The following sermon was delivered by the Reverend John W. Howe, Rector of Truro Episcopal Church, Fairfax, Virginia, on Sunday, May 18, 1980. The sermon is entitled, That They Might Be One, and the scripture reference is John 17. 

This 17th chapter of John's Gospel has sometimes been called the Holy of Holies in biblical literature. the holiest place in all the New Testament. Because here, just on the eve of his betrayal and trumped-up charges being levied against him, his beatings, the defection of his friends, and finally his crucifixion, and all that lay on the other side of that, in terms of death, the grave, and hell, On the eve of all that, Jesus prays.

And we have a glimpse here into the heart, into the mind, into the concerns of the Lord Jesus, perhaps more graphically unveiled for us than anywhere else. You know, we were studying last fall for several weeks in a row what we call the Lord's Prayer, and I remarked at that time that that really is a misnomer. It really isn't the Lord's Prayer at all, not a prayer that Jesus himself ever had to pray.

Jesus never once had to say, forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those of others. That really ought to be called the disciples' prayer. His friends came to him and said, Lord, teach us to pray.

And he gave them that prayer. If you want to read the Lord's prayer, the one that Jesus himself prayed, this is it. John chapter 17.

Here we see, perhaps more deeply than anywhere else, into the heart and mind and concerns of the Lord Jesus as he comes to the completion of the work that he had come to do here on earth. As we study this prayer, and you might just like to look at it with me in John 17 for a few minutes this morning, as we study it, we discover immediately what you probably would have expected, That even at such an hour as this, his concern is not for himself, but for others. Overwhelmingly, the burden of this prayer is for the church, for those, he says, whom thou hast given me, rather than for himself.

And in particular, four things leap out of this prayer. Some of us have studied them before. They bear repetition, and I'll try to be brief about it.

but I'd commend it to your further study go back and chew on it meditate on it and allow yourself to really get into this prayer if this is the concern of the Lord Jesus for his church and for you and me perhaps there's a key here to what our concerns ought to be and I would commend the study of this chapter to you in your leisure with your family in your shepherding group and so on four things in particular that he prays for us number one that they might be kept that they might be kept the sense of that word is to be protected to be shored up he says I have kept those whom thou hast given to me and none has been lost except the son of perdition namely Judas that the scripture might be fulfilled I have kept those whom thou hast given to me, but I'm not going to be able to do that anymore because my ministry here on earth is over and I'm going to be with the Father. So he prays, Lord, Father, now it's up to you to go on keeping them. He relinquishes back his own ministry into the hands of the Father.

You keep them, he says. And there are two aspects to that. Verse 11.

He says, keep them in thy name. In thy name. In thy nature.

In thy calling. Keep them in the commitment which they've already made. We're the ones who own the name of Christ.

He says, keep them at the level of responsiveness to what that calling entails. Let them live up to what they call themselves. Keep them in thy name.

And then verse 15, keep them from the evil one. I think it's very interesting that Jesus specifically says, I do not pray that you would take them out of the world. You and I sometimes wish he would.

Take us out of this veil of tears, out of this arena of conflict. But he says, no, I don't pray that you would take them out of the world. I pray that you would keep them in the world.

in a world of trials and tribulations, a world of temptation, a world of idolatry and false gods, a world of corruption, I pray, Heavenly Father, that you would keep them. Doesn't that give you some real comfort to sense that Jesus himself was praying that the Father would keep you and keep me? That word has a somewhat negative aspect.

It's keep them, protect them, hold at bay. those things which would cause them to capitulate, those things which would cause them to compromise, to give in to the evil one. He prays secondly, much more positively, much more vigorously, that they might be sanctified.

Look at verse 17. Sanctify them in the truth. And then immediately he goes on to say, Thy word is truth.

Sanctify them in the truth. Sanctify them in thy word, for thy word is truth. To sanctify something is to set it aside for God's purposes.

It's not so much a statement about the thing itself as it is the use to which it's put. For instance, we take communion vessels, and before they're consecrated or sanctified, they're just like any other vessels. They may be a little bit more splendid, more carefully wrought, more expensive materials may have gone into making them.

But there's nothing special about them in and of themselves until they're set aside for God's use. And when we sanctify them, when we consecrate them, we say, never again will these be used for common everyday purposes. Now they're for God's purpose.

When we ordain someone to the ministry, we're not saying that person has arrived. We're saying in a special way, that person is being set aside for God's ministry. The word sanctify is the same root word as the word saint.

And you know, I trust you know, that in biblical usage, all of God's people, all of them are called saints. That's not just the few. All of them.

We are called to be saints. Saint Ed over here. Saint Carol.

called to be the sanctified ones, the ones set aside for God's use. That's what we're called to be. And that's Jesus' prayer for us.

Not for our own use. Scripture says, don't you know that you were bought with a price? You don't belong to yourself.

If you've named the name of Christ, you belong to Him. It's for His purpose. And if to be sanctified is a matter of being immersed in the Word of God, then I want to suggest to you that our usefulness to the Father is going to have a direct corollary relationship to the extent to which we're spending time in the Scriptures.

Sanctify them in the truth. Thy Word is truth. St. Paul wrote to Timothy, he said, The word of God, all of it, is inspired and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

Why? That the man of God, the woman of God, might be completely equipped for every good work. That's its purpose.

If we're called to be saints, the sanctified ones, if we're called to be set aside for God's youth, Our youthfulness to him is going to be a direct correlation to how greatly we're spending time in the word. To whether or not we're saturated with it. Allowing it to permeate our being.

And then he says that they might be sent. Actually, this is not so much in the form of a request as it is a declaration. Verse 18, as thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

And he says, for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth. As you sent me into the world, so I'm sending them. With the same mission, the same purpose, the same calling.

We're to be doing the works of God in the name of Christ. Think about it. What did he come for?

to demonstrate the integrity of God to prove his trustworthiness to establish as Tom Skinner was saying last weekend a living model of the kingdom of heaven here in our midst that's the very first thing that Jesus said as his ministry began repent for the kingdom of heaven has come among you he says as the father sent me to establish that and to win the lost back into a relationship with God so I'm sending you. Do you consider yourself that way? Do you see yourself as one sent with a mission?

What your life is about is not winning the rat race. Somebody said you win the rat race, it just proves you're a faster rat. It's not a matter of providing for your family merely.

as important as that is it's not a matter of just being a good upstanding member of society as important as that is but it's a matter of being sent by the Lord Jesus into the world with the very same mission that was his and then fourthly we come to the paragraph that I read just a moment ago and I suggest to you that of the four things this is far and away the most important notice in verse 20 that he explicitly says I do not pray for these only in other words the twelve and the other disciples who were following him at that time I do not pray for these only but also for those who believe in me through their word generation after generation down through Christian history who have heard the witness of those who have gone before and have come to believe in him I'm praying for them. Jesus, in his hour of greatest need, was praying for you and me. That ought to be a real encouragement.

The book of Hebrews says, He never liveth to make intercession for the saints. That's what he's up to right now, is praying for you and me. And here's what he prays.

That they might be kept, that they might be sanctified, that they might be sent, and especially that they might be one. Notice how he repeats that over and over. As a matter of fact, he begins the whole prayer with it.

Look back in verse 11. And when he says, Keep them in thy name which thou hast given me, keep them that they may be one. And then we come into the latter portion of the prayer, and over and over, that they may be one.

And the measure of oneness is the same degree of unity which Jesus himself has with the Father. Perfectly one, he says. As thou art in me, and I am in thee, so also we may be in them, and they in us.

Perfect oneness. You think about the unity that Christ had and has with the Father. It's a oneness of being.

A oneness of calling. A oneness of perspective. A oneness of purpose and mission.

A oneness of discipline, of holiness, of glory. To the extent that he can say, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. Philip says, Lord, we'd be content.

If only you'd show us the Father. And Jesus says, Philip, how is it possible that you've been with me so long and you still don't get the point? If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.

I and the Father are one. That's the degree of unity that he's talking about. And his prayer, get this, friends.

His prayer in this moment of greatest seriousness, when the heart of Jesus is most graphically unveiled for us, the innermost concern of our Lord is that we would share that unity. Not just with Him, not just with the Father, but with each other. The Christian church needs to stand and weep for our division.

down through the ages in the present generation the party strife the denominational bickering and if the truth be known the division in any given congregation where there are people who aren't speaking to each other who don't know each other he says I pray that they would be one with the perfect unity between the father and the son and then he says something if possible even more extraordinary than that the reason for that unity is that the world might thereby come to believe the gospel that they may be perfectly one that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them can you imagine that Jesus would tie the success of his mission and his enterprise to the quality of our relationship with each other. That's what he prays. He says it's not a matter of all the buildings you build and all the sermons you preach and all the books you write and all the seminarians you graduate and all the missionaries you send out and all the hospitals you establish and all the public works that you engage in.

It's a matter of the quality of relationships between the members of the body of Christ. When you begin to vibrate with that degree of unity, people will come into your midst and they'll say, wow, what is that? And how do I get in on it?

It's not a bad follow-up for Shrine Mont. Some of you weren't able to be there last weekend. And I need to try to share with you something in a very brief time of what we experienced there, those of us who were privileged to go, because I believe, and I think the overwhelming majority of people who did go to Shrine Mont would agree with me, that God was speaking to us in an extraordinary way.

And we need to try to share that with you. I can't possibly do it justice in the few minutes this morning, but I would urge you, I would beg you, if you weren't able to be there, get a hold of the tapes and listen to them, that you might share it somewhat vicariously. I know the shepherding groups are buzzing with what we heard and shared together.

Tom Skinner was God's messenger to us last weekend, challenging us on a level that I don't think we've been challenged before, at least not corporately, to think through imaginative, creative, innovative, radical ways to find expression for this unity, to make it visible, to work it out in practice, to become the body of Christ, caring for each other, supporting each other, ministering to each other, meeting each other's needs, being vulnerable to each other, getting to know each other in a way that takes our breath away. By Sunday morning, he got disturbingly specific. He was talking about such things as moving, physically moving closer together.

Because if you're scattered all over the place, you can do very little together. We get together for an hour on Sunday morning. But you can't really share somebody's life if you're living on the other side of town from them.

Move closer to the church. Or if that's not possible, move into areas where there are already clusters of families already committed to each other, already committed to the body of Christ, and beginning in a given neighborhood to share something of a community spirit. He said, why is it that if in a given neighborhood you already have a number of families, why does every one of them have to have their own lawnmower?

Why not buy one or two lawnmowers and share them and thereby release the monies saved for the purposes of the kingdom of God? Let me tell you, that's the point at which it began to get exciting. Because he was not playing simply upon our selfish interest that we would save money for ourselves, that we would accumulate more material wealth as individuals and families, but that we might engage in a strategy together that would thereby release additional resources for the kingdom of God.

So why is it that everybody has to have his own automobile? Or two, or three? Why couldn't we have some sharing of automobiles?

Or at least, at the very least, carpooling. why couldn't we establish or at least some of us get together and establish a food cooperative and save enormous percentages of what we all of us have to spend on food and release that to Christ's purposes in building his kingdom or a furniture co-op or a clothing co-op or a machinery co-op Tom had done his homework and he could point to instances around the country where churches are making such experiments and he could refer to situations where budgets are doubling, tripling, quadrupling without any appreciable loss in the lifestyle of any of the members he's not even at that point talking sacrificially Billy Hutchison was taking notes like crazy he began to see a vision of the body of Christ working together corporately meeting each other's needs being sensitive to each other's situation offering my gifts to meet your needs and looking to you to offer yours to meet mine and in the process liberating resources for reaching out beyond ourselves to build the kingdom of heaven. Doubly imperative in a time of increasing stress coming upon our nation and our world.

Last weekend, a letter arrived on my desk written by someone who was not at Shrineland someone who is not part of any of that discussion and I thought I'd share a little of it with you this person said that there were several folks praying about our parish and our church and they felt that God was saying something to them and they wanted to share it with me and with us that when Truro says it wants to spend as much on others as we spend on ourselves, the word ourselves means basically buildings, grounds, expenses, and salaries. We feel God's saying that in the light of the warnings he has sent us, we should begin seeing ourselves as the entire body of Christ at Truro. And that means the church should begin to somehow take a vital interest in things like helping people buy homes next to the church or next to other Truro families.

We should begin encouraging our people to want to live next to other Christians and to make that their first priority in house hunting. We should begin working with groups that emerge, setting up food co-ops, furniture, machinery purchasing co-ops, travel pools. Vacation house swapping, talent and training sharing, which might involve swapping instead of cash payments.

For instance, the dentist works on the teeth of the lawyer in exchange for writing up a will. The tax expert does someone's income tax in exchange for the use of a vacation home for a week or so on. That is the pooling of gifts and abilities as a conscious thing.

In other words, we really feel that God is calling upon us to expand our sense of community, not so much by putting families together in the same house as by getting them to live near enough to each other and, if possible, the church, to be able to really help each other out. Singles need to be included more in families or actively helped in establishing households with several singles, and the church could have someone who stayed constantly in touch with single persons and with openings in houses in which several singles lived, helping them to get furniture and so on when needed. Furniture pools, clothing pools, talent pools, etc. The building of a school is certainly part of this.

Maybe even buying the Mosby or getting people together to rent an entire floor or corridor so as to have a Christian rental community. Of course, that's just a coincidence. I wonder if you believe with me that God is saying something to us.

That He's challenging us as a people, as a parish, as the family of Jesus Christ, to get more bold and dramatic and serious about our allegiance to Him and to each other than we've ever dreamed of being. I want to respond to this challenge on three levels. The first is very easy.

The second is a little bit more ambitious. And the third will probably blow you away. The first is that if you go downstairs after this service for a cup of coffee, you'll notice on the wall of the undercroft two very large bulletin boards that have been put there by the fellowship committee.

One of them is labeled needs, and the other is labeled gifts. And the idea is this, that you might be aware of some particular need in your own life, in your family, in your neighborhood, something which just possibly somebody else in the body of Christ could supply. It may be a piece of furniture you need and somebody else has it and they're not using it anymore.

It may be some expertise with fixing a piece of machinery. It may be babysitting service or it may be singing lessons or who knows what it is. You have a need.

And we'd invite you to fill out a little card and just put your phone number on that card and put it on the need board. And perhaps somebody reading that board would feel a prompting from God, yes, I could have the privilege of meeting that need. The other bulletin board labeled gifts is just the other side of the coin.

And maybe that you've got something that you can give, something material, or something in terms of a talent or a skill, And you just need to know somebody who needs it and wants it. And so you fill out a little card with your phone number on that and put it on the other bulletin board. And in this very simple way, we can begin to improve our communication and become more aware of the needs and the gifts within the body of Christ and begin to minister to each other in such a way as that.

Secondary, it concerns the fact that in such a transient situation as most of us find ourselves in around the greater Washington area, there are always, always people who would love dearly to move in closer to church or move into a neighborhood where they're aware that a number of Truro families are already living and beginning to experience something of community and houses come available and they get sold and we didn't even know it. Couldn't we help each other begin to become aware when there are houses available or when there are interests on the part of people to move into a given area. Mike Ford is calling a meeting of all of the realtors of the parish to see whether or not they can devise a strategy to simply make such information available to those who are interested in it.

In the meantime, if you have a house that you would like to sell or rent or if you're looking for a house, you could begin by letting the church office know of such a situation. And we'll do what we can to pass that information on. And thirdly, I really believe, and have believed for four years, with growing intensity, But some of us ought to get together in this parish and form a corporation to buy the Mosby building.

I want you to think with me for just a moment about housing available for those who want to move nearer to the church. About housing available for those who would feel called of God to live at a level that would be somewhat less than they might be able to afford. out there in the world in order that their resources might be released for building the kingdom of heaven, for extending the gospel throughout the world.

Of housing available to singles who would love to be in a community situation. Of housing available for the emergency needs which come up all too frequently as families experience crisis situations and they need some place to go for a little while until they sort themselves out. As housing available for the elderly who don't need a nursing home but do need the protection and the structure of others living around them.

A building available where a number of Christian businesses could hang out their respective shingles. Housing available for conference ministry adjacent to the church. Well, you might think that's the most off-the-wall idea ever heard it might just be that God stirs something in you that we could do that together Jim Whitaker and I have been talking about that for a little over a year and as you know God has given Jim some free time and Jim is calling a meeting of anybody who would like to discuss that particular prospect we would invite you to give him a call if you're even vaguely interested in seeing whether God would open up such a thing to us.

Let's just summarize. In the hour of His greatest need, Jesus prayed for the church and His prayer was that they be kept, that they be sanctified, that they be sent and especially that they be one. And I believe it's incumbent upon us and God is saying this to us in a very specific and challenging way to discover ways of manifesting and expressing and developing that unity.

If we don't respond at this moment it may not come around in exactly this way. again for quite a long time. You know, when Moses and the children of Israel reached the border of Canaan, the land of promise, Moses sent in 12 spies to check out the land.

And two of them, Joshua and Caleb, came back so excited they couldn't contain themselves. They said, you can't believe what we saw, a land flowing with milk and honey. It is the most glorious piece of real estate you have ever laid eyes on, and it's ours for the taking.

And the other ten said, Oh no, no. There are giants in the land, and we're no match for them. And the opinion of the ten prevailed. And a whole generation of God's people missed the heritage that God had for them.

They spent the next 40 years wandering around in the wilderness until all of them died off and it was their children and their grandchildren who went in to receive the land of promise. Not quite. There were two out of the original band of approximately three million who left Egypt.

Two who actually made it into Canaan. Do you know who they were? Joshua and Caleb.

They're giants in the land. Sure, God can send plagues on the Egyptians. He can drown Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea.

He can part it before us and we can walk through dry shod. But we're no match for the giants. They doubted it.

And they missed it. And I know what your response is to this challenge. It's exactly what my response is.

There are gigantic problems. Don't disturb me. believe it and receive it doubt it and do without it let's bow our heads Father in heaven we thank you for bringing Tom Skinner among us last weekend and as we've been challenged as a people and as a parish, we ask You to give us wisdom to determine our response to that challenge.

Lord, we don't want to run ahead of You and attempt impossible dreams, but neither do we want to lag behind You and miss the land of promise. Give us courage and give us wisdom, for we ask it in Christ's name. Amen.

Amen.