KGL+
Sermon
Trinity Church Boston
Easter 6 Year C
May 25, 2025
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together always be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
So, Jesus is about to leave us again.
The scriptures that we have this week, even though they were written for the disciples before Jesus’ death and resurrection, they come to us as we are on the cusp of his Ascension, which is observed this coming Thursday, forty days following Easter. Jesus dies, is resurrected, and then makes appearances to his disciples (and others) following Easter morning— he shows up in the upper room1John 20:24ff; he surprises the disciples on the road to Emmaus during the meal they shared2Luke 24:14ff; he eats fish at breakfast on the shore with his disciples3Luke 24:42ff. We lost Jesus at the end of Holy Week—but in some ways we didn’t. He kept showing up post-Resurrection, reinforcing all that he said before, reminding us in visceral ways that what he preached about death not being the final word was actually true.
So the painful goodbyes we offered—at our Vigil, at the cross and at the empty tomb—they were redeemed, in some strange way because—well, we kind of got Jesus back. Still teaching. Still kicking around with us. Always reminding the disciples—us– of ‘those things he once said’ which the disciples—we—didn’t quite understand at the time; so now he’s telling them to us again and em-pha-si-zing the points that we disciples should really have mastered by now.
But this won’t last. It doesn’t. Death isn’t the end, especially for Jesus, but it doesn’t mean life as it was when he was alive and with us and telling us about sheep, and cursing fig trees, and telling over-functioning Peter off when he wanted his hands washed in addition to his feet.
This is the Sunday before our celebration of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven; into God. Jesus is going to leave us. Again. And this time, he tells us, it’s for good.
The scripture for this Sunday is clearly Jesus’ words before his actual death, but this Farewell Discourse, as it’s known in the Gospel of John, doesn’t situate itself in the details of Gethsemane or Calvary. Jesus doesn’t talk pragmatics about what will or will not happen. Instead, he tells his friends what he wants them to know—what he wants them to remember when he is gone, when they look forward to a different sort of life without him.
The disciples, though, want some concrete answers today. Judas (not Iscariot)—that had to be a tough coincidence for a disciple of Jesus to have that name, by the way—precedes this reading by asking Jesus, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us and not to the world?” A few verses before that, Philip says to Jesus, ‘Show us the Father and we shall be satisfied.’4John 14:8 Give us the specifics, they ask of Jesus. Give us some evidence or proof or soundbite. It’s a real cry of fear, these demands. Give us a sign, tell us what to do, prove to us that we are in the right, they say.
Jesus says, ‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.’
Jesus wants his disciples to understand that things change, but that the way of his love and redemption is entirely enacted, interpersonal, a mutuality of mercy, forgiveness and grace, human to human, and God to creation, all of which will shift in form, but never in substance or in significance. But the disciples aren’t listening so well to the larger framework of what Jesus is telling them; he is telling them what will sustain their hearts and souls when he is actually gone, and the disciples—and often we– are simply fixating essentially on which hymns Jesus wants at his funeral.5This comment requires a comment: there is no fault in caring about the liturgy or what honors the deceased. But in our faith, it is a form of adiaphora- what is good, but not essential (what is essential being ‘diaphora’, or ‘difference’). We hold onto the things we believe we can control, which is absolutely part of grief. So this is not judgment, but rather highlighting even the disciples tendency towards holding on to the framework.
Jesus’ promise meets the reality that humanity is not a set-it-and-forget-it-deal—kind of like those rotisserie oven infomercials that used to be on TV, just set the timer and walk away, coming back 45 minutes later to a finished chicken dinner.6Ron Popiel’s ‘set it and forget it’ phrase is a well worn one in my family of origin, but don’t trust me, trust YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb91-j861DI What the disciples will face during their lifetimes, and over the course of the next two thousand plus years will not remain constant, nor consistent. Jesus’ mission was not to tell the disciples what to do next, step by step—but to remind them that their realities would change, and so then would their interpretation of how to be in the world.
But what was not negotiable—what was an eternal truth for Jesus—was this notion of Jesus telling us to love like he did. And as we try our best to do so, even as we fail and fall short (none of us are Jesus, by the way), God will love us, as Jesus loved us. Mutual mercy. Mutual service. Mutual grace. As we offer it generously, it will be offered to us. And as it is offered to us, we will find increased inclination to offer it even more.
The comedian Sarah Silverman, I believe, is rarely invoked in sermons—although I learned from her latest Netflix special that one of her sisters is a rabbi, so maybe I’m wrong about that— but in that special, called ‘PostMortem’, she reflects on the deaths of her father and stepmother, who died nine days apart only last May, and of her mother’s death nine years before that.7For a PG rated trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_11gmV0_I8 I’m not a whole cloth Silverman fan, but I want to state for the record that this is simply one of the most profound paeans to the mystery of love between parents, step-parents, children and various permutations of both broken and healed relationships and what it means to take care of one another. It also has absolutely TV-MA language, imagery, and please don’t watch all of it in front of your children. I don’t know how to describe such a set which alternates between being profoundly not safe for work, and also one of the most thoughtful eulogies for a generation who doesn’t particularly have a theological vocabulary for the mutuality of love in the way that Jesus tells his disciples before he leaves them.
I was struck by Silverman’s description of her mother, Beth Ann, and her memories of not only the details of what she was like, but in essence, how she taught her to be, even after her death. Silverman says,
She really never lied. It would never occur to her to lie, even to protect someone’s feelings. She just… she just didn’t do it, you know? But, you know, she was my mom. You know, I sat with her as she was dying and I was holding her hand, and it was a quiet moment, and it was the last thing she said to me; and she looked up, and she said, “Your hair… it’s so dry.” I really wouldn’t change it for the world, you know. I know it sounds like I’m being hard on her, but honestly, I’m so grateful. She always told me the truth; and it was a bummer a lot of the time. But sometimes it was something nice and then I would know it was true, and I mean, I think we need more Beth Anns in the world, you know? If we are lacking anything in the world right now, it’s truth.
‘She always told me the truth.’ Might not be a ‘last words’ fairytale moment, but Silverman offers her viewers that it was her mother’s honesty which presented to her a legacy of how one might be in and transform the world about her.
Show us how you will reveal yourself to us when you are gone, Judas (not Iscariot) asks.
Jesus replies, how I am revealed is entirely in your hands.
Saying goodbye is the hardest thing we do with those we love. Even, I’d posit, with those we don’t quite love, but have come to see as part of our own life fabric. Jesus’ words before his Ascension point us not to the loss, but to the transformation we will go through when we shift from the concrete, first, then second, then third considerations of how to act, and go directly to the root of who we are—individuals, as the faithful, as a community, as beloved.
We cannot forget who and whose we are, if we wish to have a legacy in this world. It will not be for the money, or success or achievement that we are remembered—Jesus’ gifts are not the way the world works, remember. It will be in the ways we loved. In the ways we tell the truth. In the ways we look fear in the eyes and respond in the way Jesus responded: by serving, by loving one another, by remembering that we will never be alone.
Amen.