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That They May Be One, as We are One

(Or, “Dancing with the Son”)

The Rev. Mark Byers

May 4, 2008- RCL Year A, 7 Easter

It’s always important, when reading John, to keep in mind the first chapter, which is meant to echo Genesis.

Recall from Genesis:

In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Now hear this, from the very beginning of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life,* and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

….He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own,* and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

Remember that, at the Creation, God made all things and called them good. And when God says, “It is good,” it’s not a value judgment or an opinion. It’s not like, if you and I heard a song, and you say “It is good,” and I say, “No, it is not good at all; it is Milli Vanilli.” When God says, “It is good,” that’s reality.

We’ve talked about how things unwound from there. In summary, part of the very essence of our creation is the capacity that God gave us to choose things that are contrary to God’s will. So we are created in the image and likeness of God, but we are also able to reject what God pronounces or reveals as “good” in favor of what we desire. We name this, within the church, “sin.” Sin is, of course, a complicated phenomenon, as its basic ingredients aren’t any different, in some ways, from the basic ingredients of what might be called “righteousness,” or “good.”

Let me give you a somewhat simplistic example. One of the things that God says at the creation is that human beings should subdue the earth, exercise dominion, and draw sustenance from it. In other words, eat! Nourish yourselves! In the fullness of time, as human culture evolved, we began to cultivate plants, rather than simply to gather them. This is, of course, what we would now call agriculture. As our ability to grow crops increased, we were able, then, to create surpluses. In other words, we could raise more food than we could eat. This, together with other developments in early technology, made it possible for people to build towns and cities, because not everyone had to raise food in order for people to survive. That’s not a bad thing.

But it also made it possible to raise armies and go to war. So when the prophet Isaiah talks about nations “beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” we can see that even 2500 or more years ago, people were struggling with the reality that we have this incredible capacity for different courses of action, and that in some sense, action is required by God to return human beings to a state of unalloyed obedience to the Lord. And likewise, because it’s how God created us, action by human beings is required in order to be a part of that “prelapsarian” or “before the fall” condition of perfect relationship with the Creator.

It’s certainly true that we live in a world that is astronomically more complex for human beings now than, say, ten thousand years ago, or fifty thousand years ago. (Or perhaps even twenty years ago.) Even in Isaiah’s time, it would have been a poetic oversimplification to suggest that all we need to do is refabricate some tools we made: somewhat like the sentimental words of the Beatles song, “All You Need is Love.” I hear that song, and it makes me nostalgic for a time when the human arm wasn’t capable of killing more than one person at a time. Swords into plowshares. Isaiah would weep to learn of a time of shock and awe, of explosive vests, of airplanes flying into buildings, of nations reduced by human struggle to a condition of squalor and begging or even, in a few cases, to eating mud to survive. Maybe he would have given up. It was daunting enough back then.

Yet God’s purpose, John tells us, has been eternally to provide an inevitable restoration alongside this morally tumultuous reality of ours. And his method is both simple and irresistible: to come among us and decisively plant the seeds of new creation through one person, who contains within himself both the entirety of God and our complete humanity.

That’s why John’s language is so explicitly reminiscent of the language of Genesis: it’s the same God, doing the same thing eternally, but in both cases, through concrete action within the created realm. First, establishing all things (in the creation story as related by Genesis) and then restoring and reestablishing things in Jesus Christ.

So John calls Jesus the Word, who has existed eternally, and who was integrally involved in speaking the cosmos into being and order. And in him, God also “speaks” into being the re-creation. God’s act of speaking, again, is not simply talking. It establishes reality, and for all our talk, for all the self-important information that we chatter forth every day, that’s a thing that only God can do. God alone establishes reality with a Word. God alone speaks uncontaminated Truth.

Yet somehow, we’re supposed to be part of that truth, part of that “re-creation.” God works out our salvation not just by decreeing that all who believe will be saved, but by creating a reality in which faith must dance with the will of God in order to have any meaning. We don’t simply agree or disagree with God. We get on the floor and dance to God’s song.

Anybody see Dancing with the Stars? I’m outing myself as a viewer, because I want to use this dance analogy, and I don’t actually dance well myself. They always show, during the broadcast, some of the rehearsal time these couples have together, where they’re learning these new routines to new music, and the idea is that after their week of learning is over, they get to perform the dance before the judges. And sometimes, they’re just okay. Sometimes they’re awful. Sometimes they’re just incredibly graceful and beautiful together.

These dancers teach their non-dancing partners this new way of moving, of understanding sound, of communicating, and they glorify one another in the presence of the judges, and in the presence of the audience. It’s an act of creation, of transforming two human bodies from being one dancer and one awkward celebrity into two human beings creating something that is both familiar and new. We’ve all seen dancing before. But we’ve never seen these two people dancing to this song in this place at this time, and in some way, we retain the memory of this dance inside of us, the memory of two people moving with one will, even if we never dance ourselves. It is a finite creation, but it is strong, it has impact far beyond the two people concerned, and it has duration long past the end of the song.

I want you to close your eyes and hear a song, a glorious song from God. And I want you to imagine your life, and how God is within it. I want you to think about the dance that you are dancing with God; all the practice it takes, even if you know what it’s supposed to look like. How you can hear that song, but sometimes your feet don’t move right. How even in the midst of the music and the movement, of seeing the perfection of the dance in your imagination, and the imperfections of it in reality, there are things that are entirely outside the dance that create dissonance and distraction. And how, perhaps, you mourn that others choose not to dance, or to hear the music, or even choose to sing songs of pride and ugliness and destruction. Keep your eyes closed, now, and hear the Good News from John, the words of the song God’s Son sings to his Father.

[Jesus raised] his eyes in prayer, [and] said:
   Father, it's time.
   Display the bright splendor of your Son
   So the Son in turn may show your bright splendor.
   You put him in charge of everything human
   So he might give real and eternal life to all in his charge.
   And this is the real and eternal life:
   That they know you,
   The one and only true God,
   And Jesus Christ, whom you sent.
   I glorified you on earth
   By completing down to the last detail
   What you assigned me to do.
   And now, Father, glorify me with your very own splendor,
   The very splendor I had in your presence
   Before there was a world.

 I spelled out your character in detail
   To the men and women you gave me.
   They were yours in the first place;
   Then you gave them to me,
   And they have now done what you said.
   They know now, beyond the shadow of a doubt,
   That everything you gave me is firsthand from you,
   For the message you gave me, I gave them;
   And they took it, and were convinced
   That I came from you.
   They believed that you sent me.
   I pray for them.
   I'm not praying for the God-rejecting world
   But for those you gave me,
   For they are yours by right.
   Everything mine is yours, and yours mine,
   And my life is on display in them.
   For I'm no longer going to be visible in the world;
   They'll continue in the world
   While I return to you.
   Holy Father, guard them as they pursue this life
   That you conferred as a gift through me,
   So they can be one heart and mind
   As we are one heart and mind.
   As long as I was with them, I guarded them
   In the pursuit of the life you gave through me… [From The Message]

Now open your eyes. How will the dance that you do with your Savior linger in the lives of those who see it?

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