Transcription
Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me, because I will live. You also will live.
On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them. This is the word of the Lord.
Let us pray. Wondrous and gracious God, we thank you. As your word lights our path and guides our hearts, we praise all that you do, but we ask, Lord, that you will be with us and watch over us as we listen. Listen to this word, but as it moves and commits us to paths we don’t understand, but paths set by our Lord. In your name we pray, amen.
So I got everyone a present for Mother’s Day. I’m going to teach you a new Greek word, and if that feels like your grandparent giving you a quarter for a foot rub, yeah, that’s right around the same level. No, we’re going to work on talking about a new word for the Holy Spirit this week, and just so you remember, we’re not at Pentecost yet, but that’s coming. So mark your calendar to wear red a little early, but we’ll let it go. You just got to wash it between now and then, just saying. So wear your red on the 24th, bring in your geraniums on the 24th as we celebrate Pentecost. But we’re going to talk about an earlier promise of the Spirit. When Jesus is speaking to the disciples, there’s a little background, and I’ll use the church term of the disciples, God bless them, they’re being a little thick. Jesus keeps on talking to them about what is going to happen, the traumatic time, what’s going to be when he goes to heaven and ascends. Now, initially he starts talking about the space of heaven in my father’s house, having many dwelling places, but then Thomas starts asking Jesus about how they’re going to know the way to the house. And then Jesus responds that he is the way. Philip throws in, well, but couldn’t you just show us the Father and be done with this? Why do we have to go on this great journey? So as you hear, the disciples almost have this level of, we don’t want to hear what you’re really saying because what you’re saying is really difficult and really hard to hear. It’s really upsetting to hear you talk about this, Jesus, that you’re going to be gone. So we’re just going to not let it sink in. But the reality is the disciples are hearing Jesus and in this moment, unpacking. So give them a little bit of grace for being so hardheaded. But the big thing we have is that Jesus hears their distress. And that’s where we pick up our conversation between he and the disciples, where he talks about this lovely thing called the paraclete. And no, I’m not talking about a little bird and it’s my Michigan accent that’s throwing me off. No, the paraclete. It’s a phrase that unfortunately, like often happens with scripture, describes perfectly what the original author means. But 2,000 years later, when you read the NIV, NRSV, how do you translate an untranslatable word? Do you put paraclete and then everybody looks at it and says, I will leave you the paraclete. I don’t want a bird. Jesus is talking about weird. You don’t want that. You want specifics. So we hear about the comforter. We hear about other names that are given to this. But what we’ve also done is we’ve diminished what Jesus would have meant if helper, if comforter were translated. So as we talk about this, this promise of the Holy Spirit from Jesus and the word paraclete, we got to have to think about how much better and greater this word is than the initial descriptors given. Sort of like when we talk about love and we specifically name the love of God agape, guess what? Our word for love, yeah, it meets the definition, but the Greek word is so much closer and more strategically defined. So if you say to somebody, I love you with an agape level of love, and it’s in this building, they should know that you love them as much as God loves them and they are loving you that much. That is amazing. If they just say, eh, love ya, that kind of feels like the bro pat on the back sometimes. But if somebody is naming the love in order to say agape, that gives you the idea. So when we hear the paraclete, it means so much more than what the initial piece is. Now a paraclete had a lot of, I’m going to at some point say parakeet, I know it. They would come in and establish a legal witness role where they would stand in front of a judge and provide almost a character level witness for who you were. They would stand before a judge for you. They were an expert witness, but they were also there as an expert in whatever you needed. So if you run a company and you don’t have a large company, you have to go outside to bring in somebody for HR. It’s like having that ally come in and assist you. So here, think about it from a Roman military perspective. Your troops just lost a battle, they’re demoralized. The Giants just lost a lot of games. You need a John Harbaugh to come in and get everybody riled up and get everybody ready to go. I can’t tell you about how the season’s going to go, but I can tell you what he’s going to do in that way. They would buck everybody up. They would act as a morale kind of boost, helping wherever it was needed on a team, on a group, on an industry. They were there wherever assistance was needed, no matter how small, how big, how just absolutely catastrophic or how minor it might be. The paraclete was there at all times. So Jesus does two things in this moment. He acknowledges and accepts how difficult the task is for the disciples. I mean, read through all of the questions, all of the things that they’re trying to deal with. They are the definition of lost in this moment. And Jesus says, if you’re lost now, what’s it going to look like a lot longer from now? So he promises them that which they will need, but he does so not in a minor way. He gives them a paraclete to stand beside them in front of all trials, to stand beside them in all challenges, in every way the paraclete will be there for them.
Why do I think a paraclete needs, or at least the concept needs to come back? Well, because how many words do you need to describe what the Spirit does? We don’t have time for me to list all of them off. You keep on going with the Spirit. You can list off all the ways that God’s Spirit is with you in times of struggle, in times of celebration, in times of feeling like the waters are getting over your head, feeling like you could leap over every puddle in existence. Every day, the Spirit is there.
And so when we move beyond an understanding of it, that it’s a break glass in case of emergency method to get to God, and we understand that it is there with us at all times, in all moments, building us up, picking us up, or leaping with us when we celebrate. The reality is we need to embrace more, more of what the Spirit can be. Because we’ve seen it here. I will leave you the comforter. I will leave you the helper. I will leave you the paraclete to be with you always, no matter what, because I won’t be there with you. You will have the Spirit. You will have the paraclete to keep you through all of that which I know you’re going to go through. And think about what the early church went through. The persecutions, the trials, the infighting, the arguments, all of that. How would they have gotten out of that if it weren’t for the Spirit, the paraclete?
But the Spirit does something else for us. Because like the Spirit is always there for us, within the body of believers, we are there for one another, aren’t we? Now when we hear that one of us is sick or injured, what do we do? We pray for them. We pray for them to be helped by God. We offer them up in our prayers to God. We look after them. We care for them. When a parent is struggling with a child in worship, what do we do? We pass her up. We pass her around. I remember the first church I served up in Coxsackie. I don’t think Liam got a minute sitting in the stroller before he was making his way around the congregation. That’s what we do. That’s how we are like the Spirit with one another. Because when you hurt, your brothers and sisters pick you up. When you are excited and celebrating, what do your brothers and sisters do? They pick you up. That’s what we do. So we can embrace the Spirit, both embrace the greater definition of what the Spirit is and does, but we can model the support and care that the Spirit gives to all of us in caring for those around us. Now I’m not saying in any way that we can act with the same power that the Spirit does, but think about the power of just letting somebody know that their struggle is not one that they have to bear alone.
I remember being very young and not getting this, in my eyes, weird behavior of my mother. Every time we were in worship and we heard about a woman in the congregation, and we were about a congregation of about a thousand, and mom heard that somebody had lost a pregnancy or somebody had lost a baby, mom would find them. At some point, mom would find them. I never knew what she said, I never knew what happened in that conversation, but mom always found them. And then I found out about Alex. Alex would have been my older brother. And so mom felt the drive and desire to care for any woman who was in that space that she was. When we’ve been through the ringer, and we hear of one of this body being through that same ringer, both the Spirit calls us to lift one another up, but calls on us to walk through the fires with each other.
Brothers and sisters, may we both embrace the Spirit, but also seek to try and emulate its care.
Amen.
Brothers and sisters, let us respond to God.