Sermon for Sunday, June 1, 2025

June 1, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


John 17: 20-26


I came across an interesting question this week: would you rather have Jesus talking to you or praying for you? It’s a false dichotomy, of course—we don’t have to choose. But it did make me think about Jesus and prayer and the prayer in today’s Gospel more specifically.

We know that Jesus withdraws periodically to pray, and usually he goes alone. In today’s Gospel, he’s praying just after he’s washed the disciples’ feet and served them a meal. Judas has left, and Jesus has told Peter that he would betray him. Then Jesus gives his final and rather extensive teaching to the disciples. Finally, we get to this prayer which lasts for 26 verses, all of chapter 17.

Unlike other times when Jesus prays alone, many of the disciples must be nearby. I imagine Jesus praying out loud and the disciples listening. How would his words make them feel? Cared for? Unworthy of his attention? Wondering why he is praying for these situations and not other issues? I imagine that some of them aren’t paying attention at all.

Jesus begins his prayer at the beginning of chapter 17, 20 verses earlier. It’s a 26 verse prayer, where Jesus prays for the disciples and then broadens his prayer, including all who will come after them, praying for safety, praying for clarity of belief, praying for unity. Based on the following books of the New Testament and our lives and the world around us, we know just how needed those petitions are. It’s a prayer not just for the disciples but also for those who will come later—you and me! The subject matter may have changed, but the need for safety, clarity of discernment and unity remain.

Jesus offers a vision of unity that is about much more than the unity that we might mean when we speak of it. It is a vision beyond our individual unity to Christ, or the unity of this congregation with itself or other congregations, or the unity of members of the world-wide Church. We might envision a Church that speaks with one voice about the issues of the day. We might think of a society that agrees on what is good and what is evil and how humans should behave. This is about as far as any one could ever dare to dream, and if we could achieve even part of that vision, it would be nothing short of miraculous.

As we saw in last week’s Gospel, the unity that Jesus envisions has something even more expansive and miraculous in mind. Much the way a marriage joins two humans together into one, or a pregnancy joins a mother to a child, Jesus pictures all of us gathered into unity with one another and with Jesus and with God and “coming soon” the Holy Spirit in a just and righteous world. Perhaps we rarely think about being this intimately connected with the Holy Trinity, but we are a messianic people: Your kingdom come. Your will be done by all persons on earth just as it is in heaven. We pray it and expect it to happen at some point.

We are in the time of the liturgical year when we think a lot about Trinitarian theory and practice. Jesus offers this prayer to God who is intimately joined with him in one creation and next week is Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit will come in a very different way. In our Confirmation class, we finished this semester by looking at the Nicene and the Apostolic creeds, which we agreed are not terribly different from each other, but their origins are. The Nicene creed was created to settle the question about which part of the Trinity came into existence in which order. In Confirmation class, we didn’t spend much time with this question of who came first or did all parts of the Triune God exist at once.

These are not questions that consume many of us these days and there won’t be theological fights at Synod assemblies either. We feel like we have a solid working understanding of how the three beings operate as one Holy Trinity. Or maybe we’re like some of those disciples, tending to matters that we think might be more important.

But Jesus understands that the questions of unity are far from settled, in both his time, and every decade since. Jesus prays for oneness, that we can all be gathered into God’s very self. Jesus prays that we be united in the Trinity as the Trinity is to itself. How would life be different if we believed that this complexity had been answered? If one saw themself as more like Jesus than like a flawed human, more as inspired to boldly seek justice and love mercy like the Holy Spirit, more as one that Creates through their word a world that is “good and very good” like God--how would our collective life change?

We have plenty of evidence all around us of how people behave when they’ve been shamed and told that they are worthless or evil. In the book of Acts, we see an opposite world, one where people act like Jesus has given them a commission and the power to fulfill the task and live boldly in community with the Triune God. We see people acting out of the great love that Jesus invokes in today’s prayer.

Like Jesus, we are surrounded by many people who are poor in spirit, people who are suffering terrible blows. We can be there for them. We can be the person who has a smile and a kind word and reassurance that all will be well and all manner of things will be well (to use mystic Julian of Norwich's words). We can take the time to be present, in a way that so few of us are earnestly emotionally present today. We can turn our attention away from our phones and screens and look at the faces of those who need us.

We can sow the seeds of hope and help fight despair. We can remind people that a different world is possible. We can invite them to be part of something better. We can remember that the unity of persons is often found in the larger aim of unity of persons with the Holy Trinity.

We could be the person that makes people wonder and whisper, "I wonder what his secret is? What makes her so capable of being happy?" Maybe they'll ask, and they'll really want to know, and we can talk about our faith. Maybe they won’t ask, and we can subtly give witness to our faith anyway.

We can pray for specific outcomes as we do in our individual and corporate intercessory prayers, while remembering that we can’t know the full will of God. If we’re not sure what or how to pray, we can remember the words of Romans 8:26: “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us”—as Jesus does in this Gospel. We can pray to and through the Holy Trinity: may Your will be known and done by all of us on earth as in heaven. Yes, give us safety, give us clarity, and give us unity with one another and unity with the Holy Trinity. Let us embody the ideas of Jesus as we pray that the love made manifest in Jesus be made visible in us, so that the world will know the love of God and be transformed.