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S.Easter 7.26 John 17:1-11

‘And this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you sent…’

Since the beginning we’ve been making Xnity hard—do this, do that, don’t do this, don’t do that, better be good for goodness sake, yada, yada, yada when really Xnity is easy peasy lemon-squeezy to use a technical theological term I learned in div school.

When you read the scriptures, study the history of how Christendom has interpreted the scriptures and the “life-application” the prelates and pontiffs of Christendom have made, you’ll see the glaringly obvious Truth that we’ve taken the feral and free Gospel of Jesus Christ and turned it into a System of Rules we must do in order to make ourselves worthy of eternal life. Or as my old teacher Normal Nagel likes to say, we’ve decided that salvation comes from our running the verbs rather than GOD running them all for our benefit and delight…

It started with Adam and Eve in the Garden. God made them gods in his own likeness and Image—better than Marvel Super Heroes!—immortal, with the universe at their feet for them to enjoy eternally. But they decided they needed to run the verbs and strike out their own way in order to take God’s place themselves and run it all their way.

God warned them such unbelieving rejection of his good Word is the only thing that could mess IT up and bring death. But mess it up they did! For us all! And we still reap the evil fruits of that original sin and come bent towards it ourselves…

God gave Abraham a Promised Seed who would be the Rescuer, the Way Out of sin, death, and hell, the Way Back into the godlike joy of being sons and daughters of God, basking in the Son’s eternal light—the most perfect, endless holiday you can imagine—never bored, never busy, never worried, only joyful, basking in the Light—godlike, ourselves!

Abraham simply believed the Word and this justified him, put him back on the Road to Paradise, put Paradise back into him to enjoy now, even in the midst of trials and travails, to beatify him…

And Abraham was not, as C.S. Lewis wrote of Edmund Spenser “like the modern Existentialist who feels Angst because he thinks his nature has to be created or invented by himself without guidance at each moment by his deciding. Spenser thought man’s nature was a gift given by a gracious God, discoverable and discovered; he did not feel Angst. He was often sad: but not, at bottom worried… His tranquility is a robust tranquility that ‘tolerates the indignities of time’, refusing to be deceived by them, recognizing them as truths, indeed, but only the truths of ‘a foolish world’. He would not have called himself ‘the poet of our waking dreams’: rather ‘the poet of our waking’.”

Moses gave the Israelites this Way of Faith showing how God led them out of slavery in Egypt by his slaying the firstborn of Egypt, leading them through the Red Sea on dry ground and drowning the pursuing Egyptians in the returning Sea. He led Israel into the desert out of the world and on Mt. Sinai gave them the Torah the Way to avoid an Angsty world by faith in the promised Savior, walking apart from the world, in the world but not of it.

But Israel was constantly whoring with foreign gods that promised salvation by works of the flesh and fornication. God kept sending prophets like Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah to woe them away from their deeds and deciding and verb-running to simply bask in the Light of the Son, to live the free (and freeing!) life of Hobo-Kings.

But it remained a minority report as we see throughout the Old Testament. Then, at Last, the Son came up in Israel—Jesus Christ came—being baptized into our sinful state and baptizing us into Him and like Noah saving us by this Flood water that drowns us in order to raise us up new, sin and care-free, living like Kings and Queen the godlike way of Faith, pure receivers of God’s grace and gifts.

12 lost souls the Apostles became enamored of this Way. They left everything and on the dusty highways and byways of old Palestine they found in the glorious apostolic poverty of Jesus riches beyond description a Kingdom not of this world, but in this world promising A WAY OUT! To the world they looked like fools as the latecomer to their Company St. Paul admitted we will always seem to a world that thinks hard work and constant self-reinvention is the only way to salvation.

For a while, the Church lives by faith alone and basks in the Light of the Son. But then the devil comes calling, whispering, deceiving; and human deeds and decisions slip from the periphery to the center displacing the Gospel and Angst reigns over us… 🙁

But here and there and now and then an Athanasius, an Augustine, a Luther comes along, apostles of Jesus to let us out of the shopkeeper’s prison that we’ve made of Christendom and into the glorious Light of Heaven—free to bask as lords ourselves, servants of all, subject to none… 😉

It’s really simple: Jesus, praying to his Father for his apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane in our Gospel today, says: “this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” And this knowledge comes to his disciples this Way: “For I have given them the words you gave me and they have received and know truly that from you I come and believe that you sent me.”

It is knowledge of God that saves, not works, deeds, or angsty decisions of ours. But this knowledge of God is NOT like knowing algebra; it’s like Adam knowing Eve his wife, St. Paul tells the Ephesians (!). It’s the gift of God himself to Abraham—the Wind that filled his sails and blew him back to Heaven…

I said Xnity is simple and easy peasy lemon-squeezy and it IS! But it is also true, as Pascal wisely says that: “There is nothing more difficult for a man than to sit quietly in his room and do nothing.” Because the devil is always whispering in our ear, reinforcing our inherited idea that our doing and deciding is NECESSARY FOR SALVATION!, making simple BELIEVING difficult.

As my teacher Paul Holmer liked to say: “Xnity is complex but not complicated”.

I think it’s only when we’re worn out with worry, fear, anxieties—as the disciples were in the Garden of Gethsemane—when we’ve come to the end of our rope and can’t deal with all the troubles our decisions have wrought that—in despair of ourselves (a healthy kind of despair, Luther thought ;-)—we “let go and let God”…

I bounce back and forth between angsty deciding and exhausted believing, slowly learning how beautiful it is to do nothing and afterward to rest. So Jesus keeps praying for us, always gifting His Spirit, blowing us around, to know and believe him ‘till finally, Peace, surpassing all understanding, guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.