My contention is that each preacher has one sermon. It is the same gift we give each week, but we wrap it up in different paper. We may call it our favorite Bible passage or person, but its themes seem to appear again and again in our preaching and teaching. My one “sermon” comes from Jesus’ promise to his disciples in the High Priestly prayer of John’s Gospel. The promise in John 18:14 is this, “I will not leave you orphaned.” Those of us who were brought up on the King James Version would know this as “I will not leave you comfortless.” While this promise is a mighty one, I believe Jesus’ promise to not abandon, leave fatherless or reject any of those who seek to follow him is a promise mightier still.
In my diocese, I regularly and frequently refer to “the eleven words.” It is my belief that these represent God’s calling to us as a people. While they remain imperfectly realized, they continue to be the “vision glorious” for which we strive. The eleven words for The Diocese of West Tennessee are that we will become a place “where God’s promise in Christ is good news for all people.” For me, I understand this to capture the essence of God’s way revealed in Jesus’ promise: I will not leave you orphaned.
Yet this promise in this imperfect yet “kingdom-near-us” moment must be lived out in community and not just hoped for in some distant future of God. For this to happen, the promise must be lived out by the Church, Christ’s body for the world today, if in him the World is to continue to find the one on whom its salvation rests. This understanding stands in contrast to the “pay day some day” form of Christian promise that suggests that if we don’t love too inadequately, God may blink long enough at the back gate of heaven and let us in as our pay for not getting it all bollixed up too badly.
Yet the more radical call, the more root call of the Church as Christ’s body, is to claim and proclaim even now his promise begun today. Through our action of radical love to all who seek to be members of the family of God, we bear witness to the promise of Jesus: I will not leave you orphaned. How will this promise change the way you think of yourself as Christ’s own child even in this moment? How will it change the way you respond to the next person you meet who, in this broken and sinful world, has not yet come to know Christ’s promise? How will it change the way you see another who claims to seek to follow Jesus, but does so in a different way than you would choose to do? What will change if we all are children of the promise?
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