Jesus promised his disciples that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth. May we be wise enough to follow!
Here’s a transcript:
As we come to Trinity Sunday, I’m thinking about the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel (John 16:12-15), yet another portion of Jesus’ “Farewell Address to his Disciples.” In this section, Jesus promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit once again.
This time Jesus described it as the Spirit of Truth that would lead them into all truth. I hate to say it, but in the twenty-first century we have not valued all truth, have we? We live surrounded by half-truths. We live surrounded by outright deceptions.
Many of them take place in our entertainment. I’m not talking about, you know, fictional stories: I’m talking about the advertising that accompanies them. Their claims to make our lives better are, at best, exaggerated. At worst, they’re outright falsehoods. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve purchased over the years that simply have not lived up to the claims. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve purchased over the years that I’ve come to regret, for the waste of my time and effort and, yes, money, trying to make them work in the way they were claimed to work.
Sadly, we in the United states have come to believe that the leaders we elect lie to us and do so routinely. Sometimes we believe it’s only the opponents of our selected political party that lie to us, but in general we tend to say something like, “Well, politicians will lie.”
Jesus told his disciples that that was not an acceptable state of affairs. Jesus said that the wisdom of God, the work of the Holy Spirit, was the work of truth, is the work of truth. You and I do not need to accept lies. We need to insist upon truth. It is what we are due. It is what the Holy Spirit has come to bring us, or to lead us to.
So as you watch the advertisements, as you listen to the leaders, insist upon truth. And if you don’t get it, insist further upon truth. And if you still don’t get it, insist further upon truth.
It is, truth is, what the Holy Spirit will lead us to if we follow the Spirit’s guidance and take our steps along the way.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
When the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost, it came to a much bigger group than expected.
Here’s a transcript:
This coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, so I’m thinking about the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1-21, Luke’s account of the first Christian Pentecost.
Pentecost is originally a Jewish holiday, so Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem were already gathered and prepared to celebrate God’s gift of the Law. As Luke describes it, there came the sound of a mighty wind. They saw something that looked a little bit like flames dancing upon their heads. Most importantly, they went out into the streets and started to tell the story of God’s love in Jesus Christ. They spoke that story in languages that they did not understand, but that countless others around them did.
When they were challenged about being drunk early in the morning, Simon Peter got up and quoted the prophet Joel that men and women, young and old, would see visions and dream dreams. Today, said Peter, these things have been accomplished before you.
In various places throughout the Scriptures it is said that God’s spirit is rare, selective, uncommon. It was the experience of the early Christians that God’s spirit was present, not just to some, but to all. To the young, who might be disregarded. To the old, who might be discounted. To the men (frankly, we tend to expect men, if anybody, to be filled with the Spirit). And to the women, who we still, to this day, tend to doubt whether they have the capacity to receive God’s Spirit.
Joel said they would. Peter said they did. The experience of the church for the last two thousand years says that they do.
Young and old, men and women, see visions and dream dreams.
It is the task of the Church to try to understand the visions and dreams. It is the task of the Church to discern the meaning of what our men and our women, of what our youth and children, of what our kupuna say that they have seen or dreamed. It is not the task of the Church to say through whom God will speak. God has made it clear but that can and will be anyone.
It is up to us to listen.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Jesus made a pretty good journey to see and hear John the Baptist.
According to Google Maps, that’s about a 95 mile journey. They estimate it would take 35 hours to walk that distance. Jesus probably spent four days on the road. I would guess he was hot, dusty, and pretty uncomfortable when he arrived.
But he had to see John.
As I remarked during Advent, John the Baptist was a celebrity at the time. He was a rock star. He’d… made a splash.
Sorry about that one.
The point is that people came to see him. Some were probably the celebrity seekers who have to get close to the Big Name. John the Baptist, Governor Pilate, it didn’t matter. Go and see. Some were certainly the suspicious religious authorities, the people who get perturbed when unauthorized people start saying religious things. Remember that John promised forgiveness with baptism, and forgiveness was something that happened when you made sacrifices in the Temple. I’m pretty sure there were priests saying, “That’s not right.” So they were there.
Some were the folks who desperately wanted some sense of God’s forgiveness, who were aware they’d said and done things they shouldn’t. Some probably wanted to turn their lives around. Some probably intended to go and do the same things again. People are people, after all.
Quite a few, I imagine, felt a gap in their spirits and didn’t know why. Quite a few weren’t satisfied with life in their land. Quite a few felt the need for a big change. Maybe this John the Baptist would bring it. Could he be the Messiah?
It was a crowd full of people asking very different questions.
Among them stood Jesus. We don’t know what questions rolled around in his head. I think we know he felt the need for a change, because he went down to be baptized, and changed his life.
Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Jesus’s baptism inaugurated his public ministry by identifying with what Mark describes as ‘the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem.’ He allied himself with the faults and failures, the pains and the problems, and with all the broken and hurting people who had flocked to the Jordan River. By wading into the waters with them he took his place beside us and among us. Not long into his public mission, the sanctimonious religious leaders derided Jesus as a ‘friend of gluttons and sinners.’ They were right about that.”
Jesus’ baptism was marked by the presence of the Holy Spirit. All four of the Gospel writers described the Spirit descending “like a dove.” All four identified this moment as the beginning of Jesus’ teaching and healing ministry. All four mentioned the similarities between Jesus’ message and John’s. Not one said that Jesus ever baptized with water.
Jesus, after all, would baptize with the Holy Spirit.
Thought of as a dove, the Holy Spirit is a comforting presence, don’t you think? Doves make soft sounds. They don’t scream like mynas. They don’t fuss like finches. I agree that they don’t sing as sweetly as mejiro, but their gentle coo comforts.
The Holy Spirit means that we followers of Jesus are never alone. We don’t face the sorrows and struggles of the world unaccompanied. We don’t deal with sadness alone. We don’t bring our strength alone.
Is that different from anyone else? Honestly, I believe that God accompanies everyone, of every faith, and of no faith. Hopefully, we’ve been given a better understanding, and better understanding does mean that we should be better able to appreciate the Spirit’s presence, to rest upon the Spirit’s comfort, and to receive the Spirit’s support. I’m pretty sure that we Christians are as capable of closing ourselves off to the Spirit as any non-believer. I’m also pretty sure that when we open our hearts to the Spirit, we are filled to overflowing.
As Dan Clendenin continues, “Many malignant forces try to name and claim us. Baptism reminds us that first and foremost, above and beyond all other claims — however legitimate or oppressive — we belong to God. He knows and calls us by name.
“We don’t belong to our boss or the bank. We don’t belong to an abusive spouse or our addictive impulses. We’re not defined by sickness, success or failure. We don’t belong to the political propagandists or the advertising industry. We’re not the sum total of our poor choices, painful memories, or bad dreams.”
We are none of those things. We are children of the Spirit.
O comforting fire of Spirit, Life, within the very Life of all Creation. Holy you are in giving life to All.
Holy you are in anointing those who are not whole; Holy you are in cleansing a festering wound.
O sacred breath, O fire of love, O sweetest taste in my breast which fills my heart with a fine aroma of virtues.
O most pure fountain through whom it is known that God has united strangers and inquired after the lost.
The Holy Spirit didn’t let either John the Baptist or Jesus alone. They were always accompanied by the Spirit – but they were also moved, led, driven by the Spirit. After his baptism, Luke wrote, Jesus “was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil.” John the Baptist, as we know, didn’t preach in the towns. He baptized at the edge of the river, away from the cities and the villages. The Holy Spirit cares for us, but not necessarily for our comfort.
And… I should also mention the gap that our lectionary editors have left us in Luke’s account. You may have noticed that we jumped over verses 18, 19, and 20. Here’s what they say:
“And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.
“But when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of his marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife, and all the other evil things he had done, Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison.”
It was an odd place to put that part of the story. For one thing, you could read it that John had been arrested before baptizing Jesus, which doesn’t match any other gospel account. I don’t think that’s what Luke had in mind. Instead, I think Luke meant to highlight the risks of following the call of the Holy Spirit.
As Karoline Lewis writes at Working Preacher, “The imprisonment of John reminds us of what happens to those who tell the truth, or, to those whose words we don’t want to hear. This will certainly be the case for Jesus. Hearing Jesus’ first sermon, the hometown folks want to throw him off a cliff. Jesus will be rejected by his friends, his family, his community before he even does anything.”
The Holy Spirit may lead us into places we do not want to be.
That might be into a public space, calling for change in the way we assist those without homes. It might be into a family conflict, where nobody really wants to listen to a peacemaker. It might be into advocating at work for people who will be affected by some action of the company but whose voices have not been welcomed. It might be to learn a new skill, one that doesn’t come easily, to make a home a little brighter.
It might be to take on a new message and purpose in life.
Melissa Bane Sevier writes in her blog, “Purpose is something that unfolds over time. It is rarely something we can fully grasp at any one moment, because we never know what new episode is around the next corner, outside our current vision. What new opportunity, or new problem or challenge, may present itself tomorrow? In our rapidly changing world, it’s rare that many of us will stay in one job for our entire working life, or live in one place, as many of our parents or grandparents did. How do we find our purpose when we have less rootedness?”
Jesus took over a month in the wilderness to discern his new purpose. None of us will find it in a moment.
We are Children of the Spirit. We are created by God and we are adopted by God. We are strengthened and comforted by God. We are led by God.
Jesus joined us in baptism by water. Jesus also joined us in baptism by the Spirit. May we follow the Spirit as faithfully as Jesus did, as the Spirit leads us in our own unique and blessed journeys.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric sometimes makes changes as he preaches. Sometimes he even intends to make them.
The Holy Spirit, so much a force at Jesus’ baptism, remains the source of Christian inspiration and power.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the third chapter of Luke’s Gospel, the baptism of Jesus (Luke 3:15-17, 21-22).
The lectionary jumps around just a little bit. We get a couple of verses from John the Baptist and then we skip just a couple of verses to get to the description of the baptism itself. They have something in common.
John told his listeners that there was one coming who was greater than he, who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire. And then in the description of the baptism itself Luke told us that the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus like a dove. Then came the voice from heaven, saying, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased.”
The connection, of course, is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit that John promised would be the baptism of those who followed his successor, the Holy Spirit who inspired Jesus himself.
The Holy Spirit remains not just a vital thought but a vital force in the Christian Church and in individual Christians to this very day. We understand the Holy Spirit as being not just an attribute of God, but a person of God in the Trinity. This is the One who gathers the Church together; this is the One who energizes and organizes the Church. This is also the One who inspires and guides and empowers individual Christians as they seek out their way of living out God’s call.
So the question is not, “Is there a Holy Spirit?” The question is, “How is this Spirit guiding you? How is the Spirit guiding me? How is the Spirit guiding us in the fulfillment of God’s will?”
Jesus… well, Jesus left the place of his baptism and spent quite a long time alone in the wilderness to try to figure that out. Only then did he begin his preaching ministry. So you and I we may very well need time to understand what God’s call is to us in this place and time.
But when we do understand it — when we accept it — then the Holy Spirit will be with us not to carry us, but to accompany us, to strengthen us, to renew us, as we do the work to which God has called us.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Some of you are asking, “Pastor, did you really get your sermon title from a repeated line in the 1967 song performed by The Association, “Windy”? Some of you, as I say, are asking that. The rest of you have never heard of the song.
But the answer, as you’d probably guess, is “Yes.”
I’m afraid that that means that my sermon title is somewhat misleading. I always remember the story of Pentecost with that rush of a mighty wind, a sound heard by all the people of Jerusalem, a sound that brought them together into a crowd to meet the disciples-becoming-apostles as they emerged from their rented house. I always imagine that the crowd marveled at the sight of those, “Divided tongues, as of fire, [that had] appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”
Unfortunately for my overly imaginative memory, that’s not what Luke wrote. As far as we can tell, the sound of the wind happened inside the house, and only inside the house. The tongues “as of fire” (which implies that Luke didn’t know what they were, either) also happened inside. How certain am I of this? Well, pretty certain. Because when the crowd got a word in edgewise amidst all that the little group of Christians were saying, they didn’t comment on the wind. They had nothing to say about flames in the hair.
They talked about the miracle of the languages. That was what they’d heard. That was what impressed them. The fire and the wind… they missed them.
Nevertheless: Everyone knows it’s windy.
Luke made an interesting choice for that word we’ve translated “wind.” As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “The word ‘wind’ (πνοῆς) has the same root as the word which is typically translated ‘spirit’ (πνεύματος) below. It could also mean ‘breath.’ This particular variation of that root only appears one other time in the Scriptures, in Acts 17:25, which says that God ‘gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.’” In making that choice, Luke aligned his description of the Pentecost event with the description of the Creation, when “the Spirit of God,” or “a wind from God,” or “the breath of God” – those are all sound translations from Hebrew into English of that phrase in Genesis 1 – moved over the waters. Jewish writers repeatedly used the word “ruach” – which means breath or wind or spirit – to refer to some of God’s activity, which included the inspiration of prophets to speak God’s word.
So if the sign is a mighty wind, a mighty breath, a mighty spirit, well, everyone knows it’s windy.
The Spirit chose an interesting day to manifest. Fifty days after the celebration of Passover, the “pente” of “Pentecost,” the city had filled with visitors again for another holiday, this time Shavuot. It’s described as a wheat harvest festival in Deuteronomy. By the first century, it also commemorated God’s gift of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, which was, you’ll recall, strongly associated with wind and fire. To the little group of Jesus followers in Jerusalem, numbering around 120 or so, the association would have been immediate and clear. God is doing something as new and dramatic as the gift of the Law.
Everyone knows it’s windy.
That’s why the Holy Spirit received so much attention in the writings of early Christians. The Apostle Paul spoke of it repeatedly, using the phrase “Holy Spirit” five times in Romans alone. The reading from John’s Gospel today tries to explain the gift of the Holy Spirit to Christ’s followers. Of all the gospel writers, Luke really emphasized the Holy Spirit, using the phrase more than twice as often as any of the others, and in the book of Acts, he wrote “Holy Spirit” forty-two times.
Luke wanted everyone to know it’s windy.
Do you know it’s windy?
Do you know that God hasn’t left us abandoned and on our own with the recorded memories of Jesus and the early thinkers of Christ’s Church as our only guide? Do you know that the Holy Spirit was not just the gift of the early Church, but also the not-so-early Church, the medieval Church, the Renaissance era Church, the pre-modern Church, the modern Church, and now the post-modern Church? Do you know that light and truth are not the exclusive possession of those long ago, but potentially accessible to you and I right now? Do you know, to use the UCC phrase, “God is still speaking”?
Do you know it’s windy?
There is some justice to Karl Marx’s critique that religion is the opiate of the people. The problem with the Holy Spirit of God is that, well, it’s not controllable. It tends to rile things up. It disrupts our customs and conventions. Worst of all, it tends to tell us we’ve got things wrong just when we were certain we were right.
The section of the Prophet Joel that Simon Peter used to explain what was happening is one of those disruptive declarations. As Frank L. Crouch writes at Working Preacher, “All flesh — boys and girls, young and old, free and slaves — whether they be women or men — are graced with the Spirit’s direct connection to the prophecies, visions, and dreams of God (vv. 16-21). This was institutionally unsettling back then and is institutionally resisted today. In this story, God shows no regard for our structures, hierarchies, or status quo.”
I won’t claim to be utterly charmed by our structures, hierarchies, and status quo, but I’ve got to admit that I know how to live in them. I don’t know how to live in their replacements – even the replacements I yearn for.
The problem is that putting God in a box not only doesn’t work – since the Holy Spirit tends to burst out of boxes like, well, like the rush of a mighty wind – not only doesn’t it work, it produces actual harm. In her novel ShirleyCharlotte Bronte wrote, “Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. … In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies … All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. Your god is a masked Death.”
Isn’t that just what we’ve done with our attempts to domesticate God? When… everyone knows it’s windy?
But why do we want to stay in the box, with our masked Death of a God, anyway? As Melissa Bane Sevier observes in her blog, the disciples inside the house were missing the festival of the harvest in the streets. There was a party outside and they were missing it. She writes, “The church isn’t the church if it stays indoors. Set down your donut and go find the baklava.”
That’s a comparison that works for me. I like donuts, don’t get me wrong. But I love baklava.
Christ’s Church is not supposed to be a collection of Gloomy Guses and Gabrielles sitting off in a room by themselves. As a confirmed introvert, I see the attraction of that. As a Christian pastor, I can’t affirm it. Because I know it’s windy.
Debie Thomas writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “There is no way to overstate how much we need to gather as God’s people right now and ask the Holy Spirit to instruct us, shape us, remake us, and commission us. We need fresh languages of bridge-building. We need new words to rekindle love. We need the wind and fire of God to challenge our complacencies, reset our priorities, ease our anxieties, and move us out.”
We are unlikely to be subject to the rush of a mighty wind (except the trade winds, of course). We are unlikely to see something that looks like flames but probably isn’t dancing on our heads. We are unlikely to speak other people’s languages without a great deal of work and study.
We are likely to feel the promptings of the Holy Spirit. We are likely to be challenged by the words of the Scriptures, which may not speak to us now as they did the first time we heard them. We are likely to be inspired by the example of other people, particularly when they do something unexpected, like, oh, say, the rather comic Simon Peter, the one who said so many foolish things to Jesus, the one who denied him on the night Jesus needed him most, when someone like Simon Peter stands up and quotes Joel (Joel?) in an improvised sermon to a crowd of people and leads them to believe.
Because yes: Everyone knows it’s windy.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric frequently departs from his prepared text. Sometimes he intends to. Sometimes he doesn’t.
Photo of wind shaping clouds on Kilauea by Eric Anderson.
Jesus’ disciples would have recognized the sound of a mighty wind as a sign of God’s Spirit. We need to be attentive to the intervention of the Spirit in our lives.
Here’s a transcript:
This coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, so of course I’m thinking about the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1-21).
As Luke tells the story, Jesus’ followers remained in Jerusalem following his resurrection. Fifty days after Passover, the Jewish calendar celebrated another holiday known as Sukkot (correction: Shavuot) in Hebrew but known by the name Pentecost or “fifty days” in Greek to show its relationship to Passover fifty days before.
We now celebrate it forty-nine days after Easter Sunday. We don’t carry it into the Monday.
While they were there, gathered together in some room (a large enough for a fair group of them), they heard the “sound like the rush of a mighty wind and it filled the room where they were meeting.” Wind has long been associated with the movement of God. In fact, go back to the very first couple verses of Genesis and you will find that the spirit of God, the “Ruach Adonai,” the breath of God, the wind of God (“ruach” means all of those), moved over the waters.
So this sound of a mighty wind, well, those gathered followers of Jesus would have associated that with the presence of God’s Spirit.
That sound, and whatever was happening within them, drove them out of the room, out of the building, out into the streets where lots of people had gathered in order to celebrate the Pentecost holiday, and there they began to speak. And now the Ruach Adonai, the Spirit of God, had a new effect. They spoke in languages that they did not understand, but the people visiting from elsewhere did. “Are not these all Galileans? How is it that we hear them, in our own languages, speaking of God’s deeds of power?”
In our day, we are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the presence of the Holy Spirit. There are theologies that say that the Spirit no longer intervenes in human life. there are theologies that say that God, having given us instruction and given us guidance and given us Christ, has let us go on to follow the directions we’ve been given and to accept the forgiveness that we’ve been offered. I don’t think those are right.
I think that the Spirit of God, that mighty wind, continues to be with us today. Not everybody directly experiences it. Those first disciples heard it in the room in which they were meeting. They didn’t bring the wind out into the streets with them. What they brought was the word about the wind. They brought the testimony about the Spirit. They brought their witness about the mighty acts of God.
It is upon us to be attentive to the movement of the Spirit in our live — because it may not always be as grand and unmistakable as the sound of a mighty wind — to be attentive to the movement of the Spirit in our lives, and then to bring that experience to others — out into the streets, if you will — so that they too may know about the mighty acts of a gracious God.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
