SEVENTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 

Acts 7:55-60 | Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20 | John 17:20-26

Graciously hear our supplications, oh Lord, so that we, who believe that the Savior of the human race is with you in your glory, may experience, as he promised, until the end of the world, his abiding presence in us, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This set of readings is almost too much, too many images, too much wisdom to even know where to begin to draw from these words and these images something that is so essential to our understanding of who we are as believers in God, who reveals himself in this man Jesus, who is also God, who then lives in us as a spirit animating everything we do.  But I’m going to try, and I want to start with an image that’s in these readings, and that is the image of the tree of life.  It’s in the second reading.  It’s in Revelations that somehow that this image that John is working with is an image of this God entering into the world, bringing with him something for people, and what he brings is recompense to each person according to their deeds.  Recompense, I would probably have read that without pondering what the word really meant, saying, “I will bring with me judgment so that people can be judged at the end of time,” or whatever.  But recompense is payment for a debt that you owe.  So it’s the image of this God that we’re asked to believe in.  This presence of his image of judgment has nothing to do with punishment but everything to do with acceptance and forgiveness, and he comes with forgiveness for recompense to pay for any debt that you owe, anyone that you’ve ever harmed, because you’re going to be washed in his robe.  You’re cleansed, and it says, “If you’re cleansed, then you have a right to the tree of life.”  Right to the tree of life.  What is the tree of life?  Well, you can hardly talk about the tree of life without talking about the tree of good and evil, and that’s where sin enters into the world and our consciousness.   But think of this tree as an image of some force that produces some kind of fruit, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a calling, an evolution, let’s say, of human nature into a place where we begin to see clearly what’s right and what’s wrong.  We live in a binary world of good things and bad things, and we use justice as the basic thing that we evaluate our choices.  It’s wrong to harm someone.  It’s right to take care of someone.  That world we grow into as young adults or young children.  We begin to discern right and wrong.  That’s where the human race was at one point in time, but it had a shadow.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is about a binary world where either things are good or bad, and the danger is that, if we take that binary world and we apply it to our nature, our essence, we fall into a world that is the shadow of the Old Testament where people are considering themselves as good people or bad people.  “I’m valuable, or I’m of no value.”  It’s a way of imagining this division that is really not true to reality, but we will say, “If I have done something wrong, I am that thing that is wrong.”  Someone lies to you, and they’re a liar.  Someone doesn’t really tell you the truth and they pretend to be someone else, they’re a hypocrite, or if they take something, they’re a thief.  It’s really interesting how we divide ourselves into pieces like that, and that’s the world of the Old Testament, the world of judgment and condemnation. 

And when you see the essence of the person of Jesus coming into the world to blow that system apart and to say what — I’ve replaced that idea of judgment with this incredible description of love, love for the essence of a human being and that love never being tarnished by any indication that the person has failed somewhere along the way.  It’s about forgiveness, and that’s the tree of life.  The tree of life is the fullness of who we are as creatures of God redeemed, forgiven of our sins.  We’re filled with this ability, this capacity to go beyond our weakness, our human nature and enter into a world that is infused with divinity, and when that divinity is in us, and that’s the promise of the tree of life — the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a way of discerning right from wrong.  The tree of life is an awareness of a God whose presence is in us, that transforms us, that transcends anything like right and wrong.  It’s about the essence of who we are in God.  We are his beloved.  We are his greatest creation, and he pours love into us.  That’s what’s so beautiful about the tree of life.  It’s never earned.  It is just simply given, freely given to us, and the challenge is to believe in our right to the tree of life.  And remember when the story in Genesis unfolds, it’s when Adam and Eve are allowed to leave the garden, and they go to the earth to work out this right and wrong world that they’re going to live in.  And God makes these garments for them and helps them go to this new life, and then there’s an angel placed at the entrance of the Garden of Eden.  And basically it’s saying, “You can’t come back here and eat of this tree of life.  It’s not something you can achieve.  It’s only given freely — freely given.”  That’s the essence of the New Testament, the essence of the presence of God in a human being who comes into the world to reveal who he really is, and who he is, is not anyone interested in judgment and condemnation but only in union and communion.  That’s the awesome truth that we find in this set of readings.

Look at Stephen in the first reading for a moment.  He is just a man who’s been touched by the tree of life.  He’s been given this insight into who God is.  He sees it as so attractive and so powerful.  He wants to be one with it, and he’s allowed to be one with it, because God pours his essence into Stephen, and Stephen does exactly what Jesus would do. And it just shocked the people around him who are executing him, who are part of the world of good and evil, who are judging him as a negative element, because they’re trying to stop this contagious awareness of God’s love and forgiveness.  The temple people are invested in a world of judgment.  A world of forgiveness is the enemy to them, and so when Stephen is celebrating out loud his connection with this God that lives inside of him and he sees an image in heaven, which is an image of the new covenant, God in man, man in God, humans and divinity together, and they can’t stand it.  So they stone him, and then what he does is so beautiful.  They stone him, because they’re judging him as unworthy, and then they are the ones unworthy.  And Stephen looks at them and just says, “Please God, forgive them.”  Forgive them.  Stephen and God are together in that image.  Human beings do not have that capacity to forgive like that.  So we have in that story of Stephen a beautiful image of how Christianity spread.  It’s when people were doing things that didn’t make any sense to the human nature that was grounded in judgment and right and wrong in a binary world.  There was this new image that seemed to animate these people, and it was all about presence and love and forgiveness.  And they kept giving the honor and the glory of who they were not to themselves but to a God who lived inside of them. 

Then you see this powerful prayer of Jesus to his Father in the gospel, and he’s praying that all be one.  And when I used to hear this, I used to think, “Well, he’s praying for the unity of Christianity, the fact that we all are one, that we love each other and care for each other.”  No, he’s not saying, “I pray, Father, that you will make all the members of this body of believers in a place of unity and oneness.”  Yes, that is going to be the result of who they are, but the real prayer is, “I want them, God, to be one like you and I are one.  I am in you, and you are in me.  I know that.  They don’t know that they have that as a gift given to them by us.”  Jesus, the human God filled with divinity offering to people a gift, a sacrifice of his humanity’s ego, whatever you could say that Jesus was doing when he offered himself to God completely, surrendered his will to God’s will.  He became one with divinity.  That’s our inheritance, and so what he’s praying is, “I want the followers of you, who’ve now revealed yourself to them — I want them to feel you in them just as I feel you in me, and when I go into them, I want them to know I’m in them.”  How does Jesus say, “I want them to know —” that he is in them?  He’s just saying, “Because of the love I have for them.  I see everyone you’ve given me as this incredible gift.  I’m so filled with love for them, and if they can believe that I love them, that love that I have as a human being for them, what I bring with me into them accepting my love is your love also.”  So it’s convincing people in their imperfection that they are loved.  That is not easy to do.  How many people have been told, that are wallowing in some kind of shame and guilt over a world that they’ve lived in as the binary world, the tree of good and evil, and they’ve split themselves into pieces.  And there’s a good them and a bad them, and then they’re torn.  “Which one is really me?”  And then if they fall into the trap of depression and darkness, they’re going to say, “I am my sin.”  I’ve listened to people, and they’ve told me, “If I lie, I’m a liar.  If I steal, I’m a thief.”  That identity with evil is the most dangerous thing that can happen to a human being in their relationship with God, because it creates a false separation.  There is nothing in the revelation of Jesus as to who God is that God has any shred of desire to punish or to judge and to condemn someone.  Sure, he makes it clear that discernment is essential.  You have to discern whether you’re doing something that’s destructive, but when you’re doing something destructive, if you feel that that is your identity and then you feel that you’re a destructive being, then you get identified with that, and it’s dangerous, because it’s almost as if that part of you wants to have a life.  You give your weakness an identity, and then that identity takes over and wants to exist.  It feeds off of shame, and you find yourself drawn to things that are negative, because that gives you a sense, “Yeah, you probably are this person that’s bad.”  No, you’re not.  How can you listen attentively to what Jesus is revealing about who he is and why he came into this world?  “I came into this world to reveal to each individual the love that you, God the Father, have for them, how much you long to be in them.”  But it’s hard for a human being to believe that God loves that way, but a human being that looks at you and that you know that human being and they love you, you can feel that love.  And what I think Jesus is talking about is his disciples.  He started with them.  He’s saying — they failed pretty badly about trusting in him and the process that he went through, and what is so beautiful to me is that, when Jesus came back to the disciples, he was saying, “Look, it’s okay.  I forgive you.  I love you.  My love for you is what I want you to feel, not any judgment, not any condemnation.  The essence that is you is a gift to me, and I want to be sure that gift is preserved.”  That’s your dignity, your identity, who you are in God’s mind as he created you.  That’s what God wants — that’s what Jesus wants people to know, that he loves that part of you and that he wants God to be revealed to you through him, that that’s the way God loves.

I don't know why that’s so hard.  I don't know.  Maybe it’s easier for you, but for me, so many times when I’ve done something wrong, I tend to over-identify with that part of me, and then I feel separated from God.  And the prayer of this gorgeous gospel passage is you have this Jesus who lives now in the image of Stephen in the first reading.  Stephen could see Jesus and the Father as one, and this image as Jesus, the one who’s there forgiving you for all of your sins, is God forgiving you for all of your sins.  And all he wants you to know and believe is that you are loved, you are a gift, and when you’re loved that way, when you feel that affirmation, the image that an action that you did, a mistake that you made, a mark that you missed will never create in you a sense of division and separation.  And there will be oneness.  The tree of the knowledge of good and evil separates.  It’s about judgment, performance.  Tree of life unites.  It’s about love and forgiveness, and you and I have a right to the tree of life. 

Father, the world in which we live is not necessarily a world of understanding and compassion, forgiveness.  It’s really a world at times that is filled with judgment and condemnation, rejection, separation.  Help us to be free of that illusion that that is somehow a world that you have created.  It’s not the world that you created.  It’s the world that exists when you are not fully understood, recognized, received, believed in and trusted in.  Help our world to change, to become more the world you created it to be, not so much outside of ourselves.  We can’t control that, but we can control the inner world, the world where we are often the judge, we are often the condemning spirit.  Free us from that.  Fill us with love and life, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.