You will be my witnesses

May 28, 2017

The Seventh Sunday of Easter

Just six days ago, around 4:30 on Monday afternoon, just as the evening commute home was getting started here in the city of Chicago, across the Atlantic in Britain’s second city, in the heart of Manchester, a young man was thinking the last thoughts he would ever think in this life.

His name, as you will probably have seen, was Salman Abedi, a mere 22 years old, and he was about to commit one of the most awful acts of terror seen in my native Britain for over ten years. He was getting ready to trigger a device strapped to his body which would blow himself to pieces, and which would take with him the lives of 22 innocent people.

I don’t know, of course, what went through the mind of this misguided young man as he prepared to end his own life in an act of utter evil. But as I read through this morning’s gospel passage that we have just heard, a shudder went down my spine as it struck me that, in all probability, the words which we have just heard on the lips of Jesus – words uttered the night before he went to a death which he was, by now, utterly expecting and anticipating – words that were remarkably similar, may well have been in the heart and mind and perhaps even on the lips of Salman Abedi.

For I am no expert on terrorism, and what is in my mind is, of course, pure speculation, but it is certainly not hard to believe that if you were about to detonate a suicide bomb you might well be thinking “the hour has come”. What is more chilling, however, is that I rather think that this terribly, evilly, deluded young man will have thought that what he was about to do was, in some sense, glorious.

While I don’t expect a foolish, young, insanely radical Muslim to have any familiarity with the Gospel according to John, I think that much of the rhetoric we just heard Jesus utter might resonate for all the wrong reasons with those who hold such a mind set. It is all too easy to believe that Abedi may well have been thinking words remarkably like “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. And I am rather more certain that even if his last thoughts did not follow such a direction, those who encouraged him and led him down this path of such evil will certainly have spoken of glory and fulfillment in just such a fashion….Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son…

There’s a lot of glory being bandied about at this point in the church’s year. At the end of this morning’s service, we will sing one of the finest hymns of last century, which culminates in the refrain “Yours the glory, and the crown, the high renown, th’eternal name”. Ascensiontide speaks of glory upon glory upon glory, as we look at the soles of Jesus’ feet disappearing in a cloud and we celebrate Eastertide glory brought to perfect, completed glory. Indeed, by the time we all go home, we will have uttered the word “Glory”at least twenty times in the course of this act of worship.

And yet, despite the frequency with which we use the word, it is all too easy to forget what it means, at least when applied toGod’sglory. For there is a tension which we overlook with remarkable ease between human glory and divine glory – indeed, only a few chapters earlier in the Fourth Gospel we learn that a good many people came to believe in Jesusbut wouldn’t admit it, because they didn’t want to be thrown out of the synagogue, so the evangelist tells us, “for they loved human glory more than the glory that comes from God.”

And if you speak to the millions of Muslims who have been as sickened as the rest of the world by the atrocity in Manchester this week – in fact, who are probably more sickened than the rest of us for the way in which it makes a travesty of their faith – if you speak to such Muslims, they will want to reassure you that they see nothing which glorifies God in the dead bodies of 22 young people strewn across the foyer of a concert hall. If there is any glory in such a terrible scene it is certainly not the glory that comes from God.

But glory has a complex and dangerous appeal. You can see hints of that in our first reading, when at the culmination of forty days of resurrection appearances, the apostlesstillmanage to miss the real point of what is going on… “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”they ask Jesus. Even now, they are saying, even now, is there a political, territorial, human ending to all that you have done for us – is this the time you are going to kick the Romans out of our country? Is this the time you are going to give us a political or a military victory that will bring us and people like us a good dose ofhumanglory?

And it isn’t, of course.No…. says Jesus. That’s not your business. That’s not what my followers are to be about. You aren’t meant to be striving after the human glory of kingdoms and empires….You, he reminds them one last time…. You guys are meant to be…my witnesses…to the ends of the earth. And that is most definitely not about human glory…

“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son….”

So said the Jesus of the fourth gospel. And, with all this Ascension stuff ringing in our ears, let’s just remind ourselves exactly when he said this. Because if there is an Ascension in John’s gospel, it is not the one we celebrated on Thursday evening, and about which we were just reminded in that snippet of Acts. For our gospel reading just now has Jesus speaking about glory – and doing so just moments before his betrayal and arrest. Jesus is speaking these words on the eve of his death. 

And why is that Jesus want to be glorified? For it sounds all rather human, doesn’t it? Because we all like our moment of glory… and I can assure you that I speak to myself before I dare to speak to any of you. Never doubt that most clergy have a quick preen in front of the mirror before we walk into church bedecked in garb of this kind which says, amongst, other things,Hey, look at me!

For whether we are misguided suicide bombers, or proud soldiers in dazzling uniforms in a Memorial Day parade, or whether we are graduating students at commencement, or a president strutting across the world’s stage… whoever and whatever we are, there are times when we humans all find the prospect of a bit of glory ever so slightly appealing. Glory is both addictive and appealing for us vain humans. But for Jesus, it is a different prospect, with a purpose that is not focused on the human but on the divine:

“Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son, cries Jesus. Glorify your son…so that the Son may glorify you…”

And that’s the challenge. For the God whom we worship, and the God of the Jews, and the God of Islam… our God is not a god glorified in the atrocity of Monday night in Manchester, or in the latest slaughter of Coptic Christians on Friday. And Salman Abedi was so wrong, and Friday’s murderous members of so-called Islamic State were so wrong, if they thought there was an ounce of glory to be seen in their evil actions. They, and any others like them, are so wrong if they think that these are appropriate ways to bear witness to God to the ends of the earth.

They are wrong because God is not that kind of God. The God whose glory we celebrate today is not a god who champions violence, division, and hatred. I am sure I do not have to say, in the midst of a congregation of this kind, that what I have just said applies just as much to Islam as to Christianity. The God of Abraham, to whom we here this morning are called to be witnesses in Christ, the God of Abraham is not glorified in violence but in love.

That, of course, is the over-arching message of the Fourth Gospel. Jesus asks God to glorify him so that he may glorify God moments, just moments, before his arrest, and on the eve of the only ascension that mattered to St. John – the ascension that is the lifting high of Jesus not into the clouds… but on the cross. “For when I am lifted up from the earth,” says Jesus earlier in this same gospel, “I will draw all people to myself.”And just in case people didn’t understand what he was saying, St. John actually adds the editorial note, “He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.”

And so it was, under a blackened sky, less than 24 hours after he prayed to God the Father to be glorified, that we see Jesusin his true glory, arms outstretched on the cross, saying to the world as his very last words – “it is made perfect and complete.It is finished.”

It is in this unique, extraordinary, and sacrificial death that we see most clearly God’s glory – a glory so utterly different from the kinds of glory for which humans strive and, certainly, as different as it would be possible to imagine from the kind of glory which may have been the misguided motive behind the evil event that took place in Manchester this past week. It is to this glory that we – that’s me and that is every single one of you – who are the Body of Christ, are called to bear witness to Chicago and to the very ends of the earth. So, let’s work out just what that actually means for us as church:

Back in the 1970s, an English priest called W.H. Vanstone wrote an account of the nature of the church’s ministry that deservedly became a spiritual classic of the 20^th Century. He called the book “Love’s Endeavor, Love’s Expense” – words he used in a hymn that served as the book’s epilogue and which you will find in our own Hymnal at number 585 – a text you might, perhaps, read and pray through as you wait to go up to receive communion this morning. Vanstone had a brain the size of a planet and could have made a career as a theology professor at Oxford or Cambridge, but instead he chose to spend his working life as the rector of a slum parish less than ten miles from the site of Monday’s bombing. 

It was only after some decades of this ministry, when he was well in his fifties, that he wrote this remarkable book. And in this profound working out of the Christian calling of mission and ministry, he explains all sorts of significant ways the church brings benefit to society, many of which are as valid in the Chicago of 2017 as they were in England in the 1970s. He would, I am sure, have applauded our feeding ministries, and the effort we put into Summer in the City, and the love we show the Syrian family we support with Refugee One.But,he says in his conclusion, “it is not for this service that the Church…makes its offering…”

“The Church offers itself to the triumph of the love of God… The Church lives at the point where the love of God is exposed to its final possibility of triumph or tragedy – the triumph of being recognized as love, the tragedy of so passing unrecognized that the final gift, the gift of which all other gifts are symbols, the gift of love itself is never known. The Church cannot endure that this tragedy should be…for it recognizes…the love of God is no controlled unfolding of a predetermined purpose according to an assured programme…”

Rather, he tells us, in the final pages of this powerful book,

“That upon which all being depends is love expended in self-giving…without residue or reserve, drained, exhausted, spent: love…on the brink of failure…yet ever finding new strength to redeem tragedy…and restore again the possibility of triumph.”

For it is that love and the working out of that love which is the glory of God we see made flesh in Christ, reigning in brokenness upon the cross. And it is to that love, and to nothing less, that Jesus calls us to be witnesses, to the very ends of the earth.

Amen.