June 1, 2025 ☩ The Seventh Sunday of Easter
on
Acts 16:16-34; Rev 22:12-14,16-17,20-21;
& John 17:20-26
“Being One: Trade Places with the Least?”
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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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I recall at my college orientation, one of my classmates, who was also a computer engineering major, opened a conversation with the usual trivial topics. Charles asked what music I liked, what sorts of movies I watched, the sports teams I followed, and the like. When desiring to get to know people, we all strive for connection via concrete points of connection. Now, most of these questions did not produce these connections for us. Nonetheless, we remained friends through college, and his immense humor and gentleness aided several of us through stressful classes. Our shared experience, and endurance, through college courses created deeper points of connection for us, among others. Sometimes deeper connections lie ahead.
John’s Gospel reading for this Seventh Sunday of Easter, the final Sunday in Eastertide, shares with us the concluding content of a prayer Jesus offers to God on our behalf. Jesus is praying for us. Jesus is praying for unity. This unity far exceeds simple individual points of connection.
As a Christian community, our faith is – or at least should be – the premise from which we operate. Finding our points of commonality should shape our interactions and who we are in this world. Consider what it means to “be one” [Jn 17:21] in faith with our whole beings. It means to accept the struggles of others as our own. It means to embrace the joys of others as our own. Inherently, it means to join together in love. Sometimes living in Christian unity means being ready to lower ourselves so that others may be lifted up. This means sharing more than a part of ourselves but to entirely ‘be one.’
Too often, in modern times, we become so accustomed to our shared points of connection that we overlook them and simply focus upon the differences, creating further division. In the last fifteen years, I have heard so much political rhetoric about being of one political party or another that we forget what it means to be American. Even more deeply, sometimes we forget what it means to be one with one another, with God, and with the Christ when we interact with other children of God.
In the Acts of the Apostles, we find a continued expression of what unity means in the Christian life as it pertains to sharing difficulties.
Paul gets frustrated with a diviner who follows him and Silas. She identifies them properly as those who “proclaim… a way of salvation.” [Acts 16:17] Paul, though, finds her to be annoying, so he removes the spirit that encourages her to proclaim such. Inadvertently, Paul freed this slave. She had owners that benefited financially from her fortune-telling. She now served them no purpose – still, we are unsure of what comes of this situation, but her worth is no long bound to monetary value.
Then, Paul and Silas become captives. In a very general way, they swap places with the girl who was enslaved. She is free; Paul and Silas are captive. Despite their misfortune, even in a place of distress and condemnation, they act for the benefit of the jailer by not fleeing when the prison doors broke open due to the earthquake. They never ceased to look after others’ needs regardless of their own predicament. Not only did Paul and Silas end up achieving freedom, but in this compassionate state, the jailer took them home, cleaned them, and fed them. During this great act of hospitality for the imprisoned, Paul and Silas brought the Good News to the jailer and his household. In their actions and words, they brought the jailer’s household into the fold of believers.
Paul and Silas shared a special love for others- people they did not know, even their oppressors. To operate in such a deep sense of unity with our Lord in light of the love Jesus showed for us upon the cross, when He took our place in the face of death from our sins, we must remember our foundation. We must remember to what our worth is bound.
We are loved by God in Christ. This serves us for the present moment. We must also acknowledge the breadth and depth of the love with which we unify our very beings in faith.
We were meant to be loved. Before we were created, God meant for us to be loved by God [cf. Jn 17:24], by Christ, and by one another. We were designed to be loved and to share in a life of love. The entirety of creation’s past has brought us forth in love for love.
Finally, we are meant to love. Our purpose is to show forth love into the world, into the future, for all time. We are connected in love to the past, present, and future, by the love of God and of His Son. This is the immense and immutable love from whence we came, to which we belong, and in which we participate in bringing forth so that others may come to know Christ as we know Him.
The interconnectedness to which Jesus prays for is not an exclusionary practice for only a select group of people, but it is an invitation, just as we find in John’s Revelation, for “everyone who is thirsty [to] come.” [Rev. 22:17c] Jesus prays for us to be One and for all of God’s children. In Paul’s work, in Acts of the Apostles and in his epistles, we know his work to be grounded in Scripture for the sake of the Jewish people, his culture of origin, and for the Gentiles, the non-Jewish populations. All are welcome.
Be present beside and with one another in compassion. Believe that unity is possible and is more than simply sharing a few points of commonality; rather, we exist utterly as one in faith. Live in the unity of peace and love of our Lord with joy and thanksgiving. Amen.
