Poolesville Presbyterian Church
05.20.12; Rev. David Williams
I was reminded this last week that there is a reason pastors don’t talk much about classical theology when we get up into the pulpit. It’s a bit like the reason I have an absolutely least favorite ride at amusement parks.
Don’t get me wrong about amusement parks. I have a thing for amusement parks, all of them, from the biggest to the smallest. It’s an old echo from my boyhood, one that I’ve not let be dimmed by age or being the one who actually has to pay for it.
I find pleasure in the great honking industrial-sized entertain-o-plexes served up by Disney and Hershey, in the promise of sweet shiny shiny fun that hangs like a tantalizing mirage on the far horizon of that seemingly endless expanse of parking lot. And Lord have mercy, does that lot go on. The parking lots at Disney World, for example, are bigger than the entire Disneyland Park in California. When you’re parked in DisneyWorld Lot Section Pluto Z12, it’s important to be aware that the name doesn’t come from the cartoon character, but the distance from the entrance in light-minutes.
I still delight in seeing one of those gritty little traveling carny-parks sprouting in the parking lot of a nearby struggling strip mall, its aging Ferris Wheel rising like an incandescent blossom from the cracked asphalt.
I love bucketing along in roller coasters and giggling in haunted houses and halls of mirrors. I love funnel cake and cotton candy and the way your kid’s faces get so sticky by the end of the day that if they start complaining about leaving, all you have to you press your hand to their face, hold it for a second, and you’re going right where I tell you to go, young man.
But I’ve never understood the attraction of the tilt-a-whirl. There are dozens and dozens of variants to that particular ride, but all of them stick to the same basic principle. You sit in a gondola that orbits around a central point. That gondola can also be spun around as it spins around, a bit like the earth rotating as it goes around the sun. That’s it.
I had an ex-girlfriend who was really, really into riding tilt-a-whirls at fairs and state parks, and insisted that I ride them with her while she cackled with glee and spun the car as fast as she could. Let me reiterate: this was an ex-girlfriend.
Because riding the Tilt-A-Whirl is fun in the same way that the second day of a particularly bad stomach flu is fun. After thirty seconds, the world is a whirling blur. The movement of the liquid in your inner ear becomes more complicated and chaotic than the best fluid dynamics computer model can predict. You don’t know where you are, or where you’re going next, and you’re not entirely sure you’re going to be able to know the near-term location of that corn-dog you ate ten minutes ago.
When theologians try to talk about our relationship with our Creator, it can sometimes have the same effect. The heady, interwoven abstractions that human beings are forced to use when we try to articulate a reality that transcends our reality can be existentially dizzying.
This last week, as I and a group of other doctoral students wrestled with the ancient theologies of the church, it sometimes felt much the same way. As the week rolled on, meanings and symbols seemed to dance in and out of one another, and the more complicated it became, the more our minds churned and struggled. We learned that our task as Christians was to participate in a maximally existential joyous organic koinonia of logoi personhood. We found the purpose of the church was to incarnationally and perichoretically manifest the eternally catalyzing energia of the Numinous. We were challenged to embrace a robust cosmological capacitative explosion of triune ontological robustness. At least, that’s what I think I remember. Having both a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a value-sized bottle of ibuprofen on hand also proved helpful.
The seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel, like much of the rest of that Gospel, evokes a seemingly similar interweaving. Words repeat and cycle and repeat again. Concepts in the text swirl and connect and reconnect. Chapter seventeen is one long sustained prayer, one that serves a clear purpose in the arc of the story John is telling. The sequence of seven signs that defines the heart of the narrative for John has been completed. The teachings about the Holy Spirit and community that are Christ’s final summation to his disciples have just come to a conclusion. That summation, which is called the “farewell discourse,” has filled chapters fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, and now finally wraps up.
Chapter seventeen is one long sustained prayer, one that transitions us between the farewell discourse and the beginning of John’s passion narrative in chapter 18. The purpose of the prayer is a benediction of sorts, as Jesus conveys through prayer that he has, in fact, taught the disciples everything that needed to be taught. He has given them both his teaching and himself, and through this prayer, he asks that his Father protects them and stands present for them.
Who are the folks he’s praying for? First, it’s the disciples that had gathered around him. But it’s more than that. If we continue on through past the end of this reading, we hear that the verses in question were meant for not just them, but also for “..those who will believe in me through their word.” It’s a prayer intended towards those who would follow on, meaning, it’s a prayer for us.
What it asks is both simple and complex. The language is a simple request for protection, in recognition that both Jesus and those who follow him stand in tension with “..the world.” That word is repeated eleven times in the thirteen verses you heard read today, and that repetition isn’t random. It reflects a tension that John is intentionally developing.
The word used for “world” in the original Greek of this passage are variants of the word kosmos, which is the word that gives us the English word...um...cosmos. It can mean a number of things, but it primarily refers to the way that life and existence order themselves. Kosmos is the process of material reality. It’s the way things work.
Or, if we’re honest about many of our encounters with material reality, the way things don’t work. Our world and the lives we live in it can be a swirl of chaos, a churning mass of unpredictability and mess and disorder. What is predictable is that things are not predictable. We seek pattern and meaning and purpose, but the world often seems to defy our efforts to give it form and structure. When Jesus speaks of kosmos here, that’s what he’s talking about.
Our studies and our work lives take unexpected turns. Our relationships strengthen, or they can suddenly fail. Reminders of our mortality are ever present. If we focus on that chaos, it will churn and roil our psyches. If we abide in that chaos, it can leave us dizzy and nauseated and confused and overwhelmed.
But what Jesus taught and lived out was not rooted in the raw chaos of life and existence. His grounding, his heart, and his person was in the source and foundation of our existence, and in the purpose towards which we are to orient our lives. In this prayer, we are reminded that the role of faith is to orient our eyes and selves away from the mess and the churn, and towards the transforming love and grace of God.
That doesn’t mean we’re not aware of chaos, or that it ceases to be around us and a part of our lives. We don’t get a pass on that. But though we are in faith in the world, we are not...if we are in the Truth as Jesus was in the Truth...of the world.
For all of the whirl of being, and for all of the complex structures and frameworks and paradigms we’ve fabricated to understand our relationships and our theology, what is most important in our faith is maintaining that consistent focus on the gracious presence and purpose of our Creator. It is in and towards this presence that we’re invited to abide and live.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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