May 26, 2019 “Serenity or Apathy?” – John 14:23-31

John 14:23-31
“Serenity or Apathy?”
May 26, 2019 – Sixth Sunday of Easter

On April 17, 2018, during Southwest Airlines flight 1380 from New York to Dallas the left engine on the Boeing 737 exploded. Debris broke open a passenger window and killed a passenger. Yet Tammie Jo Shults, an ex-Navy fighter pilot, remained calm and guided the plane down to a safe emergency landing in Philadelphia. You can hear her on the flight recording quietly reporting the plane’s status, accepting air traffic control directions for landing, and requesting medical assistance for injured passengers. Her passengers were extremely thankful for Captain Shults’ composure and competence under stress.

That kind of serene calm accompanied by clear-headed action is what we want in a pilot, a fire fighter, a surgeon, and all sorts of people to whom we entrust our lives and safety. It’s also what Jesus wanted and still wants for His people. He wants to give us the means to remain at peace in the midst of life’s stress, while still obeying His commands and responding appropriately to events around us.

Today’s reading from John is part of Jesus’ “upper room” conversation with His disciples just hours before His arrest and crucifixion. That was the stress and crisis they were about to face, with Jesus fully aware of what was coming; His followers much less so.

In John 14, Jesus responded to questions from three less well-known disciples. Our text now is His reply to Judas (not Iscariot the betrayer) who asked in verse 22, “Lord, how is that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” Judas wondered when Jesus was going to go public with His power and make the world see He actually was the Messiah, with God’s own authority.

Jesus’ answer in verse 23 and beyond is that it was not He who would demonstrate His power to the world. It was they, His followers, who would make Him known and thereby make God His Father known to the world. The way this would happen was, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

The first component in Jesus’ provision for His people in stressful times was His word, His teaching, which they are to “keep.” There are many facets to what Jesus taught and said, but these chapters of John show that love for God and love for others are at the heart of it. We keep His commands and demonstrate our love for Him by loving one another.

Yet keeping those commands, especially the command to love, under stress is not easy. In the heat of conflict, in moments of fear, when we’ve been hurt, or when the future is uncertain, it can be terribly difficult to act on our Lord’s word to love Him and love each other. Feelings other than love frequently drive our thoughts and behavior, those automatic emotional responses Kendal talked about last week. That’s why we constantly get together to rehearse what we’ve heard, what Jesus taught us.

I listened to an aviation expert explain how Captain Shults stayed calm in the cockpit of her damaged plane. The two big challenges she faced were loss of an engine and the explosive decompression of the cabin. But what to do in those two situations is constantly rehearsed in training. Pilots memorize the steps to take and are drilled on repeating them until it becomes second nature. That training, both from the Navy and from commercial pilot instruction, held good for Shults. So should our own training from Jesus. The more we listen to and rehearse what He says about love, the more we will be able to actually do it when faced with hurt or those who are hard to love.

The good news is that Jesus offers us more than training. He actually empowers that love within us by His own presence. It’s His second provision for us in stress. Verse 25 reminds them of His teaching, “I have said these things to you while I am still with you.” Verse 26 adds, “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.”

In other words, Jesus doesn’t just tell us what to do and then leave us to it, either to succeed or fail. He remains with us through the One who “comes alongside,” the literal translation of the word for “Advocate.” His Holy Spirit is there for those who believe in Him, constantly reminding us of what we’ve been taught. So like the best-trained pilots, like Luke Skywalker being guided by the voice of Obe Wan Kanobe, we may feel and hear Him calling us to remain calm and loving in the worst of circumstances.

Thus in verse 27 Jesus offers a third help, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.” “Peace” was a common greeting in Jesus’ time. In Hebrew, it was shalom, likely the word Jesus actually used. In the Greek in which John wrote, it was eirene. Either way, it was how you said hello or goodbye, wishing peace to others upon arrival or departure. But Jesus did not just wish peace for His followers, as the world does. He gave it to them, a deep and abiding peace such that He could go on to say, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid.”

We could say that the peace Jesus gives is “serenity.” It’s a feeling we enjoy. In all life’s hassles and trials, we wish for serenity that will carry us through it all, blissfully at peace while everyone and everything around us are at strife. You may know that famous prayer associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” But as I’ve been trying to say, the peace or serenity that Jesus gives to us is not just acceptance of the way things are. That’s abundantly clear even in the rest of that Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

We may begin with serene acceptance of unchangeable circumstance, but it’s not where Christian peace, the gift of our Lord, ends. Like Shults at the controls of her jet, we may accept the unchangeable circumstances of our situation, but then we are called by Jesus to do all we can to change what we can, for the good of both ourselves and others.

The Serenity Prayer was first spoken by the great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in a sermon at a small church in 1934. The story is that he had jotted it on a slip of paper from which to read. His friend and neighbor Howard Chandler Robbins was so struck by it that after the service he asked Niebuhr if he could quote it. Niebuhr just handed him the slip of paper and said he had no more use for it. Robbins published it in a church newspaper. From there it went out to the world.

What I’d like you to know is that Niebuhr was deeply convinced of the sinfulness of human beings and of our society. He wrote a book entitled Moral Man and Immoral Society, but he would later joke that a better title would have been “Immoral Man and Even More Immoral Society.” That sounds awfully pessimistic. There are a whole lot of “things I cannot change,” that need to be accepted in our lives and in this world.

Jesus Himself understood the power of evil and sin in this world. He talked about His own “going away” in verse 28 as something inevitable, necessary. In verse 30, He said, “I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming.” That “ruler of this world” was Satan, the force of evil. Jesus acknowledged, even accepted what evil was going to do to Him as He was crucified on the Cross.

You and I have to face the same reality. Evil in this world and in our own lives is huge. The deaths we remember this Memorial Day weekend are testimony to that evil. If you look at the news, people have died and been hurt in evil and absurd ways this week from the top of Mt. Everest to a school in India to an explosion in Lyon, France. You have your own illness or heartbreak or bills to pay. We have a lot of serenity to pray for.

Yet right in the heart of all that bad stuff Jesus gives us His peace and says about that evil ruler of the world, “He has no power over me.” The serenity which comes from Jesus goes beyond just accepting what we cannot change. Those things have no power over Jesus, nor over us when we trust in Jesus.

Niebuhr remained firmly convinced that the answer to “Immoral Man and Even More Immmoral Society” was the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Human beings can be changed and empowered by grace to make a difference in the world. He did so himself by supporting causes that aided refugees fleeing the Nazis in Europe and by challenging corruption in government like the Nixon administration.

Which is all why serenity is not mere apathy, not merely doing nothing when bad things happen to us or to others. Non-Christian philosophies like Stoicism or Buddhism are sometimes understood to teach us that the wise thing to do is simply serenely accept whatever happens and try to maintain your internal peace. But the peace and serenity of Jesus goes beyond apathetic acceptance. The gracious gift of Jesus requires us to get up and be active, making real changes for the better in ourselves and in the world.

I added verses 30 and 31 to the assigned lectionary reading for today because they help us grasp that the peace Jesus gives is serenity but not apathy. In verse 31 Jesus talks about what He does. He’s going to be crucified, but He’s not just accepting it as unchangeable, inevitable evil that is going to happen to Him. No, He goes to the Cross in obedience to His Father, doing “as the Father has commanded me.” It’s so that everyone can understand His love, His love for the Father and His love for us.

There’s one last bit to the text at the end of verse 31. You might think it has nothing to do with what Jesus has been teaching. He just says, “Rise, let us be on our way,” like a teacher might say, “Class is over.” But it’s a bit of a puzzle for Bible scholars because, if you read on a bit, you can see that class is not over. Jesus is not done speaking. He keeps on talking, instructing and praying for His disciples, for another three chapters.

Various solutions to the puzzle are proposed. One is to imagine that one of them asked Jesus another question or He thought of something else to say and He just kept teaching. Other scholars, more bold and perhaps more foolish, think pieces of the text got out of order and we need to rearrange the chapters so they make better sense.

The solution I like is, honestly, pure guesswork, but it helps us, I believe, get a handle on the difference between serenity and apathy here. The guess is that Jesus and the disciples did in fact rise and go out at this point. Jesus kept teaching, kept talking as they were walking through the streets to the place where, at the beginning of chapter 18, they went out of the city to the Garden of Gethsemane.

Some translations put that last bit of verse 31 as, “Come,” or “Come now, let us leave,” but “Rise” is more literal than “Come.” And I think that’s important. The peace of Jesus Christ, true serenity, is not just sitting still enjoying pleasant feelings. It’s a peace that also gets up and does something, that has courage to change the things it can. Jesus was rising to save and change the world, first by being raised up on a Cross, then by being raised from the dead. He called and still calls His followers to rise and come after Him. We too can be changed and change the world by dying and rising.

One of our pastors in the Hindustani Covenant Church in India was murdered last month. 58-year-old Pastor Nandu Tadokha was walking home from preaching in one of ten villages he served around Chopda. He was known as the “barefoot evangelist” as he walked his circuit and brought hundreds of people to faith in Christ. But as he walked that day he was attacked and beaten. In spite of his severe internal injuries he was able to walk to a hospital where he died several days later.

Other Hindustani Covenant leaders tell us that Pastor Nandu kept on praying even during his treatment at the hospital, “praying for the people who beat and injured him.” Those same church leaders said that they decided that their own response will be “not to hate these people but to love them and start some social development work in this village to show Christ’s love for them and to give peace to Pastor Nandu’s soul.” I would say that his soul was already at peace and that he had passed his peace on to those who knew him.

Pastor Nandu had been warned to stop preaching, but he serenely kept on getting up and walking to where people needed to hear about the love of Jesus. That’s true serenity. That’s courage to change what can be changed. That’s the peace of God in Jesus Christ filling up a heart and a life that has really listened and learned what Jesus had to say.

May you and I hear Jesus’ word today. May we hear His teaching about love and receive His gift of peace. May it give us serenity in Him. May it give us courage in Him. And may it give us wisdom enough to know when to get up and keep going wherever He leads us.

Amen.