The Gift: A Love Story

We arrive in the pews on Sunday morning as a motley crew. One family is smiling, though the beads of sweat under the collar tell us that just ten minutes ago they were yelling in the car. Why is it so hard to get ready for church, no matter what time the service starts? There’s a woman wondering if her friend two pews up has gained weight or was that just an unfortunate wardrobe choice? There’s a man who’s already begun the usual fantasy that helps him survive church. Right now he’s on the ninth hole at Augusta getting ready to putt after Tiger Woods. There’s a man in a suit who looks prosperous, but he wonders if he’ll ever be able to buy a new suit now that his business has taken such a downturn. There’s a woman wondering if she can make it if she leaves her husband. There’s a little boy who loves church because it’s the only time that his parents are both next to him for more than five minutes.

There’s a little girl drawing pictures of horses as she wonders whether people will be nice to her in Sunday school. There are people here who’ve already been reading Scripture and people who’ve already had their first drink. There are people who lose all track of time, lost in worship, and people who have already calculated how long each part of the service will take and when we’ll get out if the preacher actually quits on time.

Yes, it’s just us. Double-minded, double-hearted, compromised and full of mixed motives—and that’s just the preacher. It’s just us, a rag tag collection of humanity who all happen to be disciples of Jesus Christ. Nothing has changed. It was ever thus. The Almighty Triune Creator of the universe has chosen to make himself known through a community made up of the likes of us. The gospel of salvation in Christ, the thundering news of triumph over sin and death, the very hope of the human race, is going to be passed along through people like us, or not at all. You may well wonder, “So God, when you set it up this way, what were you thinking?”

We are the church, the ecclesia, the assembly in one particular location of those who are connected through the gospel across all time and space. In the midst of our flaws, our preoccupation with trivia, our failings and our foibles, we are nevertheless members of the mystical body of Christ. We who are so earthly bound have a seat in the heavenly realms with Christ. We who are so focused on the now have a task of eternal significance. There are no trained Biblical characters somewhere else doing all this holy work. It’s just us, and people like us that comprise the world-wide fellowship that is the body of Christ. As we spend the next three weeks contemplating the mystery and majesty of the church as described in Jesus’ prayer in John 17, we do so remembering the reality. From the first disciples until now, all Christ’s members are flawed people. Jesus was not naïve. The extraordinary things he says about us were made knowing full well who we are—after all, one of the inner twelve had just betrayed him.

So knowing that, let’s dig in. As we study John 17, we realize first of all that it’s not about us, and it’s all about us. We are caught up in a larger story, a greater love, a higher drama. Our participation is not about our great choices, or our worthy deeds, or individual quests. The real story is the love that is the Triune God. The action is what is going on when by sovereign decision, the eternal Father sends the eternal Son to enter the world where a lost and wayward humanity dwells. The love between the Father and the Son has gone on for all eternity. Our story is about what happened when that love between Father and Son started to get played out on the field that is the world.

Don’t let talk of the Triune God shut down your mind. Most of us are functioning unitarians—we don’t really think of the Trinity even though we affirm this in our creeds. But let us think this through. God is love. That is the most important thing we know about God; our very lives depend on that fact. Love involves relationship. God is a being in relationship. Within the one God are three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each is fully, truly God. Each is his own person. Yes, this bends the mind. It sends one man back to Augusta National and another off to the mental shopping mall. But stay with me and consider the story. Imagine them just for a moment as distinct persons. The Father loves the Son and has from all eternity. He delights to share his divine life with him. The Son loves the Father, and delights to please him, to give himself in obedience. But obedience is not the way we think of it between boss and employee, servant and master, coach and player. Obedience is between equals, who find delight in freely offering themselves to one another.

Now it is the nature of love to be turned out from oneself toward the other. Love is only love when there is someone to love. Imagine that as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit loved one another in perfect joy and delight and fulfillment, they decided that this love could be magnified if it overflowed in creation. Let us create an entire universe filled with creatures whom we have made, who have a real existence apart from us so we can love them. Let us make human beings as most like the image of God. They will be male and female, finding their completion in loving one another and bringing forth new life, just as we do. And they in turn will be able to enter the joy of our love by loving us and one another.

Then, at the right time, we will bring this love that is between us right down into their midst. The Father sent the Son through the Spirit to enter the world in human flesh and bones. The Son loved his Father as he had from all eternity, though now he did so from inside our humanity. From his position as the man Jesus, the Son loved his Father and obeyed him and rejoiced in his love. We humans got caught in the crossfire of love between the divine persons.

Then the Father determined to give his Son Jesus a gift. A love gift. He gave Jesus the disciples. The Father gave the Son the church as his own possession. In some places, Scripture speaks of the church, the community of disciples, as the bride of Christ. We are the Father’s gift of a bride to his Son. In other places, Scripture speaks of the church as members of Christ’s body. He is the head and we are the members, the parts of his body. The church is the gift of the Father to the Son, of his body still in the world, still enacting his will. In other places, the church is spoken of as the temple of God, a house of worship built upon Jesus Christ as the foundation. We are the gift of the Father to the Son, of a beautiful, living temple where the Son may be glorified. We are the gift of the Father to the Son.

But also, we are the gift of the Son to the Father. The Son came to us as Jesus Christ in order to find us when we were lost, to heal us when we were sick unto eternal death. He came to save us from our sin and misery. He came to live the obedience and love that we cannot live on our own. Then the Son gives all he has accomplished to us. He gives us his righteousness. He gives us his obedience. He gives us his Word. He gives us his eternal life. Claiming us, transforming us, Jesus offers the church back to the Father. “You have given them to me, and I have taught them your Word, I have given them our love and life. So I offer these disciples back to you Father, as my offering of love to you. I have cleaned them up, cleansed them, and offer them now as spotless and pure through me, a gift to adorn your glory.”

We are the double gift. We are the gift of the Father to the Son. We are the gift of the Son to the Father. And in the process of that gift giving, look what happens to us. We get found when we were lost. We are called out of the darkness and into the light. We get healed when we were broken and battered. We get forgiven and our hard hearts are replaced with new hearts, new hearts that can respond to the love of God and to one another.

The third person of the Triune God also enters the picture. He is the one who empowers the human Jesus in his obedience and love of his Father while on earth. The Spirit is the love by which Jesus could offer his life on the cross and the Spirit is the power of the resurrection. This Holy Spirit is the gift of the Father through the Son to the church. Jesus sends him to dwell in our hearts, to be the glue between us and Christ. The Spirit is the mortar in the temple of God that holds us, the stones, together on the foundation. The Spirit is the sinews in the body that keeps us, the members, attached to Christ our Head. The Spirit is the pledge of love, the ring on the finger of the church, who is the bride of Christ, that indicates we are promised and sealed for our union with our husband, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit is the great pentecostal gift to us. But also, we are the Spirit’s gift to the Father and the Son, as he labors in us to make us more and more like Christ. He transforms us and empowers our ministry—as a love gift to the Father and the Son.

This is what we ordinary scrubeenie Christians are caught up in. As you’re doodling on your bulletin or noticing the dress on the woman in the next pew, or counting the organ pipes, you are also caught up in a love story great beyond imagination. The Father is giving you to his Son. The Son is giving you to his Father. The Spirit is being given to you and the Spirit is giving you to the Father through the Son. That’s what the church is: the bride, the temple, the body, the gift.

Well, if you’re like me, perhaps there’s a little independent streak in you that is beginning to ask: “So what choice do I have in any of this? I mean, what about me? This doesn’t seem to be about me. I seem to be just a participant in someone else’s love story. I didn’t choose this; I got chosen.”

As my friend Cary would say, “You got that right.” It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s about the love story of the Father and the Son and the Spirit that opened up to include us. It’s about an eternal love that reached down to scoop us up into it. It’s about the God who came to save us, and declared, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” We can fight against this reality all our lives, and all we like, and choose to live in misery. But it won’t change the reality. If you are here as one who trusts in Christ, it is because God chose you. He willed your salvation. He called you and included you. He has stooped to pick you and me off the pile and say, “You will be my gift to the Son. You will be my gift to the Father.” The choice we have is not about whether this is a reality. The choice we have is whether we will view this as a violation of our human authority and sovereign individual choice and thus curse it forever. Or whether we will see that this is the greatest news, the greatest joy, the deepest assurance, the highest love we can ever know.

Jesus began his prayer, “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him.” Once again, the story is first of all about what is going on between the Father and the Son. The hour for glory has come. Jesus is on the edge of arrest, trial, beating and crucifixion. He is on the edge of glory. As he prays later, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.” For the glory of the Son of God begins with his humiliation. He is God come to receive in himself the God-forsaken brokenness and rage of our human condition. He is God come to obey to the point of laying down his life that we might live. He will glorify, bring honor and praise to his Father by his obedience. The Father will glorify the Son in exalting him through death to life everlasting.

Jesus affirms in his prayer, that the Father has given him authority over all flesh. Jesus the obedient one is the one with true power of choice, with power to enact his will, the one with whom all creatures have to do. Part of this authority is to give a gift. By now that shouldn’t surprise us. The Son has the authority to give the gift of eternal life. On whom does he confer such a gift? To those whom the Father has given him.

Then Jesus in his prayer defines eternal life. He prays, “And this is eternal life, to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Knowing God means entering a relationship. It means entering the love of the Father and the Son that has opened out now to include us. He calls us: Will you come and follow me? Will you consent to my joining you to myself? Will you be my bride? This is eternal life, to enter into a living knowledge of the Father and the Son in the Spirit.

In his prayer, Jesus asks, “Father glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” Then further along as he prays for us, Jesus says, “they have come to know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.” Jesus affirms that the story began before the world was made. The Son and the Father have been glorifying each other. The crucial choice the disciples made was to believe that this man before them was actually the Son sent from the Father. He actually existed before his conception. He came from the Father and was returning to the Father. This belief, this ability to see the larger story of the love between the Father and the Son opening out into our world, is what brought them into that living, knowing of the true God. It brought them into eternal life.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be talking about all that flows from such living knowledge. But let’s close today with this one great thought. Just before he began this prayer, Jesus told his disciples, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have tribulation, but take heart; I have overcome the world.”

Being caught up in the larger story of the Father and the Son is the path to peace. The world may produce tribulation. No, the world will produce tribulation. The world will wear us out. Death will invade us. We will seem to be lost. But, when we are caught up in the larger story, we see beyond the moment. “In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.” The story of the Son who came from his Father is the story of passing through death into the victory of eternal life. In his obedience unto death, the Son overcame the world.

So in him we have peace. For it doesn’t all depend on us. It’s not about us. We are the Gift. We are the Gift of the Father to the Son, brothers and sisters to him whom he can make his own, to whom he can give eternal life. We are his glory. And we are the Gift of the Son to the Father, those who are included in the Son’s obedience, righteousness, life and glory. We get it all as he offers us to his Father, members of his own body, a sanctuary of praise of which he is the foundation, the Son’s own bride. We are caught in the crossfire of this divine love story.

All that is what is going on amidst the bulletin shuffling, the nodding, the distractions, the trivia of our lives. We are the Gift. Who would’ve thought?

This sermon first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 13, No. 3 (May/Jun 2007).