I Have Said

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Trinity Sunday, Year C

Jerusalem Baptist Church, (Emmerton) Warsaw VA

John 15:26-16:15

²⁶ When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. ²⁷You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.

16 I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling. ²They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. ³And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me. ⁴But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them. “I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. ⁵But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ ⁶But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.

⁷Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. ⁸And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: ⁹about sin, because they do not believe in me; ¹⁰about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; ¹¹about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. ¹²“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

There’s a rule of thumb worth jotting down when studying scripture:  If a phrase appears three times in close succession, it might be good to sit up and take notice.  In the passage this morning, Jesus does that in the first 6 verses of chapter 16 of the Gospel according to John.  So, we sit up and take notice. 

When we do that, we first pull back from the minutiae, the details of the verses and get a sense of the context from which we have lifted this section and read it.  In John’s telling of the Gospel, virtually the whole second half of the book is dedicated to the last two days of Jesus’ life and public ministry.  This is towards the beginning of that part.  Jesus is speaking to his disciples after having shared supper with them – the last supper, as it were – this whole section is made up of extended discourses by Jesus delivered to his disciples.  In some ways you almost get a sense that he is cramming the last doses of wisdom into them because he knows he will not be with them much longer.  And he says that pretty plainly, repeatedly, even in this brief section – in chapter 16 verses 5, 7 and 10 (read underlined phrases).  It is almost painfully repetitive in retrospect, looking at it and reading it from our perspective – post resurrection – but it underscores the degree to which Jesus sensed the disciples’ resistance to the idea that he, their Rabbi, mentor and Master, should be the victim of a betrayal that would result in his being tried and found guilty of blasphemy and treason and executed by crucifixion.  And yet it is a recurring theme in each of the Gospels to varying degrees, that the disciples didn’t ‘get’ that Jesus had to give himself for them in order to fulfill his purpose for coming to earth.    

Now we move back in a little closer to the text, to see just what it is that Jesus is saying.  In the first instance, he says he’s told them what he has told them to keep them from stumbling. 

Imagine, if you will, an underground grotto, a tunnel, or a cave.  No lights, no lamps, no skylights.  Solid darkness.  Someone has walked through it often enough to be able to navigate the more-or-less finished floors.  More or less means they have only partially been leveled.  There are still some dips, there are still some rocks that were too big to move out of the way whose points still come up through the dirt floor and make for a nasty surprise if you don’t know they are there. 

This person who has the knowledge of what it is like to walk through the cave without the aid of a light offers to tell you how to avoid knocking your head or slamming into a wall or tripping on a rise in the floor… would you want to listen to what he or she has to say?  Common sense would say yes, wouldn’t it?  In some ways this is what Jesus was offering the disciples.  He knew they were going to be facing some of the same experiences that he was getting ready to face in the next few hours, so he tells them what they need to know in order to get through it.  He knows they will be thrown out of their places of worship.  He knows they will most likely be killed.  And he knows WHY it will happen: because of him.  Because of the Good News that God is no respecter of persons, that salvation is offered to all freely, but that it comes at a price. 

Jesus gave his life for ours.

Not coerced, not blackmailed, not negotiated away from him in exchange for our salvation, but freely offered, freely given.  And that brings us to the second and third instances.  Jesus knows that it will seem to the disciples – and all those who will be persecuted for the sake of the Gospel – that in those times when they are facing their darkest moment – even to the point of death – it will FEEL like those forces arrayed against the Gospel message are winning.  And it would seem to make sense, wouldn’t it?  After all, we can’t DO any more once we’re dead, right? 

While they may not have been able to actively engage in the propagation of the Gospel after death, HOW those martyrs of the faith faced death, HOW they dealt with persecution and torture and ridicule DID make all the difference in the world.  It was their witness – their testimony to their faith as they faced those final moments that impressed the very people who were doing the persecuting, the torturing and the killing that eventually began to turn people to the truth of the Gospel. 

And Jesus includes that truth in the very next breath.  He tells the disciples he is going away, but his absence does not mean that they are being abandoned – in fact it means the opposite – in order for them to remain connected to Jesus he is going to have to leave them to allow the Holy Spirit to come to them. 

And here is where we see the relational heart of the Gospel.   Jesus says he is returning to the Father, and that the advocate – the comforter – the Holy Spirit is coming in his place.  But whereas Jesus was constrained by his very physicality – that he in fact had a body like you and me – it limited his ability to enter into communion with his followers – in other words, just as we cannot know each other’s hearts because we cannot enter into each other’s hearts and read each other’s minds, Jesus, while scripture tells us he COULD tell what a person’s true heart was, he could not necessarily be aware of everything that was going on around the world while in his physical form.  The Holy Spirit has no such constraints.  Jesus could only be in one place at one time.  The Holy Spirit has no such constraint.  Jesus had to rely on what people could hear come out of his mouth in order to communicate to them the will of God.  The Holy Spirit had no such constraint.

To put it in another way, it is the difference between going to hear a speech in a civic center, or watching it, along with the rest of the nation or perhaps the world, on television or listening to it on the radio – everyone tuned to the same station and listening intently. 

There is a reach that the Holy Spirit has that would elude us if we relied solely on what we could hear from an individual or what we could figure out simply from reading scripture. 

Scripture tells us that the Holy Spirit is our intercessor – our go-between between God and us – that communicates for us when we don’t have the words to express what our hearts are yearning for – and that at the same time he – the Holy Spirit – serves as the one who communicates God’s life and word to US. 

I have to tell you, I struggle with using the male pronoun because, being Spirit, there is no gender attached to the third person of the Trinity, and yet, in the English language there is no gender-neutral way of referring to a person as anything other than ‘he’ or ‘she’.  Please know that even though I may not employ the gender specific pronoun that does not take away the personhood of the Holy Spirit.  He or She is still as personal as you or I.  The Spirit knows, cares, moves, prompts, challenges, and generally treats us like our best friend would – always calling us to be and to do our best, always expecting the best from us and loving us regardless of whether or not our best is what is given, done, or experienced. 

So on this Trinity Sunday, as we celebrate the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit of God in our lives and in our midst, I would invite you to remember that critical aspect of our faith: that we are not simply following a life-ethic, or the teachings of a prophetic, religious genius who was killed at a relatively young age in a backwater territory of the Roman Empire nearly two thousand years ago.  That we are not simply taking those teachings and stripping them down to the underlying principles in order to make them relevant in today’s culture.

We are, in claiming our faith in Jesus Christ, claiming that we are in relationship – in a living, changing, deepening, broadening GROWING RELATIONSHIP with him.  And THAT overrides everything else. 

A brother whom I deeply respect came up to me earlier this week and told me this: Christianity has nothing to do with philosophy.  It has to do with knowing what God wants us to do and doing it.  I told him I couldn’t agree more.  But I would go a little further in the explanation, beginning with a question:  How do we know what God wants us to do?  Where is our clearest picture – our clearest image of God?

In Jesus Christ. 

So we get to know Jesus, and in that knowing, we get to know God.  And we find out that God wants us to be in relationship with God just as Jesus was in relationship with God, just as the Holy Spirit is in relationship with God. 

And what clicks for us is that God has provided, in the person of Jesus and through his CURRENT absence – a way to BE in relationship with him – THROUGH the Holy Spirit!

So here is where we become more than observers at the party, standing along the sides of the room, leaning against the wall and wondering how it would feel to get out on the floor and dance… because God in Christ through the Holy Spirit is extending a hand to each of us and saying come, let’s dance together!

Let’s pray.