Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Easter 6
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
You know the scene—a group of kids is standing around outside on the school playground. They’ve been given the task to choose two different teams to play ball. We’re there, you and I. But we’re not one of the captains doing the choosing. No, we’re in the group milling around waiting to be chosen, either looking down pretending not to be interested in what’s going on, or looking up hopefully into the faces of those who will be doing the choosing.
Most of us have a memory of something like this, and most of us remember exactly where we fell in the order of being chosen.
It’s one of those early traumatic experiences, like falling when trying to ride a bike for the first time or being thrown into water over our head for the first time. But unlike learning to ride a bike or learning to swim, the experience of being chosen never gets easier, never becomes comfortable.
I was at a workshop last summer in which we had to divide up into pairs to do some work together and to present that work to the larger group. The facilitator told us: OK just find someone you’d like to work with and, oh, by the way, as you do this, notice what it feels like for you to choose or be chosen. Noticing what it felt like was not difficult. For, there it was, that old feeling of the knot in the stomach and that tightness in the chest. I might as well have been back on the school playground.
Think of all the times you’ve waited to be chosen—chosen for admission to a school, chosen for a job, chosen to work on a team, chosen for an honor or an award, chosen to be elected to an office, chosen to be admitted to a club; and finally chosen to be a friend, chosen to be a partner or spouse.
Many of these situations also have the dimension of choosing within them—oftentimes we’re not just waiting around passively for someone to select us. But even with the element of our own choice added in, in all these examples we can feel the knot in the stomach, the tightness in the chest as we wonder: Am I good enough? Am I attractive enough? Am I skilled enough? Am I lovable enough to be chosen?
Both our lesson from the Book of Acts and our gospel for today are about being chosen. In the Book of Acts we hear about God through the Holy Spirit choosing a group of Gentiles, the family and friend of Cornelius the Centurion, much to the astonishment of Peter and his circumcised Jewish delegation, who come out of a tradition of Christians who were observant Jews. And in our gospel, which is a continuation of the vine and the branches, the passage from last week, we hear Jesus reminding his disciples that their life with one another and its fruits begins with his choosing them.
Why does God choose particular people? Why does God choose the Jewish people, obscure, marginal, oppressed and enslaved, to call his own? Why does God choose disciples and companions who were unlettered fisher folk, tax collectors, and women? And why does God pour out the Holy Spirit on the kin and close friends of a Gentile soldier?
And along with all of these, why does God choose us? And what does God choose us for?
The stories about God’s choices of individuals and groups of people are mysterious and confounding. On the one hand, the choices seem quite arbitrary—God chooses who God will choose—it has nothing to do with the person or the people being chosen. It has to do with God. But on the other hand, throughout Biblical literature a theme seems to emerge about these choices. Our God, it seems, does not choose the way team captains on the playground choose or the way most potential employers choose or the way some potential friends or partners would choose. No, God does not choose those whose skills will make them winners or productive employees; God does not choose those who are attractive, compatible and charming. God, it seems, prefers those whom others would reject or certainly choose last, those who would not appear to be the most promising, those whose skills and experience would not qualify them for much, and those without charm or much compatibility.
Paul, our Patron, in his 1st Letter to the Corinthians says it this way: God chooses the weak, the foolish, the despised and the lowly in order to put their opposites to shame in the world. But in John the emphasis is different. Jesus chooses a group of unqualified, erratic, undesirables and asks them to be a particular way with him and with each other. “Abide in me,” he says, and “love one another,” and if and when you do these thing, you will be bearing the fruit that I want you to bear.
What is this all about?
For John the work we have been chosen to do is all about social interrelationship. The starting place for this is a pattern of life in which we are leaning on the bosom of friend Jesus. For us this means being connected to Christ in the Eucharistic meal, in prayer and in Scripture, and having ways to connect to the story and reality of self-giving love at the center of this universe and at the center of our lives.
I was trying to describe this with some kind of immediacy to a woman in my former parish once. I was grasping at how to do this and finally blurted out: “Imagine what it would be like to be told that when you were a child, someone had thrown himself or herself in front of an oncoming car to save your life. Imagine how that would feel for that to be your story and for you to live your life in the light of that story. Now imagine you’re not imagining.”
For John, our spiritual lives and how we relate to others in community are first and foremost rooted in the one who is so knit to his friends that he is ready to lay his life down for them. For this is, of course, what his friends, what God’s friends, are asked to be and to do as well.
The second part of the life we are chosen to live is to be friends to each another, to choose each another and to love each another over and over again. This is not all hearts and flowers. Among other things, it is about presence, comfort, empathy, compassion, telling the truth told in love, and forgiveness. It is about pouring out the energy of our lives in the same social interrelationship with one another that is characteristic of God’s relationship with us. And it is doing this in the context of the spirit of unity of the total community.
And this is perhaps where the Gospel of John is asking us 21st Century Christians to stretch not only beyond our comfort zone but beyond our experience. You and I can wrap our minds around offering a person our presence, comfort, compassion, the truth told in love and forgiveness--that’s plenty of work right there. But to do this in the light of the unity and health of the total community, with those concerns being paramount—this is an additional dimension, one that can feel unprepared for, unskilled in or even repulsed by.
Those of you who are Star Trek fans know about “the Borg.” The Borg are humanoids of many different races that are enhanced with cybernetic implants that allow them to prevail against most every foe. But the scariest thing about them is that they are all connected to one another into what’s called “the collective.” Their collective identity supercedes any individuality they might have had at one time. The creators of Star Trek, of course, got it just right—the idea of the collective, the loss of individual identity is terrifying to us.
But this sense of the collective is part of John’s reality. In John, God chooses us, not just me, and places our self-sacrificing friendships with others within an overall understanding about the collective spirit of the community. But in our case, this collective spirit needs to be willed over and over again.
And so, friends, unity, itself, is a work; unity is, itself, a fruit.
And so, look around you here today and ask yourself: why has God chosen us as the community of St. Paul’s? Why has God asked us to abide together in the self-giving love of Christ and to practice this same self-giving love with each other?
I know one thing. It’s not because we’re so skilled at it or because we will get it right every time. It is perhaps so that we might experience the work of Christ himself—the one who stretches out his arms upon the hard wood of the cross, suffering the tension of opposites, so that we might find unity within ourselves and with one another.
Works Consulted or Cited
Raymond Brown’s Commentary on the Gospel of John
Brian Stoffregen’s Comments on lectionary texts linked from The Text this Week website.
