Jesus' Brand Loyalty

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, May 21, 2023
John 17:1-11

    My grandma was someone who had a particular brand loyalty to certain products beyond compare with anyone else I know.  I have adopted my mom’s shopping habit of pretty much buying whatever is the cheapest or on sale; generic or store brand is fine with me!  Despite growing up on a farm during the Great Depression and being a thrifty person in other ways, my grandma bought Tide laundry detergent – if she had a coupon or not – never anything else.  I remember asking her about it once; she felt that strongly that no other laundry detergent could clean clothes and get stains out like Tide – and she wasn’t about to try any new stuff that came on the market, either!  The smell of Dawn dish soap brings me right back to my grandma’s kitchen.  There was always a tube of Aquafresh toothpaste on the bathroom sink.  And despite her love of baking – seriously, she never bought bread, she always baked bread herself – she never made pancakes from scratch, oh no!  It was Bisquick pancake mix or something else for breakfast.
    You know, we would tease my grandma about her fidelity to Tide, Bisquick, and other products, but all of us I’m sure have the brands we trust or buy more often than not because we know that the product is comfortable, reliable, good for our health or for the environment, or we just like it.  With so many shopping choices out there, sometimes the easiest choice is to buy a product we know we like, even if it’s a little more expensive.  I’m sure many of you have strong feelings about Coke or Pepsi.  Apple versus Android is another big one, right? You can meet the people who stand in line to get the latest Apple products like they follow a rock band or a religion, and then the people who go out of their way to use anything BUT Apple technology.  Sometimes it strikes me that we are more loyal to products or companies than we are to God; or at least, we’re surer of ourselves when it comes to trusting in a product we have come to love.  Our relationship to God in someone we cannot see can be more elusive and changing.  Sometimes we can easily feel close to God and recognize God’s faithfulness all around us, and other times, we may wonder where God is – is it worth still being loyal to God?  Is God still loyal to us?
    I came across an article recently in the New York Times about Christianity having a branding problem, because too many people associate what they see in the media or even a bad personal experience they’ve had with a church or a Christian person with the entirety of the Christian faith.  The messages we seek to share here at Faith, “All are welcome,” and “You matter to God, You matter to us,” can get lost or overshadowed by people’s faithfulness and trust in other things: sports, work, household chores, productivity in general.  Or worse, human sinfulness in the church can create deep mistrust for people in organized religion, which can translate into mistrust of God.  As people of faith, it is so important for us to continue to share God’s love in Christ in ways that remind people that God IS faithful, even when we are not.
In our gospel for today, Jesus says that he has made God’s name known, and that everything Jesus has is from God, so that we, believers in God, might know in truth that Jesus comes from God. God has sent Jesus as an incredible sign of God’s faithfulness to us!  For faithful Jews, Jesus the Christ, the Messiah and son of God, is a new name for the same brand, the one true God, and some in John’s community are struggling to trust that Jesus is synonymous with God the Father.  And so we hear in Jesus prayer for us as his disciples words that he has spoken to us many times before, “You can trust me!  I am with you.”
    For the past two weeks, we have heard part of Jesus’ LONG farewell speech to the disciples on the night before he is crucified in John 14, and today, Jesus moves on from preaching to the disciples to praying for them.  Different from the Lord’s prayer, Jesus is not teaching the disciples how to pray or what words they can pray.  Thank goodness, this would be a very long prayer for us to remember – 26 verses, a whole chapter in John 17!  Instead, the disciples hear Jesus praying for them.  Jesus prays for us! Jesus prays that we might glorify God in sharing his name.  Jesus prays that we might know him as the one whom God sends for us to be crucified and raised for us – God’s greatest gift for us. Jesus prays that we might be protected in God’s name.  And finally, he prays that we might be one, as God Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three and yet one in the Holy Trinity.
    This is a powerful thing just in itself to know that Jesus prays for us – to know other fellow Christians are praying for us!  Jesus’ prayer is that we might trust him more fully as truly the only “brand” so-to-speak worth our eternal loyalty.  Other things fail, our favorite brands change and disappoint us, companies merge and go out of business.  Jesus says, “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  This is Jesus’ prayer for us!  And this means eternal life is knowing and being known by Christ now! We don’t have to wait until we get to heaven and see God face to face, we can experience the power of a relationship with Christ right now, here on Earth.  Christ’s mark of the cross, Christ’s “brand” if you will, is on us, for us to encourage one another and share.
    Jesus’ prayer that we be one as God is one at the end of our gospel for today is also a challenge.  It would be silly for us to not be friends with someone because they prefer Pepsi and not Coke.  But even as Christians, our loyalty to political parties or our stance on hot-button issues sometimes become barriers for deeper relationships.  We make allegiance to other things more important than our faith in Christ.  The existence of tens of thousands of Christian denominations testifies to the fact that often we focus on what divides us rather than on what unites us.  This is not to say that we should pretend that we are all the same.  God created us and this world with an amazing array of diversity!  Sharing differences of opinion with one another can strengthen our community and our common unity.  I would never have discovered Smuckers peanut butter if someone had dared question my loyalty to Jif, and encouraged me to try something else, for example!  Learning to agree to disagree is a holy, faithful practice, when we agree to put Christ first and let God’s love be what unites us.  Today, Jesus prays for us to be strengthened in our faith and trust in him together – that is where we find unity.  
    This morning, knowing that Jesus prays for us, we can come before him and ask him to pray for other things beyond this beautiful prayer in John 17.  We can pray for deeper trust, protection, knowledge, and unity in Christ ourselves.  United in Christ by faith, let’s let our unity glorify God and strengthen our confidence as Christians, to boldly share our brand, that we belong to Christ.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.