The Seventh Sunday of Easter
Asking for What We Have Received Christ is risen! (He is risen, indeed!) Alleluia! Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ! Amen. Speaking about all Christians everywhere, including you and me, Jesus prays in today’s Gospel, “*I ask for those who believe in Me, that they may all be one*.” Whenever, wherever, and whatever Jesus prays, His praying teaches us to pray. Unify us, dear Father in heaven! Make us one! Dear Christian friends: Today’s Gospel is part of a famous prayer that our Lord prayed just prior to His betrayal and death. We commonly call this prayer our Lord’s “high priestly prayer.” There is another prayer, a much more famous prayer, which our Lord gave in His Sermon on the Mount and which we pray every Sunday. That other prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer will help us to gain a great benefit from “the high priestly prayer” in today’s Gospel, where Jesus prays “*that we may all be one*.” The Lord’s Prayer can help us with today’s Gospel because Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer to ask for things we have already received. *The Small Catechism* is wonderful on this point: We pray “Hallowed be Thy Name,” even though “God’s name is certainly holy by itself” without the help of our prayers. We ask for God’s Kingdom to come and for His will to be done, even though “the Kingdom of God certainly comes by itself without our prayer” and “the good and gracious will of God is [likewise] done even without our prayer.” So, too, “God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people.” Nevertheless, we faithfully join all other Christians in asking daily for our bread—or at least we should. Why would Jesus teach us to pray for things that He has already given and we have already received? He does it for our sake. Like everything else our Lord does, Jesus has taught us to ask for things we have already received so that we will gain the maximum benefit, even from our own prayers. · *REPENTANCE* is the first benefit of asking for what we have already received. Again, the catechism provides help: “God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people, but WE PRAY IN THIS PETITION THAT GOD WOULD LEAD US TO *REALIZE* THIS.” Stated another way, Jesus teaches us to ask for things we have already received so that we will divert our attention away from our own bellybuttons; so that we will not get too wrapped around the axel of our daily struggles and frustrations; so that we will lift up our eyes and remember at all times and in all situations that our “*redemption is drawing near*” (Luke 21:28). For example, the Lord your God has given you His holy name, thus claiming you as His own child; He has fully accomplished His will for you, which is your forgiveness and life and salvation. Stop acting as if God has done nothing! Rather, pray for that His name be hallowed and that His kingdom may come, in order that the Holy Spirit may continue to bring to the forefront of your mind all that your God has already done. · *FAITH* is the second blessing of asking for what we have already received. For example, you and I and every person on the planet now have forgiveness of sins, completely earned for us by the death of Jesus upon the cross. Why, then, should we pray that God “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”? We should pray this way so that we may endure in the certainty of the faith. We should pray for forgiveness because it is a rare thing to feel forgiven. It is easy to feel guilt and regret. It is child’s play to keep returning to the bad things of the past. We ask for the forgiveness of sins—and in the Apostles’ Creed we say we believe in the forgiveness of sins—because our forgiveness is not a feeling. Our forgiveness is an eternal reality that lives outside of us, which means it cannot be changed by our emotional state. Therefore we should ask God for forgiveness, in order to keep our hearts and minds firmly connected to what God has already provided. · *UNDERSTANDING* is a third benefit of asking God for things we have already received. That is why I said earlier that the Lord’s Prayer can help us with today’s Gospel, which is from our Lord’s “high priestly prayer.” As He did with the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us to ask in today’s Gospel for something we have already received! “*I ask for those who believe in Me,*” says the Lord, “*that they may all be one*.” How do we know that we are already one—that is, that we have already received God’s gift and miracle of unity for the sake of Christ? We know we are all unified and one because God has said: “*You are the body of Christ and individually members of it*” (1 Corinthians 12:27); and again, “*our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ*” (1 John 1:3); and yet again, Christ Himself is our peace, who has made us both one… that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And He came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through Him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (Ephesians 2:14-19) Look at the amazing thing our Christ has done for us! First, He prayed for our unity in today’ Gospel, “*that they may all be one*.” Then Jesus took up His suffering and His death and His resurrection in order to create for us in His flesh the very unity for which He prayed! And He has given this unity to us. And He teaches us to ask for the unity that He has already given, “*that we may all be one*.” Why should we ask for the unity we have already received? · We should do so for the sake of our *REPENTANCE*; that we should ask forgiveness from God and from one another for all those times when we have acted as if our God had never knit us together as one in His blood. By praying “*that we may all be one*,” we ask God the Holy Spirit to inventory our minds and our motivations, laying bare for us our selfish acts of disunity: when we have asserted our own way; when we have taken the ball and gone home because people are no doing the things we want to do; when we have deliberately created division and dissention in matters that have nothing to do with the Christian faith; when we have criticized, or complained, or conspired to gain our own goals. The prayer “*that we may all be one*” helps us to change and return to Christ, who is the one and only source of our unity. Thus it is written, “In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Christ to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of His cross” (Colossians 1:19-20). · Such prayers will help us in our *FAITH*. In the same way that praying for forgiveness returns us to the forgiveness that is already ours in Christ, so too, praying for unity likewise returns us to the unity that is already ours in the body and blood of Jesus. In the same way that we confess in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the body,” so also may we confess in all faith and confidence, “I believe in the unity of the Christians—that is, the Holy Christian church, the communion of saints.” We believe the resurrection, even though none of us has seen a corpse rise up out of a casket. We also believe the unity of the Church, even though we everywhere see disunity and division, argument and strife, resistance and rejection, and plenty of Christians who claim a Christianity that looks nothing like ours. · We should do so for the sake of our own *UNDERSTANDING*. We ask God for unity—“*that we may all be one*”—because unity is something we cannot achieve by our own strength or power. Our unity comes only from the risen Christ. Therefore we must continually find our way to those places where the risen Christ continually does His cleansing, healing, unifying work. We will seek only the unity that He creates for us in the preaching of His Word, in the administration of His Baptism, and in the celebration of His Holy Meal. Outside of these things there is no unity. Outside of these things, we might be able to achieve some outward semblance or form of unity—waving a flag and agreeing to disagree—but that will be no unity at all. Unity is the work of God and God alone. Therefore we shall remain unified only when we remain gathered together where God works. And we will continue to pray “*that we may all be one*” even while we ask God to use us in drawing other people into this unity that we have received, in order that they may be one with us, with the result “*that we may become perfectly one*.”
_______________________________________________ Sermons mailing list Sermons@cat41.org http://cat41.org/mailman/listinfo/sermons
