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dmmowers · 7 years

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The Spirit of truth

People are confused about the Holy Spirit. We talk and sing and preach about the Father and the Son, but we hear much less about the Holy Spirit than the other two persons of the Trinity. The Pentecostals, who formed me as a Christian and taught me to read Scripture seriously, talk more about the Holy Spirit than maybe any other Christian group, and they helped me become familiar with the Holy Spirit. When I was at Bible college, sometimes we would linger in prayer after a worship service, asking the Spirit to make the presence of Jesus real in our lives. That was a wonderful thing, but that didn't mean that there wasn't confusion about the Holy Spirit even there. My first year, I lived across the hall from a man who had been in the Army prior to college. He spent most of his leisure time in the weight room, and he looked like it. He also had a great sense of humor and a winning smile. One night, we were in the cafeteria at dinner sitting across from each other when a young woman walked up to our table and said to him, "We've never met, but the Holy Spirit told me that you and I are going to get married." He smiled back and said, "That's funny. The Holy Spirit hasn't told me that."

We Episcopalians might scoff that some of our evangelical friends would talk about the Holy Spirit in those terms, but we are not immune from our own confusion about the Holy Spirit. A few years ago, I was reading a newsletter from another diocese that had a high school student's account of going to a youth summer camp. "When I got to camp and met the counselors and the other campers," the student said, "I just felt the Holy Spirit right away." On another occasion, after a bitter debate where personal insults and attacks got thrown back and forth between sides, a General Convention narrowly passed legislation related to the way the Episcopal Church thinks about sexuality. After the very, very close vote, someone who supported the winning side said to a church news outlet, "The Holy Spirit has led us to embrace this new understanding."

So: Confusion. Does the Holy Spirit give us insight into the future in deeply personal terms? Does the Holy Spirit give us an emotional experience when we meet other people or participate in a profound moment of worship? Does the Holy Spirit work through a majority vote, such that the people that "win" are the people who have the Holy Spirit and the people that "lose" are the sad sops who don't have the Spirit and don't even know it?

So this morning, I'd like to try to clear up some of this confusion about the Holy Spirit. This morning's gospel reading comes right after the reading from last week, where Jesus promised the disciples that he would be in relationship to them for all of eternity - that he would be their Way through death to the presence of God on the other side. In our passage today, Jesus moves on to what their lives will be like. Jesus is about to die; the disciples don't know that he is going to be raised from the dead. So Jesus isn't preparing them for his death with these last sermons in John 12-17 but rather for his ascension - you might have noticed that even though Jesus has been raised from the dead and most of us in this room claim to follow him, none of us have actually, physically seen Jesus. At least, I don't think so. Maybe someone in the choir. If Jesus has been raised from the dead, why haven't we seen him? Because he has ascended into heaven. He has gone to the right hand of the Father to rule over the world, to have dominion over every country over every facet of our world.

Jesus' disciples, like Jesus himself, are all Jews, so this business about Jesus going away is particularly troubling. In Jesus' time, God's presence was with his people in one particular place: the Temple, in Jerusalem. People could go into the temple to worship before the presence of God, but that worship was mediated through priests and the Temple authorities that had become corrupt. The presence of God was there, but the Spirit of God was only poured out on particular people who had a special vocation - the prophets, for instance. God was all-seeing and all-knowing, but the only way to approach God was through worship of the Temple.

So Jesus is preparing his disciples for what it will look like to not have him around anymore, and he says that he will not leave them as orphans. In other words, Jesus isn't going to go away and leave them to the status quo. He had come into the world as God, and now that he was heading back to the Father, he couldn't simply send them back to the way things were before. He tells his disciples that he "will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever." At first blush, this doesn't seem to solve anything. Who is this Advocate, and why does this Advocate's presence mean that we are not left as orphans? Isn't Jesus still just as absent as he otherwise would have been? Aren't the disciples just back to the same situation, where they worship God at the Temple through the mediation of corrupt authorities and where the presence of God is relatively unapproachable and removed?

II.

Last week, I spoke with a pastor friend who is a few years into planting a new church in the far northern suburbs of the Twin Cities, about 35 minutes from downtown Minneapolis. His church has a hundred or so people, they couldn't help but notice two years ago when a giant evangelical megachurch decided they were going to move in down the street and hold services in the town's high school. The megachurch's largest building, the mothership, if you will, was in a town about 25 miles away, and over the last few years they had built several satellite campuses like this one. Their pastor would preach at the mothership every week and appear on a video screen at each of the satellite campuses. The very first week the megachurch met at the high school in my friend's town, they had 500 people at the service. After being there for two years, the megachurch decided that they needed their own building in that town, so pulled out their checkbook and spent $18 million to buy and renovate an abandoned K-mart in the town. Once it was ready, they held their first service in the K-mart, and grew from 500 people meeting in the high school to over 6000 people in that old K-mart.

I asked my friend what he thought about the new megachurch. "The megachurch is perfect for our community," he said. I did a double-take. "What do you mean, perfect? Aren't you worried that they will draw families from your church? Or that people who might have otherwise joined your church might join their congregation instead? Couldn't that make it more difficult for your church to survive?" He said, "People move out here to these suburbs because they don't want to know anyone. They want bigger houses and more toys; they don't want to know anyone. This church is the church for people who don't want anyone to know who they are. You come in, you sing songs in the dark, you consume the worship experience like you would any other product, and you get in your car and leave. You never have to be in relationship with anyone, you never have to disagree with anyone, no one even has to know that you're there. You're totally anonymous, just like the suburbs."

You wouldn't think that a church of this size and denomination would have much in common with your typical Episcopal church, but it does. There are lots of Episcopalians who like to think of themselves as being spiritual without being religious. They are Christians, sure, but it's not really anyone else's business what their faith is like, because that's a private matter between them and God. That view presumes that what's important about Christian faith is occasionally sneaking in the back door for worship, but not often enough that anyone actually knows who we are, much less what's hard in our lives. This is no different than the people who attend church in that old K-mart north of Minneapolis; it says that our friendships aren't a part of being a Christian. No one can support us in our griefs or in our losses because no one knows who we are. From the perspective of the New Testament, this is completely wrong.

III.

In our reading this morning, Jesus says, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever." But that's not actually what the Greek says here. What I just read to you is what it sounds like in formal, Yankee English. We need some help from our friends down South to actually say this the way the Greek says it. "If y'all love me, y'all will keep my commandments. He will give y'all another Advocate to be with y'all forever.

Jesus is addressing his disciples in the plural, not in the singular. He's saying the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, will come to be with the disciples as a collective. The Holy Spirit will come to the disciples as a group, not as a collection of individuals. The disciples will not be orphaned when Jesus goes away because the Holy Spirit is coming to them to bring them the presence of Jesus. No longer will the disciples have to go to the temple to worship God; that's fairly obvious. But what is less obvious is that they will not even need the physical presence of Jesus with them in order to worship him, because the Holy Spirit comes to bring Jesus to them. "In a little while," Jesus says, "the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you will also live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you; those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

Even though Jesus has gone away to the Father and the world no longer sees him, his disciples will see him. Because he lives, his disciples will also live. On that first Pentecost, when the disciples receive the Holy Spirit as Jesus had promised, they will know that Jesus is in the Father, and that they are in Jesus, and that Jesus is in them. Those who love Jesus will be loved by the Father, and Jesus will love them and show himself to them. The Holy Spirit comes to bring Jesus' presence to the disciples as a community so that they will know Jesus' love in their relationships, and so that they will be unified with each other in that love.

IV.

The Holy Spirit is sent to the first disciples in community. The Holy Spirit is still sent to disciples in community. The Holy Spirit comes to us today to make Jesus present and to give our community the spiritual gifts we need to take up Jesus' mission in our world. We see the presence of Jesus through the Holy Spirit in, among other places, the relationships of trust that we build with one another. As we know others and are known by them, as we share our pain and our baggage with others, the Holy Spirit makes Jesus present to us through each other. We can't just scurry in the back door at two minutes to mass and scurry out just before coffee hour four times a year and expect that we will know the deep presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Sure, the Spirit can make Jesus present in many ways, even to people who are radically unfaithful to Jesus -- think of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus in Acts 9 -- but the way that we are promised that the Spirit will be present is in the fellowship between the disciples. The Holy Spirit comes to us when we are together as Jesus' disciples. When we worship together, when we live our lives in ways that are deeply vulnerable to other Christians, when we serve the poor together the Holy Spirit makes Jesus present to us.

This doesn't mean that all churches do this well. Vulnerability is hard. I am here at Trinity Church in part this morning because I was once part of a church that failed to foster this kind of friendship in some pretty fundamental ways. We have former Catholics and Lutherans, former Nazarenes and evangelicals, even some other Episcopalians who are here because at some point they were hurt by a local church. Just like I did, each of us made decisions to leave where we were and to eventually make our way to Trinity. I'm not at all suggesting that we were wrong to do that. Sometimes churches are toxic. Sometimes churches have tragically little interest in being the kinds of communities that are deeply shaped by Jesus.

But Jesus' vision for the church, and for Trinity Church, is that we would share deeply of our lives with each other. In this sharing, the Holy Spirit takes those of us who have nothing in common other than trust in the cross of Christ and makes us a family. Jesus' vision for church is that every difference that could drive us apart is made secondary to the witness of the Holy Spirit in our lives together: a vision where the people who win a vote at a convention genuinely comfort and care for those who lose. A vision where the people who live in a mansion share their bitterest disappointments with the people who live in a trailer park and are comforted by them. A vision of the church where people who think that Christian marriage is between men and women befriend a gay couple not to try to change them but rather to go on vacations with them. This is a vision of the church where love is a verb: where the people of God take action to care for each other, to care not just for the people who are like us but indeed for the people who are not like us. As the people of God take care of one another, the love of the church spills out just like the love of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit spilled out into the creation of the world. The love of the church spills outside of the church to our neighbors, to those outside our church, to the down-and-out, to the abused, to the people who can never catch a break.

May this church be a community that is marked by the presence of Jesus brought to us by the Holy Spirit. May this church be a community where people are safe to know and to be known, and to deeply share their hopes and successes, their failures and their hurts with each other. Thanks be to God that Jesus Christ, ascended into heaven, has asked the Father to send us an Advocate to bring us the presence of Jesus forever; in spite of all our failings and unfaithfulness, in spite of our wandering and our carelessness, Jesus has promised us the Holy Spirit, and the love of that Holy Spirit will never be stopped.

Amen.

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