Easter 7 A John 17: 1-11Prayer and the Window of Christ

On this last Sunday of Eastertide, the Sunday after the Ascension, I have been thinking about the time I learned to pray, and I remember it being a time of both confusion and wonder. I remember being taught what to say, the words to use, the names to include, but it was not clear to me why I was saying these things, kneeling in the moonlight in my room at night. After all, I was sure that most of the people whose names I would use could look after themselves and, being small, I was not sure that anything whispered in a dark room would make any difference in the lives of loved ones living far away. Yet I remember saying these words like I remember the wallpaper in my room; I remember the sense of wonder they formed in me, that what I thought and said were part of a conversation rooted in trust, trust in the midst of a world where I felt the only constant was change. On this last day of our Easter celebrations, we have a window onto the life of a community that is about to be changed completely, and prayer is at the heart of that change. Jesus has just finished his goodbye to his disciples, and yet after this long farewell what we are hearing is the intimacy of prayer, a prayer within God and yet with the deep love of a son addressing his father. Instead of issuing last-minute instructions on the eve of his passion, Jesus is allowing his disciples the opportunity for holy listening, a kind of sacred eves-dropping, on the trust he is placing in God for himself and for the beloved community. Having given the disciples, those in the upper room and the rest of us, a chance to hear what their lives would look like in his absence, he places that future not in their hands but in the providence of God, and it is the deep listening to this address between father and son that we learn the trust on which our faith is built. He asks to be glorified as the Father has been glorified, to “protect [his friends] in your name, that you have given me,” he says, “so that they may be one as we are one”, to send them out into the world in order to transform it. He is asking for the completion of three hard years of ministry and the love it has borne through all the disciples, then as now. We do not have the reaction of the disciples to the prayer, but they must have been as baffled as I was when I was young. Jesus has been at the center of all their lives through all the miracles, the teachings, the promises of what is to come, hearing them on the eve of betrayal. We, however, hear them all through the filter of the resurrection, where their world and ours has been thrown into disarray by this wonderful, impossible event that has taken place in the risen Christ. It is in the light of this event that we have focused on him, on his presence with us, what it means for our relationships with a father or daughter or colleague, what it means to seek out the Christ in everyone we encounter. It is through the trust in that prayer that it is easiest to understand the Ascension and how it has changed all our lives. One of the great privileges of being a part of this place is being here some days in the late afternoon, when the sun strikes the windows and lights up everything in this sanctuary in a completely different way than we see on a Sunday morning, the light refracting in reds and blues off everything in the nave. It's something like this that happens for us after the Ascension. For weeks now, Jesus himself has been the light on which we have been fixed, bringing us back to the fold, the one who has called us friends instead of servants, the one who has promised the Advocate to guide us. But even after he is

lifted out of our sight, he becomes more a part of who we are and how we see our world. Instead of being the thing we are looking at, he becomes the window through which we see everything around us, the work that engages us, all that has meaning in our lives. He is no longer the thing we see but the way we see, our way of viewing everything through the promises of God. We look through this window and see everything changed, and we too are changed in the process. It means, says Rowan Williams, that “we think about Jesus not as someone completely outside us, but as the power in us gradually setting us free to see the world with clarity, hope and love. Jesus does not demand attention for himself: he...enables us to go on our journey toward God the Father as he himself did, by the path of commitment to the world.” However badly we want to gaze on this figure that has changed our lives, to turn our own eyes toward heaven, it is our view through him that compels us to see our world and each other differently. Seeing our world through the window of Christ helps us to understand the eternal life that is at the heart of Jesus' prayer for those who have been with him throughout his ministry. At the heart of that life is the willingness to see the smallest of our steps toward God and each other as the eternal life for which Jesus prays: the way we reach out to an estranged colleague, the family that comes together around a sick relative. It is just because these steps can be so difficult that they are so crucial because they allow us to see ourselves as beloved of God; it is only in seeing ourselves as one, just as the Father and Son are one, that we become the people we were made to be. In the terms of Jesus, eternal life means being bound to God, we who have been made in God's image. Looking through that window forming within us also changes the way we think about prayer. Allowing Christ to be that window inside us lets us see in our prayers that “there are no surplus people, people whose needs or claims we can safely ignore-- the handicapped, the dying, or those who are just far away from us”, Williams says...”The loyalty of any Christian can't be given to anything less than the human race to which God has made commitment.” Our prayer on this Sunday is a reflection of the prayer Jesus offers his own Father because it illuminates all of God's children, from the disciples in the upper room to all of us, all who give their lives each day to the realization of the kingdom. It allows us to understand that we cannot really see the divinity of the creator without acknowledging the trust we hold in the providence of God, each of us who were created in God’s image. Viewing that relationship between Father and Son through the window of the Ascension reminds us of who we really are. In Jesus' terms, we do not belong to the world, just as he does not belong to the world, but we have a dual citizenship, in the world we encounter every day and in the eternal. After all, we are very much in the world, but, changed as our view is through the window of Christ, it cannot look the same. It is shot-through with light, the light of clarity, hope and love, the love of a Father for a beloved son, and the love of a son who has given us a view of a new heaven and a new earth.