First Lutheran Church, Detroit Lakes, MN
Easter 7 | 05.21.2023 | John 17:1-11
What we just heard was Jesus’ epic prayer the night before his crucifixion. I’m focusing on one verse – John 17:11:
And now I am no longer in the world, but [my disciples] are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name…so that they may be one, as we are one.
This close to his death, think of these words as Jesus’ last will and testament for his followers, and for the movement they would inherit—and what was his will for them and the movement?—that they are not just a bunch of individuals who practice faith, but that they are a community. As Jesus put it: “…[T]hat they may be one, as we [The Son & the Father] are one.” The mark of Christians should be: community.
That prayerful emphasis by Jesus makes me think of a problematic emphasis in American Christianity: American Christianity is OBSSESSED with the individual journey of faith, fixated on ‘personal salvation’ and ‘personal relationship’ with Jesus.
I hear it all the time: get yourself saved. My personal Lord & Savior. My faith journey…that feeds me and my life. These are the highly individualistic aspects of faith.
I’m not arguing that these individual aspects aren’t important or sacred, but I am arguing that things like personal salvation and personal relationship with Jesus do not reflect the whole concerns of Jesus for his followers. The faith for which Jesus yearned for his people was beyond merely personal.
Christianity faces a lot of threats – some real and most imagined (I am so sick of Christians playing the victim card when we are the most legislatively represented, most populous, and culturally acknowledged religion in the world, but I digress). Christianity faces a lot of threats – some real and most imagined – and one of them, for sure, is our excessive Christian individualism, where we turn our faith into something that affects only us personally – and forget about the community of faith that Jesus prayed for us to have, be, and serve – right here in John 17!
He didn’t pray for his disciples to have a personal relationship with him, but he did pray for them to be in community with one another.
That’s the distinction. We obsess about personal salvation and individual relationship with Jesus, and here Jesus yearns with his dying prayer for us to not just be personal, but interpersonal…not just individual, but communal – may they be one as we are one.
His dying emphasis was on community, and Christianity in this country is rampant with fixation on personal relationship and personal salvation, and personal satisfaction, and it misses the point of what Jesus came here for: that we might be better in relationship to one another!
Jürgen Moltmann, one of my favorite theologians, said that the ‘I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior’ epidemic “diminishes…the Gospel into…self-centered individualism.”[1] In other words, our obsession with faith being only personal requires no and develops no community…that style of faith is a betrayal of Jesus’ prayer today.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Lutheran theologian, took this even further. He implied that reducing faith to just personal salvation and an individual relationship with Jesus is a form of narcissism.[2] Christianity becomes only about my soul being saved, my fulfillment, my trip to heaven, my spiritual needs being met.
So, in his Letters & Papers from Prison, to admonish this concept Bonhoeffer wrote, “The church is the church only when it exists for others;” Jesus came here “only for others;” so, our following him is not just personal, and not just about an individual[3] “relationship…[but] a new life in ‘existence for [and with] others.’”[4]
If you didn’t follow any of that, let me recap: perhaps the greatest Lutheran thinker in the last 500 years argues that Christianity is not even Christianity when it’s only personal and individual.
Community is Jesus’ ideal.
Of course, a personal relationship and salvation with Jesus is by no means false, but it is forever incomplete…and it is not the full faith for which Jesus prayed. As a former professor of mine has written: “…the point of faith in Jesus isn’t just faith [in Jesus]…the point of following Jesus is that we might be drawn more deeply into…love for, service to, and sacrifice on behalf of [community].”[5]
So, folks, Christianity is not just another religion for obsessing about your individual fate and identity; you want that, find it in the astrological signs, because Christianity is not just about being individual consumers of Jesus, it’s also about being radiators of Jesus – in community, for the neighbor, in life together.
When in doubt, my friends, just remember our post-communion prayer, inspired by another seminary professor of mine: as Christ has been food and drink for us, we “become food and drink for one another.”[6]
That’s the prayer of Jesus. Amen.
[1] Jürgen Moltmann, “An Introduction to Christian Theology” (lecture, Duke University, Durham, NC, 1968) quoted in Wyatt Houtz, “Jurgen Moltmann: ‘I accept Jesus as my savior’ diminishes the Gospel,” PostBarthian, http://postbarthian.com/2017/04/26/jurgen-moltmann-accept-jesus-savior-diminishes-gospel/.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters & Papers from Prison, ed. by Eberhard Bethge, trans. by Reginald Fuller (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 286. *Anthropocentric*
[5] David Lose, “Spiritual but Not Religious,” In the Meantime, http://www.davidlose.net/2015/03/lent-5-b/.
[6] Paul S. Chung, Christian Mission and a Diakonia of Reconciliation: A Global Reframing of Justification and Justice, 3rd ed. (Lutheran University Press, 2008), 41.
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