I Am Because We Are
Easter 7C-25
Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago
Jesus is in his final hours. The disciples asked, and Jesus has taught them, the Lords’ Prayer. Now, like children listening in while the grown-ups talk, they are learning more about themselves and about God eavesdropping on Jesus out-loud prayer. They are learning about God’s audacious plan to place the mission of Jesus in their hands and ours. we are entrusted with the urgent, life and death mission of renewing the world on earth as it is in heaven by our baptism into Christ. I imagine their eyes growing wider as they listen in on God’s daunting and risky plan. But then they also learn that they will have help. They hear God’s promise to send the Spirit, the Advocate, as a loving guide, and to keep sending that spirit, despite all times we mess up.
St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, “…the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is in the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26,27). How many times have I, in my ignorance, prayed for foolish things, or done foolish things? Yet God remains steadfast in sending us the Spirit of new life.
Yes. Upon his death, the curtain in the temple separating God from the great wide world was torn in two (Luke 23:45). As the book of Revelation announces, the water boundary between heaven and earth has been removed (Revelation 21:1). In Christian worship there is no stage, no audience, no actors, no fourth wall. There is one assembly. We are joined together with the faithful of all times and places, in the one life. See. We are the hands and the feet of the living Christ at work (and play) in the world.
But the way forward is not easy. God’s major problem in liberating humanity is continually thwarted the undying recurrence of hatred of the other, century after century, in culture after culture and religion after religion. “Most Christians still do not know how to receive a positive identity from God—that we belong and are loved by our very nature!” (Rohr, Rohr, ONEING, Unity and Diversity, 13–14). Jesus’ most consistent social action was eating in new ways and with new people, encountering those who were oppressed or excluded from the system. Jesus ate with all sides. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. He ate with Pharisees and lawyers (Luke 7:36–50, 11:37–54, 14:1). He ate with lepers (Mark 14:3), he received a woman with a poor reputation at a men’s dinner (Luke 7:36–39), and he even invited himself to a “sinner’s” house (Luke 19:1–10). “The Eucharistic meal is meant to be a microcosmic event, summarizing at one table what is true in the whole macrocosm: we are one, we are equal in dignity, we all eat of the same divine food, and Jesus still and always “eats with sinners,” just as he did when on Earth” (Richard Rohr, “A Welcoming Table,” Daily Meditations, January 25, 2022). No one is excluded from Jesus’ table. Why is that so difficult for us to remember?
As a child I still remember standing with my kindergarten class, looking up at the flag, hand over my heart, to recite the pledge of allegiance every day. (I don’t know. Do children still do that?) I have read that children across America in every State except Hawaii, Iowa, Vermont, and Wyoming recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day at school since 1942. Hand over their hearts they “…pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”
The pledge incorporates America’s best and founding principle. “America is not only a homeland… it is also an idea and a moral cause … America stands for a set of universal principles: the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with inalienable rights, that democracy is the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and best honors beings who are made in the image of God” (David Brooks, “I’m Normally a Mild Guy. Here’s What’s Pushed Me Over the Edge,” NYT May 29, 2025). This idea of unity and oneness before God is under threat today.
Jesus’ final prayer was for Oneness. The unity that we are to have with each other we are also to have with Jesus and the Father. The unity, for which Jesus prayed is that everyone—all who have ever known of him, and all those who ever will—be embraced in deep accord, a mystical union with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Catholic contemplative monk, Bruno Barnhart calls this, Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer, “The Prayer of Consecration of the New Temple.” Word Made Flesh becomes Flesh Made Word.
Jesus prayed with confidence for those he didn’t know and those who were yet to be born — for people he’d never meet, for those whose future lives he couldn’t begin to imagine — not because of some miraculous intervention of God was to suddenly bring about a humanity of love, unity, and peace but because the disciples who were with him that day would do to the work. They would do God’s work with their hands. Imagine those disciples listening in on God’s audacious and risky plan. “Those who heard him would share Jesus’ teachings. They would love as he loved. They would treat the poor, the outcast, and infirm with dignity and respect. They would heal, embrace, and welcome. They would feed the hungry” (Diana Butler-Bass, Sunday Musings, June 1, 2025). They would welcome all to God’s table.
As Saint Paul wrote, “I live no longer not I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). In the spiritual journey for which Jesus prayed, we slowly come to realize that we don’t live life by ourselves just as the bees don’t make honey without each other. There is Someone Else living in us and through us, sharing our consciousness, luring, suggesting, persuading us to be our best selves, teaching us that we are part of a much Bigger Mystery. We are a single drop in a Much Bigger Ocean. (Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, 3/7/16). We are a recipient, a conduit, a participant in the resurrected life we call Easter. From South Africa we receive the word, ubuntu, “I am because we are.”
Easter does not mean that you believe in unbelievable things. “But that you believe — trust, give your heart to, and belove — an utterly believable single thing: We human beings are one in God and one with each other, here, in this world, to work and speak together for love, healing, liberation, and, indeed, resurrection. To do the impossible, to create what will last, to think and strive for the generations to come. To not give up hope” (Butler Bass).
