Scripture: John 17:1-11
After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
”I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them.
And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
Sermon Rev. Jeff Kellam
"And This Is Eternal Life"
Jeff Kellam, Union Presbyterian Church, Endicott, NY
May 7, 2023
John 17:1-8
Today I want to tell you how a jar of dimes is a sign of eternal life.
But first, let Jesus describe the meaning of eternal life:
And eternal life is this:
to know you, the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
I wonder if you have given any thought to eternal life today.
Or, yesterday.
Or the day before.
Most of us don't, I suppose.
Life is pretty busy, and doesn't leave much room for thinking.
Except for the geometry test, or the arrangement of the gardea
or working the crossword puzzle, or figuring out the appropriate discipline for a child.
Who's the next "American Idol" to be booted off the show?
Or, how much to pay Master Card this month?
We do some thinking each day, but
I don't suppose most of us think eternal thoughts...
Eternal life?
Doesn't come up very often, does it?
Last Sunday, after the fellowship time,
Larry Goetz met us over at the church cemetery.
We chose a burial plot.
Plot...sounds like the arc of a novel, doesn't it?
But in this case, it's where the urn will be placed,
not far from the resting places of other church families.
Having been brought up in Joshua Mercereau's house across the street, I kind of like the idea of being buried along the street that bears the Mercereau name.
My eternal resting place.
Eternal?
Until there's a crisis that derails routine and strikes at the very heart of our being.
A friend of ours is dealing with a crisis like that right now.
Her sister died of cancer a few months ago.
Her uncle lost his battle with the disease a few weeks ago.
Now, her late uncle's son, her 48 year-old cousin, has been diagnosed with cancer. There's not much thought given to routine in that family these days. But hour-by-hour they cannot escape the unfairness of life, the brutality of disease, the mysterious ways of God. That family is thinking eternal thoughts.
Years ago, I officiated at an internment in an Ithaca cemetery.
"Officiated."
Such a cold, detached term. Here's what I really did.
Since I didn't know the woman whose ashes we "laid to rest,"
and I had never met the family,
I asked the family to meet with me beforehand and tell me about Jeanice.
She had lived to be 88,
a good Presbyterian who loved to read her Bible until her sight failed.
She had been a registered nurse, an accomplished pianist, an avid reader.
Jeanice had been a loving wife, and a wonderful mother.
In her last years, she had been afflicted with cancer, a stroke, a serious fall.
But she still listened to books on tape,
and asked for a discussion group in the nursing home to dissect "The DaVinci Code."
Here was a woman, a wife, mother, and grandmother who had lived life to its fullest.
This has happened to me before:
the family described their beloved in such warm and wonderful ways,
I found myself wiping tears away, so touched am I by their memories.
In planning such services, we think about what passages of scripture
would best that live so well lived.
What stories might we share?
What songs might we sing or at least allude to?
Then I would write a brief meditation that expresses thanksgiving for the ways
God's grace and love were evident in an earthly life now ended,
and I proclaim the good news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from death,
and almost always quote something from John's gospel,
for it is there that Jesus' words speak Light to our darkest thoughts of death.
"Do not let your hearts be troubled..." Jesus says.
"In my Father's house there are many dwelling places..."
"I am the resurrection and the life...
everyone who lives and believes in me will never die."
"Because I live, you also will live."
So I did "officiate."
I read the words and prayed the prayers.
But more, I offered the compassionate understanding of the God of steadfast love,
that love that death cannot touch or diminish or take away.
And I said again those strong words of the Apostle Paul,
that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
You see where I'm going with this?
All of us will find the routine of our lives derailed.
The la-di-da waltz through busy-ness and habit and schedules and monotony
will suddenly stop when the phone rings, an email arrives, or there's a knock at the door.
Then, then we awaken to the idea that what we had been so busily living
was not really life, but mere breathing and eating and running from place to place.
So, back to my original question:
I wonder if you have given any thought to eternal life today.
Or, yesterday,
Or, the day before.
I know you will on some tomorrow.
And when you do, you must know this:
John the Evangelist wants you to know this,
because Jesus wants you to know this,
because God wants you to know this,
and here it is, again, in this prayer of Jesus:
And eternal life is this: to know you,
the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
There are three things we should be clear about.
First, when Jesus speaks of "eternal life" it is not the same thing as living forever.
At first thought, if living forever is an alternative to death, I guess I'd take it.
But there is that downside: forever is a very long time!
You enjoy doing carpentry? Try being sentenced to do it forever!
You enjoy singing? Going to school? Playing bridge? Being out on the boat?
Forever?
As one Bible scholar put it,
"...life which went on forever would not necessarily be a boon."
Jesus doesn't threaten us with or promise to us a human life that endures forever.
But he does speak of "eternal life" many times in John's gospel.
The thing is, he's not talking about heaven or the hereafter.
In John's gospel, the word "eternal" is different from the way we usually think of it.
"To have eternal life is to be given life as a child of God." (New Interpreter's Bible)
It is not something held in abeyance until the believer's future,
but begins in the believer's present.
"Eternal" means life lived in the unending presence of God,
not only in that mysterious future, but even now,
as we come to the realization that we are the children of God.
So the second thing is, this idea of eternal life
has more to do with the quality of life than the duration of life.
You remember the bumper sticker that asked,
"What if the Hokey Pokey is what it's all about?"
We chuckle at the absurdity,
but can be sobered by the realization that the way we spend our time and money,
the values we espouse and the commitments we make
sometimes fit very nicely into the weekly prayer of confession offered in worship.
In other words, the things we think life is about are far removed
from the life God intended for us.
Wasn't it Dionne Warwick who recorded the theme from the movie ”Alfie?”
She sang, "What's it all about, Alfie?" What is life all about?
I like to think the” Jesus life” is summarized in the “fruits of the Spirit,”
The lists in the New Testament Epistles give us life-affirming guidelines for measuring
how closely we live the life God intends for us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)
A good friend made that list for me in cross-stitch, framed it, and gave it to me as a gift, and it hangs in the wall of my study as a constant reminder of what life in the Spirit is.
Love, joy, peace.
How does my life reflect those values day by day?
Patience, kindness, goodness.
What a challenge for me, and for all of us, I suspect.
Faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
God help us!
Just a century after that list of the fruits of the Spirit was circulated to the first churches, Justin Martyr wrote of the changed lives of men and women who committed themselves to Christ. "We who formerly delighted in [sexual immorality] now strive for purity. We who loved the acquisition of wealth more than all else, now bring what we have into a common stock, and give to everyone in need. We who hated and destroyed one another, and on account of their different manners would not receive into our homes [people] of a different tribe, now, since the coming of Christ live comfortably with them. We pray for our enemies; we endeavor to persuade all who hate us unjustly to live in conformity with the beautiful precepts of Christ, to the end that they may become partakers with us of the same joyful hope of reward from God, the ruler of all.”
So there is how lives were changed within a few generations of Jesus' first followers. Jesus' prayer for his disciples, the one we overhear in John's gospel, the one that defines eternal life...
that prayer is answered in the life of the community
that knows God intimately in Jesus Christ.
{The indented paragraphs in this text were not used in the preached sermon.}
And eternal life is this: to know you,
the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom you have sent
Here is the third point about eternal life.
The word "eternal" can only be properly applied to God.
"Eternal life is, therefore, nothing other than the life of God.
To possess it, to enter into it, is to experience here and now
something of the splendor, and the majesty, and the joy, and the peace,
and the holiness which are characteristic of the life of God." (William Barclay)
Eternal life is to know the Eternal One, ….and what does it mean to "know?"
It doesn't mean just knowing about, gaining knowledge, or even understanding.
In this context, knowing God means to be in relationship with God.
Someone has used an odd example for this kind of knowing, but it works for me.
He was talking about pain, and how people know pain.
On the wall of the hospital room is a little chart that helps patients
describe the level of pain they feel, on a scale of one to ten.
That's a help, but unless one has truly experienced "ten,"
one cannot "know" what it means.
You can read a medical book and read about pain,
but you don't know pain until you've had a relationship with it!
You can read all about God in one book of theology after another,
you can read the Bible from cover to cover, and you'll know all about God,
but you still may not know God.
That takes a relationship, and in Christ, God has made the first move.
It's said that we Christians are a people of the Word, meaning the Bible.
And we Presbyterians are a people of many, many words, meaning we read and talk a lot.
But the best way to describe a people who live in eternal life
is to say that we are the people of the Word, capital W, Logos, Christ.
Knowing Christ has always meant knowing God.
The last two verses of this prayer of Jesus help make this clear.
John 17:25-26:
"Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you,
and these (all believers) know that you have sent me.
I made your name known to them,
so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."
That's where John's account of the prayer ends.
The relationship of love.
To have eternal life, to know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom God sent,
is to love, as God loves us. That love is what life is all about.
It is time for all of us to make as life's first priority, above all else, all else,
nurturing the seeds of eternal life planted in every soul.
We begin by knowing God through Jesus Christ,
and living in obedient response to God's creative power and love.
"It begins on earth but does not end when physical life is ended,
because the believer, like Jesus, lives in the eternal love of God, now and always."
(Lamar Williamson, Preaching the Gospel of John)
When I heard that Jeanice's family had found a large jar of dimes among her things and asked her what that was all about,
she had replied that each dime represented a random act of kindness,
a sign of grace done to or for her that Jeanice had recognized and counted,
a dime for each one.
I thought what a wonderful idea!
For we are all made rich by each random act of kindness or goodness
or compassion or understanding that comes our way.
And Jeanice had there in that jar solid evidence that grace abounded in her life.
On one of those dark days, when aging seemed to be getting the best of her,
there was that huge collection of dimes.
Even when her eyesight was failing,
she could still feel by the weight, the heft, of the container,
how often God had blessed her through the kindness of family, friends, even strangers!
The jar of dimes was almost sacramental in her life,
an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace!
To live life to its fullest, its most abundant,
is to love God, and love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
And to see the fruits of the Spirit every day in every relationship of this eternal life
with which God has blessed us!