Those of you who experienced Catholic education as it was a number of years ago will be glad to know that many of its features are alive and well in the training program for deacons in our diocese. One of those features is that there are certain phrases and things they say that you hear so often that the words become a part of you, whether you want them to or not.
One of those things I heard often over the past 3½ years is that deacons have the mission of doing their ministry “in the world,” that that is where their special work is to be done.
But there is another characteristic of the old Catholic education that survives in the diaconate program and that’s that students frequently think things that they know they’re better off not saying. And I have to say that this phrase about deacons doing our work “in the world” often bothered me. First of all, I would think, everyone is here in the world; there’s nothing special about deacons being here. But the other thing I would think is that I’ve seen the world, and it is not a great place to work. You can have it.
So when I saw this gospel reading, this mysterious reading from John, from Jesus’ last talk with his disciples late on the night of the last supper, where he says that he is not asking the Father to take them out of the world, I knew I would have to think today about what this might mean.
On the one hand, of course, it’s perfectly obvious that we haven’t been taken out of this world. Where else would we be? But in fact, if we are honest, even on a happy day like today, we don’t like it.
Because in one way or another, we think the world isn’t the right place for us, or that this isn’t exactly what Jesus should have done. After all: The people around us are so imperfect; everyone disagrees about everything; they resist our attempts to help them and fix their problems. The world is a mess; it has problems that can’t be fixed; and it ignores everything we believe. The church — and I hope I am not scandalizing anyone — the church is imperfect too, and I won’t go into detail, often no better than everything around it, and of course, we think it should be. And most of all, being in the world means we are imperfect; we have problems that don’t go away, and failures that we seem to fall into over and over again, despite everything.
What are the results of feeling this way about where we are? Sometimes we get angry, since nothing around us meets our expectations. Sometimes we latch onto some person that we think isn’t like the rest of the world, and we hold everything up to that standard. But mostly, we use the imperfection of this world, and of ourselves, as an excuse. We are not good enough. The world is not ready for us to get to work in it. And so, in one way or another, we check out. We keep ourselves busy with everything without being involved in anything, or we sit back and wait for conditions to improve.
This reading stands in our way. Because the message of this reading is that this world is where we belong and where we do our work. More important even than that, we are not here making the best of a bad situation, stuck here because we have no alternative. Because it isn’t that Jesus is sending his disciples someplace frustrating just to see how they do, it’s that he loved them, and loved being with them here.
He loved their imperfections, and he loved — and still loves — this imperfect world so much, that he stayed up half the night on this night before he died talking with them for hours, reluctant to leave this world we sometimes fail to love.
Now I am not one of those people who is here to say that the world is a great place if we could only change to a more positive outlook. As the great English writer G.K. Chesterton said, if we sometimes feel that we are not at home here in this world, that may be because this world is not our real home. A positive outlook has nothing to do with it. It is far from the best of all possible worlds, and we are not all fine just the way we are. But we are loved the way we are. The gospel, after all, is not about people becoming perfect, or making the world OK. But about imperfect people who stayed imperfect, but put aside their resistance and decided to do something about following Jesus, whether or not it worked out the way they wanted it to.
So this world is the only game in town. And if you look back on the people and the situations that have made the biggest difference in your life, I think you will have to agree that they had their warts. We will only see God through the imperfect things of this world, and the imperfect people like us who are in it. It is hard to see the world as holding so much potential. Yet we have to try. Because that seems to be the way that Jesus would still like to see all of us: with the potential, even in our imperfection, of doing truly amazing things.