Above Earth's Lamentation

Sermon by Seminarian Jackie Miller on the Seventh Sunday of Easter + May 12, 2024

There’s a hymn I’m sure many of you know: “My life flows on in endless song / above earth’s lamentation. / I catch the sweet though far-off hymn / that hails a new creation.” I love this hymn. It’s one of my favorites.

But it landed a little differently one Sunday morning last October. It was homecoming weekend at my alma mater, Carthage College, and after the usual homecoming Eucharist, there was a memorial for Pastor Kara, the beloved campus pastor who at age 52 had died of cancer several months prior. We sat in the chapel and sang this hymn. (Some of us more so listened.) A few current students, the 19-year-old kids sitting next to me, started sobbing. I couldn’t hear any new creation in that moment, and I assure you it did not feel like we were above earth’s lamentation.

Now, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that the world can be a painful, frightening, and evil place at times. War rages on in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere. So many of our neighbors lack the basic necessities of life. What we hear in the news often leads us to worry about our future and that of the world, our country, our city. And we deal with our own personal tragedies every day.

Perhaps that is why people have looked to this passage to proclaim that we are ‘in the world but not of it.’ There are other hymns—which you will not find / in your / ELW—saying things like: “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through”, “Some glad morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away”, “I’m but a stranger here, Heaven is my home; Earth is a desert drear.” That first one even has a chorus that asks, “If heaven’s not my home, then Lord what will I do?”

If this messy, deeply flawed world is our home, then Lord, what are we to do? The message is clear: this world is too full of suffering to be where we are ultimately meant to be, so we must be going off to a different world, where everything is perfect.

This might be the part where we recoil at some of the language in our Gospel passage today. As Jesus says his farewell to his disciples and prays for them, sharp lines are drawn between his followers and ‘the world’ that can sound a lot like condemning the world. And we know from John’s gospel, “God so loved the world that God gave the Son, the only begotten one, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.” God came to this world, not taking the people who do or believe the right things somewhere else. The world isn’t only sunshine and rainbows all the time, but it is God’s beloved creation that Jesus comes to save.

The Gospel of John has plenty to say about the world, some of it nicer-sounding than others but all of it pointing toward Christ as lord and savior of all of creation. Our passage today comes from the night of the last supper, a dinner that the gospel introduces like this: “Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” For Jesus, to love his people in this world means to be in it with them and let this world do its worst to him.

He goes on to tell the disciples, “I have said this to you so that in me you may have peace. in the world you face persecution, but take courage: i have conquered the world!” — he says as he is about to be betrayed, arrested, and executed.

But to Jesus, that is conquering the world. He takes the world as it is— not as we would like to have it but as it is—and makes it something new.

In an ideal world, Pastor Kara would have walked in and sat down next to those crying students, held our hands and told us everything was OK. Instead, we kept singing, “Through all the tumult and the strife / I hear that music ringing, / It finds an echo in my soul.” There are few things I would want more than for my phone to ring and hear Pastor Kara on the other end. But instead, I continue to meet people who have had their lives changed by her presence in it—to see how we as the Body of Christ in the word are a little bit stronger, a little more faithful, even as the world keeps turning.

I’m sure the disciples would have preferred if Jesus didn’t die—especially when they saw him hanging on the cross or hid away in fear. If the powers that be didn’t want him dead and Jesus could continue being physically and bodily present, he could have stayed with them to heal more people, teach them more, and continue to lead them. But that wouldn’t be true to the world we live in. Instead, we have Jesus who loves us who are in the world to the end. We get a death that shows us endless love and sacrifice in the face of the violence of the world. We have a Savior who rises from death to life again, who shows up with marks of the nails in his hands in a closed room, who could be mistaken for a gardener or a strange traveler, who finds us along the road and in the breaking of the bread. the cross becomes victory, becomes life, becomes peace. we take what was a horrific execution device, a sign of people’s terror and helplessness in the face of rome, and we put little versions of it on our walls or around our necks to remind us of jesus and the love god has for us. christ has conquered the world, indeed—not by taking down caesar with a sword or miraculously escaping from pilate—but by showing us that they don’t get to decide how the story ends. we see the in-breaking of christ’s reign, of life that somehow comes out of death, not in spite of the suffering of the world but among and through it.

What if Jesus were standing here? We could ask him our questions and hear what he would have us do about the problems and pain of our world. Instead, there’s you, and there’s me.

Jesus came into this world and now sends us out into the world. The Word became flesh and lived among us. God comes to us and still is doing something new—here, now. We are being made into people of the resurrection, the Body of Christ in the world.

God is with us, sending us out into the world as it is to find, proclaim, and create those moments of resurrection. This Sunday after the Ascension as we remember Jesus’ body being taken up to heaven, we are still here in this world, left with one another and Jesus’ words that this is our beloved home. So we keep gathering around the Word. We keep sharing bread and wine around this table. We go out to love this world God loves and live out the Gospel that Christ is making all things new in, among, and through us. And we keep singing the songs that tell us Christ is lord of heaven and earth.

Amen.