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SERMONS

Seventh Sunday of Easter
May 28, 2006
By Melissa Cavett, EFM Graduate

TO BE ONE, PROTECTED AND SANCTIFIED IN TRUTH

I gratefully and humbly submit that we four ordinary people are one, protected and sanctified in truth.

Jesus’ prayer for his disciples in John’s gospel lesson today is, “Holy Father, protect them …that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one…”

Like the legs of a table, we, the EFM graduates, the four of us, have a special relationship with each other. The top on the table includes the other EFM members, last year’s graduates, and our mentors over the last four years, Barbara McDonald, Suzanne Files, John Hamman, David Christian, and Don Chancellor. We four are one in the sense that we complement each other in our strengths and share each other’s burdens in our weaker moments. Sometimes it was hard to keep going; the commitment seemed too much. But when family matters, the death of a loved one, work, or other commitments seemed ready to break one of us off, the other three rallied around and hammered or glued the fourth back into place. No one of us can be defined without the others because we have four years of shared memories. Of shared theological reflection, EFM content, worship, and spiritual autobiographies. When we see each other, we see true friends with the love that Christ’s disciples must have shared.

No one of us is who we are today without the input and the encouragement of the other 3. In discussions of the Bible, theology, prayer, worship and ministry we have become stronger Christians, united in harmony and love for each other. For three consecutive hours once a week for four years our identities have been shaped by our shared experience. We have been protected by the tabletop of mentors and other EFMers just as surely as we have held them up.

Jesus also prays, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. For their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be truly sanctified in truth.”

To be sanctified means to be cleansed and made holy for sacred use. To be sanctified in the truth means to be cleansed and made holy for sacred use by hearing, reading, learning, and speaking the truth. In year one of EFM we read the Old Testament; in year two the New Testament. Our third and fourth year curricula included learning church history and theology from Augustine to the Lambeth quadrilateral. We have been blessed, as Jesus’ disciples were blessed, with love for each other and the truth of God’s word. We have had mentors who have cared for us, led us to truth, asked us to speak the truth, to dig deeply within ourselves to understand and find the truth. We have been sanctified by the truth of our pasts and the knowledge that we see each other as honestly as is humanly possible and still love each other and see each other as a child of God. We have been allowed to discover our true selves in God’s presence as we faced each other each Monday in prayer, discussion, laughter and sometimes argument.

How many hours have you sat face to face with anyone? How many times have you searched for the truth of God’s word with others with honesty and sincerity? Questioning the true meaning of your beliefs? Accepting the other’s and loving them even in disagreement or disappointment or delight? Searching for your heart’s deepest desire, trying to have the courage to acknowledge your true calling, willing to listen and accept the honest opinions of others, finding the truth of Christ in their faces.

If you truly want to be sanctified in the truth, protected and a part of one table, welcome to EFM.