By and large, the commandments are not too difficult to understand. The 1st Commandment is clear enough: You shall have no other gods. I think we all understand that means we should not fear, love, or trust in anything more than God.
Words are powerful things. You’ve heard the popular playground poem: “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” False. Words can cause a whole lot of hurt. Words can do a whole lot of damage. In the book of James the human tongue is compared to a fire that can set an entire forest ablaze. With such capacity for destruction, we have to conclude that words are powerful things.
“We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.” (Nicene Creed) You recognize those words, don’t you? Those words are from the Nicene Creed. We confess them together each week. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder and we confess to each other and to the world that we believe that the Holy Spirit of God is “the giver of life.”
Our text this morning is a portion of a prayer that Jesus spoke to his Father on the night he was betrayed. This prayer is often called Jesus’ “High Priestly Prayer,” and in this prayer, he prays for himself and for his apostles and for his whole Christian Church on earth. It is a precious prayer to us, and we are blessed that the Holy Spirit saw fit to have this prayer recorded in the Scriptures, because in this prayer we hear what our Lord desires for his Church.
“I remember the last time I saw…” Have you ever said that? We often remember the last time we see someone, usually someone we love. We remember the last time we saw mom or dad, grandma or grandpa. Sometimes we remember exactly what they were wearing and exactly what they said to us. The image seems somehow “burned” or laser-etched into our memory.
A number of years ago I was talking to a man who had been one of my coaches in high school. Now, just to give you a window into the thinking of teenage high school boy who loved and lived sports, coaches are a “big deal.” But now, as an adult, I was talking to this man. And as our conversation ended, he called me something.
A remarkable thing took place in South Africa on December 3rd, 1967. On that day a doctor named Christiaan Barnard performed the very first human heart transplant. He removed from a patient a diseased and failing heart, and he replaced it with a strong and healthy heart.
It has been quite a week in our nation. If you watch the news you have seen hatred and discord. There has been violence and death. There has been rioting and looting. We have, in short, seen much that is bad in humanity. It can make a person weary and fatigued. Are you there yet? Does it all make you long to see something different? Something kind and virtuous and “good”?
It is now the third Sunday of the season of Easter, and by this point in the season, it might be the case that perhaps a little bit of Easter fatigue has begun to set in. Perhaps you’re growing accustomed to saying and singing “Alleluia,” so that using that word doesn’t seem as quite special as it did two weeks ago. Perhaps you’re getting used to seeing the paschal candle lit, so that seeing that little flame on the top today doesn’t strike you the same way it did on Easter Sunday.
Many years ago when I was still a Seminary student in Mequon, I found myself in a discussion with a person who did not believe that Jesus Christ is true God. They were zealously trying to convince me that he was not God! After bringing up parts of Scripture that clearly say Jesus is God, I brought up our text for this morning.
