Our Sunday Message

Famous Last Words: John 17:6-19
Rev. Dr. Carol McCall Richardson
May 28, 2006
Ascension Sunday

 Words have immeasurable power. They can build up or in an instant tear down. They can heal or destroy, transform or divide. Especially powerful are last words, words of farewell, good-byes.
  Last week Dr. Corr shared passionately last words with our graduates, praying that they would hear and internalize them. He said, I pray you will find a spiritual community where you are, a kind of community where the doors of the church and the arms of the people will be open to everybody.
  POWERFUL, PASSIONATE LAST WORDS from a father to a daughter and a son in the faith. LAST WORDS OF FAREWELL can penetrate to the marrow of our being, our very souls, at least if we hear them and internalize them.
  Hear this story of the impact of last words shared by a minister about his Sunday School teacher, Miss Emma Sloan. Miss Emma Sloan was the teacher of the small Sunday School class though out his grade school and high school years. She promoted with the class each year because there simply wasn’t anyone to take her place in his small, rural church. Listen to this story:
  She gave me a Bible. She wrote in the front: ‘May this be a light to your feet, a lamp for your path. Emma Sloan.’ She taught us to memorize the Bible (um, maybe her name was really “Mr. Glenn Everton, or Miss Doris Layne or Miss Jo Bracey or Miss Glenna Ward, teachers of our children and a host of loving teachers who come to our minds who impacted us significantly.) Miss Emma used the alphabet to help us memorize, and we’d go around the room saying verses. A-A soft answer turns away wrath. B-Be ye kind, one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, as God also in Christ has forgiven you. C-Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden. D-Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. E-Every good and perfect gift…,F-For God so loved the world.
  I still remember, he said, all those verses. She didn’t explain them. We simply learned from the King James Bible all those verses. [But now as a grown man, a minister of the gospel,] ‘I can’t think of anything, anything in all my life that has made such a radical difference as those verses. The Spirit of God brings them to my mind appropriately, time and time again.”1
  Last words of a teacher before leaving for college had profound and enduring impact, for these words had been heard and internalized and they guided, influenced and strengthened his living out God-called life.
  WORDS HAVE POWER. LAST WORDS, especially so.
  I remember the last words my mother said to me before she died. She wrote them out in letter form to her children. Listen to this excerpt. She wrote:
  Dear Children, as I leave you now for a little while, I want to thank you for your part in my life. Your faith in Jesus has increased my faith in Him; your goodness has made me strive to be good, your love has made me so happy and grateful always. I go now knowing, ‘that [God] who began a good work in you will complete it at the day of His appearing.’
  Unbounded love,
  Mother
  Her last words to me continue to shape my life and the bent of my heart.
  LAST WORDS ARE POWERFUL, if they are heard and internalized.
  Today we have the privilege to hear and internalize Jesus’ last words to us again. Remember this is Eastertide in the Christian Calendar, a time for the church to hear again the teachings of Jesus as he makes his way to the cross. These teachings, these last words of instruction, are found today in the Gospel of John. If we read the gospel of John straight through, we notice that things slow to a crawl around chapter fourteen. The last supper is over. Judas has silently left the room, Everyone’s feet are clean and Jesus’ hands still have the residue of water from washing them all when he begins to talk.
  “Love one another,
  do not be afraid;
  believe in God, believe also in me.
  Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but I will not leave you orphaned.
  I go to prepare a place f’or you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am you, you may be also.’
  Jesus continues like this for four chapters, telling his disciples everything they need to know before he leaves them, to return to God his Father. We overhear the last intimate moments that Jesus spends with his followers before his arrest and eventual crucifixion. This unlikely group will be the ones to carry on the work that God has sent Jesus to do—
  this group that had juggled for power among themselves,
  this group that still did not understand who he was,
  this group that Jesus had admonished because of their lack of understanding and faith.
  What impact will these last words of Jesus have on their lives?
  Have they heard them? Have they internalized them? Are they enough to give them the courage to carry on his mission, to impact a world with God’s Good News? Jesus surely must have been gravely concerned.
  But then he prays for them. He wraps his last words in prayer and offers them to the One who sent Him to them—to these unlikely chosen ones. And this final prayer before the cross includes not only his disciples but you and me, believers through the ages who have been and will be mysteriously drawn to Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit of Truth. For Jesus in John’s Gospel tells us, when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth (John 16:13).   The prayer that is our focus this morning, found in John 17, has been known since the medieval ages as The High Priestly Prayer, because in Jewish tradition, it was the high priest that went before God to intercede for the people. Here we find Jesus interceding, praying, to the Father for you and me.
  The fact that Jesus, the divine human, the sinless one, had need for prayer is remarkable in itself. But we know he did. Prayer seemed to be his lifeline, for he prayed at all times, on all occasions. If he, the Divine Son of God, needed this intimacy with God, how much more do we need this spiritual discipline if we are to reflect God’s love in our lives and grow in our faith.
  And so Jesus prays and it seems as if the disciples were still right there with him. Maybe they were still at the supper table. They heard this last intimate conversation Jesus has with God on their behalf.
  And so as he begins, he first makes personal intercessions for himself as he prepares for the cross and then he begins to pray for his disciples and for you and me, beginning in verse 6. I have distilled his prayer into three last words. May God give us ears to hear.
  Our first last word is PROTECTION. Jesus prays for our protection. READ Verses 11: Holy Father, protect them in your name and, verse 12: While I was with them I protected them in your name… During his ministry on earth, Jesus has been responsible for the safeguarding of the community. Now his departure necessitates that this work be entrusted to God. And so, Jesus entrusts you and me to God. Protect them, Jesus prays. Do not take them out of the world—that sphere that opposes God or, at best, receives the Divine casually—but protect them from evil as they are in the world.
  Mothers, I dare say every time a child of yours leaves home, you breathe a prayer for their protection…protection yes, from physical harm but protection from moral harm that they wouldn’t give into the temptations that will dilute their personhood. Keep them from evil.
My grandmother told me when I was a little girl that her mother on her death-bed, said to her these last words, “I have prayed a wall of prayer around you that God would keep you in God’s care, always.” Those words had a lasting impact on my grandmother, so much so she passed them on to her granddaughter, reminding me that God is the Good Shepherd who knows me and who has laid down his life for me and given me eternal life and no one shall snatch me out of the Good Shepherd’s hand (John 10:14-30).
  Jesus prays for our protection while we serve in his name in the world, to the world. No, we are not immune from suffering. We are part of the human race and as part of the human race, we will suffer. Jesus tells us in that we will suffer but in Jn 16:33, we hear Jesus say, but I have overcome the world! This verse paraphrased is stitched and framed in my home. It says:
  God delivers from trouble, but not always.
  God prevents trouble, but not always.
  God sustains in trouble…ALWAYS!
  The second last word I would have you hear and for which Jesus prays is GROWTH. Here in this text, verse 17, the word is sanctify, meaning to set apart for a special purpose. It simply means grow in your faith, so that, as the hymn says, others will see Jesus in you.   Know what you believe, study the Scripture, engage your culture, practice those spiritual disciplines that keep you close to Jesus, the Vine.
  Do you know how the wine gardener knows which grapes are the best? The grape is held up to the light. If the grape is transparent, it means that this grape, though connected to the vine, has grown far away from the tap root and has not received the proper nutrients but the grape that is dense has remained close to the vine and its tap root. It is the best, the choicest of fruit, the fruit that will not wither. Grow robust in your faith. Grow in truth and we know God’s Word is truth and Jesus is God’s Word—the Way, the Truth and the Life. It is by the life and ministry of Jesus that we are to measure our lives and ministry as we hear and internalize the most fundamental tenet of the gospel message that God loves us and that God has given the Son to die for us that we might believe in God and have eternal life.
  The third and final last word for us today is UNITY. Not units, separate individual parts, individualism, the American way, but wholeness, oneness in the body. In Verse 11 Jesus prays, that they may be one, as we are one. It is oneness of relationship. It is the overcoming of our separateness, our estrangement we may feel at times in relation to God, ourselves, others and life itself. This overcoming is what Steve Shoemaker, pastor of Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte, NC, calls reconciliation [coming together again, wholeness] after so long a journey.2 It is for this that Jesus prays as Love itself begins to make his way to a cross, God’s final act of demonstrated love on our behalf.
  But thanks be to God death does not have the last word! Behold, Jesus says, in Revelation, Do not be afraid, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever…(Rev 1:18).
  Jesus is God’s Final Last Word for the world!!
  Will you hear him? O God, give us ears to hear. Amen.

1 Fred B. Craddock, eds. Mike Graves and Richard F. Ward, Craddock Stories (St. Louis, Chalis Press, 2001) p. 33-34.
2Stephen W. Shoemaker, Finding God In His Prayers (Nashville, Abbington Press, 2004) p.92.