One Love, One Heart

One Love, One Heart

...so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them as I in them – John 17:1-26

It’s about us. We. Not you, singular. Not me. You, plural. We. Us. Them. As Jesus is about to walk out the door and be arrested, tried, tortured and executed he prays. He prays for his friends, his followers, the few that stay with him to the end. Which in gospel terms most often means us. Jesus prays for us to be protected as he returns to that place from whence we all come: the home of God’s eternal Love. “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” That “we” may be One. It does not get more profound or mystical than this. Be sure, those who first read Storyteller John’s account of the good news have seen not only the departure of Jesus from their midst, but The Temple and all of Jerusalem, and most all of Israel lies in ashes and ruin as Caesar’s Roman Legions have laid waste the entire land of their ancestors. Their world was shattered, broken, completely laid waste. Crisis.

We might all acknowledge that the world today is broken in so many ways. And as the world is broken, so are we. I mean this quite literally: “we” is broken. When “we” is broken, all we are left with is me me me. And when we look out upon this broken world it sometimes oftentimes appears as if it is in danger of breaking up and being completely laid waste.

As something as small as one micron endangers the lives of millions. A micron is about .00004 inches. For size comparison, a human red blood cell is about 5 microns across. This micron of a virus has infected 5.24 million worldwide and taken the lives of 340,000. And counting. With the gifts of science and common sense we have been given opportunities for protection of the most vulnerable among us. It is hard to imagine a time, not long ago, when our vocabulary of “social distancing,” “self-isolation,” “stay at home,” “wear a mask,” “flatten the curve,” and the like would have seemed like a foreign language. What are you talking about, we would have said.

Amidst the miasma of information, mis-information, role models and the lack thereof, instead of meeting this public health danger as a unified people, an already polarized population has fragmented even further, seemingly unable to process and separate the facts from the fictions. Instead of working together to save the most lives, we end up in ghettos of like-mindedness looking out for something we call “individual rights,” rather than a deep concern for what we used to call the Common Good. Some are alarmed that any authority would tell us what we can and cannot do, while others are alarmed that there are those who refuse to adopt Best Practices for a pandemic. All sense of community and care for the other, for one another, appears to be disappearing into a Hollywood-like manufactured myth of American Rugged Individualism, a re-emergence of some kind of twisted Manifest Destiny, and a sense that Jesus’s prayer for us must mean ‘I will be protected by God’s will,’ or, ‘If I die, it must be God’s will.’

As we ponder the inscrutable meaning of Jesus’s Farewell Prayer, we cannot seem to see that he is not talking about me. He is praying for us. We. Them. He prays for the common welfare of the community he leaves behind as he returns to the place from whence we all come and will one day all return. We come from Love. We return to Love. And Love is all around. God is Love. Love is of God. So, that the love with which you have loved me, he prays, will be in them. Protect them, he says, so that they may be one, as we are one. Can we even hear these words as we allow ourselves, our community and our own selves, to be so fragmented and not-one? Can we hear these words above the din, the strum and drang, of the present moment?

Love one another as I have loved you and as the Father has loved me. This prayer is a call to set aside our personal fears, desires, wants, rights, and become a community of God’s love for others – God’s love for all of creation and everything and everyone therein. A community truly at one with Jesus and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is always more concerned with the needs of others than for its own survival. Attending to the needs of others is what insures our survival, our safety.

Just how does God protect us in times such as this? By giving us those who have been given the skills and knowledge to help us all to navigate the threat of this mighty micron-virus safely. Together. Maintaining safe-distancing and wearing a mask is not about protecting me, it is about protecting the lives of those around me. It is about loving and respecting others. For I have no idea if I am or am not infected, asymptomatic, and capable of infecting others. It says, I take this seriously and care about you and respect you as a valued part of the community in which we all live.

So, this is not about my right to assembly, or to go to church, but rather is it possible to make the church I attend a safe place for others. Because if it is safe for others, it will be safe for me as well. There is no Love in me me me. There is love only in us, in we, in them. It takes time to create a safe place for others. There is no need to rush into it. We remain together through our long-distance online worship. We will return, all in good time. Not our time, but the right time. The safe time for all, especially the most vulnerable among us.  

Note, Jesus does not pray for himself to be protected from what he knows will happen to him as he walks out of that door in the upper room where he has shared a last meal with his friends. Where he has washed all of their feet. Where he has prayed not for himself, but for them. For us. For all those he served and loved as he went about Galilee and Judea feeding people, healing people, listening to others, welcoming strangers, welcoming all manner of man, woman and child. He does not pray for individual rights for each and every one of us. He calls us to be a community of Love for others. All others.

He prays that we become a community of One as an extension of God’s One love in Jesus so that we may be a witness to the world of such love as hath no boundaries, no exclusions, no enemies. Jesus makes visible the living presence of the living God. He prays that we too make visible the living presence of God’s love for all creation – everyone and everything therein.

This, he prays, is eternal life here and now: to know God his Father. To know Jesus. To live a life shaped by our knowledge of God. And here, and throughout the Bible ‘to know’ does not mean to grasp a truth, but rather to be acquainted with someone. To know someone is to be in relationship with that person at a deep place in both of your lives. And to know God and to know Jesus is an invitation to know others – the other, all others, all those who are not us.

What does it mean to be One? It means to be all – all in one, and one in all. Our survival in a broken world depends on our being one as Jesus and God are one. This prayer calls us to be united in such love for one another as Jesus and God are One Love. One Love. One heart. Let’s get together and feel alright. Amen.