The Promise Of A Presence
Sermon
Changing A Paradigm -- Or Two
Gospel Sermons For Sundays After Pentecost (First Third) Cycle C
Thomas G. Long, professor of preaching at Princeton Seminary, tells the story of teaching a confirmation class about the major festivals of the Christian Church year. The young people knew all about Christmas and Easter, but no one in the class could remember the significance of Pentecost. Tom explained that the Day of Pentecost was the day the Holy Spirit came from heaven with the sound of a rushing wind, and fire rested on the heads of everyone gathered in Jerusalem, and they all spoke in different tongues. He was, of course, reciting the story of Acts 2. At one point in this discussion a young girl raised her hand and announced: "I don't remember that. My family and I must have been out of town that Sunday."1
How about out to lunch? But the story does illustrate an important feature of all biblical stories, namely that they are sometimes hard to relate to the experience of the Church today. That is why instead of focusing this morning on the familiar story of Acts 2 which may confuse more than one confirmation student present this morning, we will deal with the Gospel text. The two are linked, of course. John 14 contains the promise, for which Acts 2 is the fulfillment. John 14 announces the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, while Acts 2 makes that gift a public act for the good of the Church. But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit.
Let me set the scene in John. The disciples had come to an upper room with their Lord to celebrate God's great deliverance of Israel by eating the Passover meal. And what happened that night upset those disciples, both Jesus' actions and his words. Before the meal even began, he knelt before each one of them with a towel and water, insisting on washing the grime from their feet. It was the action of a common servant, and yet, most intimate. Then, after the meal, he made predictions that shocked them: "I'm telling you the truth, one of you is going to betray me," he announced. "My children, I shall not be with you very much longer," he told them. And to Peter, the Rock, he said, "Before the rooster crows you will say three times that you do not know me."
We can just picture the disciples sitting in stunned silence. What Jesus had just done and said shook them to the core of their beings. And they probably never heard his words of promise. They were, no doubt, too confused to comprehend the gift he gave them that night of long ago, when he announced:
I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.
-- John 14:25-26
I can identify with those disciples because I've been there. I remember clearly being fifteen years old and being home as we received the news that my grandmother had just died. This was the first significant loss I can remember. Well-meaning neighbors and family friends flooded to our doors with all the platitudes: "Everything'll be all right." "She's better off." "Everything will work out for the best, you'll see." And I saw and felt that in the midst of the grief and shock my mother didn't believe a word of it. Her mother was dead; everything wasn't all right; the world had just come crashing down around us.
I know there are those here today who can identify with my experience. Circumstances cause our worlds to fall apart -- death, accident, terminal illness, divorce. Life comes apart at the seams and somebody standing on the sidelines, wanting to be helpful, mouths the pious pronouncement: "It'll all work out." But like the disciples, we don't see how because we just can't fully grasp the meaning behind the words.
But let's look at what Jesus said, and discover there, one hopes, some meaning for our lives. In response to the outcry of the disciples about his going away and not being with them, Jesus promised them a presence. In Greek the word is Paraclete, and it has been translated variously as "Counselor," "Advocate," "Friend," "Teacher." Maybe we are best served by understanding what the word means in its literal sense: "one who stands beside us." Jesus will be with us always, through the Spirit he will send to us. He will stand by us through all of life's trials and struggles. He will be there, standing beside us, in the good times and the bad. He will not leave us or forsake us or abandon us. He promises that his presence and all the power he commands will be with us through this gift of the Spirit. It is the promise he made to his disciples of long ago and to his present-day disciples in the promise of the water and word of our baptisms.
Elizabeth Hoffman Reed, a liturgist from Alexandria, Virginia, said it well in her commentary on this passage:
The term "Spirit" is hard to grasp, as we strain to name the side of God we perhaps least comprehend. But look at the word. We use it often. We say a person is low in spirits; we drink wine and spirits ... we comment on a dancer's spirited performance; we notice how a writer catches the spirit of the times ... The word comes from the Latin word for breath.
We don't have rushing winds and tongues of flame today. We celebrate something more ordinary but no less miraculous: the breath of God. Steady, rhythmic, constant. Animating every action, if we let it. Day in, day out, God's breath flows through us. Day in, day out, it keeps us going, fills us with vitality, gets us moving, keeps the activity going. Welcome to the ordinary, daily life of the people who have received God's Spirit!2
Ordinary, indeed! It is the promise of a presence with us always, even when we don't appreciate it or know it or maybe even want it. Being a child of God means we have one who walks beside us each day that we walk and down each path we stumble.
But notice what else Jesus does with those early disciples as recorded in John. Having made that promise, he gives them the gift of his peace, a peace far different from how the world understands peace. This is not a negotiated settlement kind of peace, nor an absence of conflict, nor life secured by a "Nuclear Proliferation Treaty" signed by all the nuclear powers of the world. This is God's shalom: wholeness and well-being. It is what Professor Fred Craddock calls "the confidence that God is God and neither our gains nor our losses are ultimate. It is the trust that God loves the world, is for all creatures, and is present with us in every endeavor to make real that love in concrete ways."3
This is the kind of peace that the world can neither give nor promise. It is peace that can come only from the one who gave his life so that we can have ours. It is peace that allows us to live and love in a world of international tension and conflict, where nuclear bombs are still being tested to scare neighbors. It is a peace that enables us to give while others hoard, that prods us to look at the needs of our neighbors even when it's painful for us. It is a peace that invades the closed circles of our private worlds and says: "Do not be afraid." It is, friends in Christ, the peace of God, given in Jesus Christ, that passes all our attempts at understanding.
We need such a promise and such a gift in our lives else we stumble and fall and have not the courage or the strength to ever get up again. We need the promise and the gift to walk the rough paths of this world, paths that can lead us into the valley of the shadow of death, paths through the tough terrain of ethical issues which need decisions, and difficult social problems that need our attention, paths with the twisting trails of unknown futures and challenges we have yet to imagine.
I liked the simple way one pious person prayed about all this:
Dear God,
So far today, I've done all right. I haven't gossiped, haven't lost my temper, haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or over-indulgent. I'm very thankful for that. But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to get out of bed. From then on, I'm going to need a lot more help.
Amen.
Don't we all!
Thank God for his marvelous promise and gift to each of us, for we trust and believe in a God who walks with us, who has breathed life into us, and who gives us his Spirit to live in this world. And it is that gift, that presence, that breath, that Spirit we celebrate this day of Pentecost. Amen.
___________
1. M. Thomas Norwood, Jr., Pentecost 1, Proclamation 4 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 7.
2. Elizabeth Hoffman Reed, Homily Service, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Silver Spring: The Liturgical Conference, 1998), p. 68.
3. Fred Craddock, John, Knox Preaching Guides (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), p. 111.
How about out to lunch? But the story does illustrate an important feature of all biblical stories, namely that they are sometimes hard to relate to the experience of the Church today. That is why instead of focusing this morning on the familiar story of Acts 2 which may confuse more than one confirmation student present this morning, we will deal with the Gospel text. The two are linked, of course. John 14 contains the promise, for which Acts 2 is the fulfillment. John 14 announces the gift of the Holy Spirit to the disciples, while Acts 2 makes that gift a public act for the good of the Church. But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit.
Let me set the scene in John. The disciples had come to an upper room with their Lord to celebrate God's great deliverance of Israel by eating the Passover meal. And what happened that night upset those disciples, both Jesus' actions and his words. Before the meal even began, he knelt before each one of them with a towel and water, insisting on washing the grime from their feet. It was the action of a common servant, and yet, most intimate. Then, after the meal, he made predictions that shocked them: "I'm telling you the truth, one of you is going to betray me," he announced. "My children, I shall not be with you very much longer," he told them. And to Peter, the Rock, he said, "Before the rooster crows you will say three times that you do not know me."
We can just picture the disciples sitting in stunned silence. What Jesus had just done and said shook them to the core of their beings. And they probably never heard his words of promise. They were, no doubt, too confused to comprehend the gift he gave them that night of long ago, when he announced:
I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.
-- John 14:25-26
I can identify with those disciples because I've been there. I remember clearly being fifteen years old and being home as we received the news that my grandmother had just died. This was the first significant loss I can remember. Well-meaning neighbors and family friends flooded to our doors with all the platitudes: "Everything'll be all right." "She's better off." "Everything will work out for the best, you'll see." And I saw and felt that in the midst of the grief and shock my mother didn't believe a word of it. Her mother was dead; everything wasn't all right; the world had just come crashing down around us.
I know there are those here today who can identify with my experience. Circumstances cause our worlds to fall apart -- death, accident, terminal illness, divorce. Life comes apart at the seams and somebody standing on the sidelines, wanting to be helpful, mouths the pious pronouncement: "It'll all work out." But like the disciples, we don't see how because we just can't fully grasp the meaning behind the words.
But let's look at what Jesus said, and discover there, one hopes, some meaning for our lives. In response to the outcry of the disciples about his going away and not being with them, Jesus promised them a presence. In Greek the word is Paraclete, and it has been translated variously as "Counselor," "Advocate," "Friend," "Teacher." Maybe we are best served by understanding what the word means in its literal sense: "one who stands beside us." Jesus will be with us always, through the Spirit he will send to us. He will stand by us through all of life's trials and struggles. He will be there, standing beside us, in the good times and the bad. He will not leave us or forsake us or abandon us. He promises that his presence and all the power he commands will be with us through this gift of the Spirit. It is the promise he made to his disciples of long ago and to his present-day disciples in the promise of the water and word of our baptisms.
Elizabeth Hoffman Reed, a liturgist from Alexandria, Virginia, said it well in her commentary on this passage:
The term "Spirit" is hard to grasp, as we strain to name the side of God we perhaps least comprehend. But look at the word. We use it often. We say a person is low in spirits; we drink wine and spirits ... we comment on a dancer's spirited performance; we notice how a writer catches the spirit of the times ... The word comes from the Latin word for breath.
We don't have rushing winds and tongues of flame today. We celebrate something more ordinary but no less miraculous: the breath of God. Steady, rhythmic, constant. Animating every action, if we let it. Day in, day out, God's breath flows through us. Day in, day out, it keeps us going, fills us with vitality, gets us moving, keeps the activity going. Welcome to the ordinary, daily life of the people who have received God's Spirit!2
Ordinary, indeed! It is the promise of a presence with us always, even when we don't appreciate it or know it or maybe even want it. Being a child of God means we have one who walks beside us each day that we walk and down each path we stumble.
But notice what else Jesus does with those early disciples as recorded in John. Having made that promise, he gives them the gift of his peace, a peace far different from how the world understands peace. This is not a negotiated settlement kind of peace, nor an absence of conflict, nor life secured by a "Nuclear Proliferation Treaty" signed by all the nuclear powers of the world. This is God's shalom: wholeness and well-being. It is what Professor Fred Craddock calls "the confidence that God is God and neither our gains nor our losses are ultimate. It is the trust that God loves the world, is for all creatures, and is present with us in every endeavor to make real that love in concrete ways."3
This is the kind of peace that the world can neither give nor promise. It is peace that can come only from the one who gave his life so that we can have ours. It is peace that allows us to live and love in a world of international tension and conflict, where nuclear bombs are still being tested to scare neighbors. It is a peace that enables us to give while others hoard, that prods us to look at the needs of our neighbors even when it's painful for us. It is a peace that invades the closed circles of our private worlds and says: "Do not be afraid." It is, friends in Christ, the peace of God, given in Jesus Christ, that passes all our attempts at understanding.
We need such a promise and such a gift in our lives else we stumble and fall and have not the courage or the strength to ever get up again. We need the promise and the gift to walk the rough paths of this world, paths that can lead us into the valley of the shadow of death, paths through the tough terrain of ethical issues which need decisions, and difficult social problems that need our attention, paths with the twisting trails of unknown futures and challenges we have yet to imagine.
I liked the simple way one pious person prayed about all this:
Dear God,
So far today, I've done all right. I haven't gossiped, haven't lost my temper, haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or over-indulgent. I'm very thankful for that. But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to get out of bed. From then on, I'm going to need a lot more help.
Amen.
Don't we all!
Thank God for his marvelous promise and gift to each of us, for we trust and believe in a God who walks with us, who has breathed life into us, and who gives us his Spirit to live in this world. And it is that gift, that presence, that breath, that Spirit we celebrate this day of Pentecost. Amen.
___________
1. M. Thomas Norwood, Jr., Pentecost 1, Proclamation 4 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 7.
2. Elizabeth Hoffman Reed, Homily Service, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Silver Spring: The Liturgical Conference, 1998), p. 68.
3. Fred Craddock, John, Knox Preaching Guides (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), p. 111.
