions in this generation will help shape a future we will not experience. People we will never know, people as yet unborn, be they total strangers or our children’s children’s children, are even now dependent on us. Remind me of this with every decision, when we poison the environment, when we undermine our democracy, when we are tempted to give up in the face of so much conflict. 
     There is something poignant and heartening in this call across time and this word of blessing, “Live in peace.”  It echoes the greeting of Jesus himself to his frightened, doubting disciples after the resurrection: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). Indeed, in John’s gospel Jesus promises all of us the same reassuring gift: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid” (John 14:27).
     In today’s text we have once again gone back in time, to the last night of Jesus’ life, when he is preparing his disciples for his impending death and his return to the Father. Where earlier he addressed them directly, making the most of this last opportunity to teach and strengthen them for the hardship to come, now he turns to prayer. In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Lord teaches his followers how to pray on their own behalf (Matthew 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4). But in John he prays for them, and he does so in their hearing. 
     Jesus’ prayer bears witness to the unique bond between him and the Father; his petitions also make it clear that the disciples for whom he is praying are part of that relationship. The love between Father and Son includes the ones Jesus has called his friends. “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing,” he tells the disciples, “but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything the I have heard from my Father” (John 15:15). He has assured them that “you did not choose me but I chose you” (15:16). In his prayer Jesus makes it clear that the choosing, the gathering of these friends, is the work of the Father as well as the Son: “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 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 . . . . All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.” Indeed, the shared commitment to the nurturing and defense of this community gathered around Jesus is essential to the relationship of the Father and the Son. 
     Their love for one another overflows into love for the world they have made. Remember how the fourth gospel begins: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (1: 1, 3). For John the world is both that which God so loved that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (3:16), and a dangerous, vicious place, poisoned with hate and sin. As John tells us at the outset, “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him, yet the world did not know him” (1:10). This world requires Jesus’ death on the cross, and it threatens those he is leaving behind. Yet Jesus does not ask the Father to take them out of the world; rather, he pleads for their protection as he sends them into the world to heal it with the power of his unfailing love. The world is broken and brutal, but it is also God’s good creation, the realm hallowed by Jesus’ life among us, full of grace and truth. As one New Testament scholar concludes, “If the broken world isn’t the one that is so beloved, then the lifting up of the Son makes no sense. Jesus need not die if he is only in the world for the sake of the people who like him. And Jesus’ own will not be in danger if they are to bear fruit in happy isolation. The reason that they are mirroring the union of the Father and Son and carrying the love of God and Jesus for them into the world that doesn’t know God is precisely that God loves that world and wants it to know that love.”
     After considering the ones he is leaving behind, Jesus goes on to pray: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us so that the world may know . . . that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” Jesus is calling down the channels of time, praying for generations to come, praying for you and me. “Remind me of this with every decision/Generations will reap what I sow.” Our Lord chose to pass on a blessing; he entrusted it to a great cloud of witnesses, a band of his contemporaries and a company of friends yet to be born. And now it is our time; he is sending us to carry that blessing into the world God loves. Amen.