As has sort of become a theme in these last few weeks of Easter, once again this week we have a Gospel text where one of the disciples asks what seems to be a completely logical question, and Jesus convolutedly answers a totally different one. This week, it’s Philip, who asked Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” To which Jesus replied, “Have I been with you all this time Philip, and you still do not know me?” If I was Philip, my internal monologue response to this would be, “I know who you are Jesus, but you’re not talking about you anymore, you’re talking about the Father. You’ve already said you’re leaving, and I’m supposed to know the Father, and then someone else is coming, and none of this makes any sense!” At least, if I was Philip, I hope that would be my internal monologue, and not one of those awkward times when I end up saying my thoughts out loud, because that would be embarrassing…
It’s confusing, this thing that Jesus is saying. And what Philip wanted, and I totally get this, because it is what I always want too, what Philip wanted was just the assurance that he was on the right path, proof that he was going in the right direction, a road map, a guidepost, a scorecard, something, anything, to help him figure out who is who and what is what.
I totally get where Philip was coming from, because I want that too. We’re engaged in this process of Redevelopment here at Trinity, and I so want there to be a map or a plan or a guide that I’m supposed to follow as your Redevelopment pastor. I want to plug in the magic formula that will cause us to grow as a church. And, like Philip, I have asked. Not, “show me the Father, and I’ll be satisfied,” but I’ve asked the synod, I’ve asked staff at the churchwide office, I’ve as colleagues in the area, how am I supposed to do this? How are we supposed to redevelop our congregation? What are growing, thriving congregations doing that we’re not, that we should be? Show me the plan for successful church redevelopment, and I will be satisfied. And you know what they’ve told me? No joke, this is an actual quote from someone at churchwide, “We’re not really sure what you’re supposed to do, but when you figure it out, we’d like you to tell us, so we can teach it to other people.” Guys, here’s the crazy, terrifying, but also awesome and exciting truth about where we are right now in the life of our church. Trinity was on the ground floor of church redevelopment. We have one of the very first redevelopment grants issued in the ELCA. We are it, we are the trailblazers, we are the ones who have been called to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. On my bad days, this scares the living daylights out of me, but on my good days, I am blown away with the honor that we’ve been given, that the wider church feels the spirit moving so much in this place that they have entrusted us with this privilege of getting to lead the attempts to bring to birth a new direction in the future of the church.
And this isn’t just a Trinity phenomenon. Do you feel like the whole world seems kind of out of control right now? Like the church, not just Trinity, but Christianity, isn’t what you remember? Churches are struggling, and don’t even get me started on politics, and is there or is there not a war on religion, and who really is being persecuted? Fox news claims one thing and CNN another, and both sound more like an article out of The Onion than any actual news story. And you just want to shout, Lord, just tell us who’s right, give us a clear path. “Lord, [just] show us the Father and we will be satisfied.”
The fact of the matter is, we are in the middle of a great cultural revolution. We are in the middle of a restructuring that is bigger than just Trinity, bigger than just the Lutherans, bigger even than the whole church. Everything about what it means to be human, from religion to technology to travel to communication, everything is changing right now. But here’s the comforting news, as unsettling as it is to be in the middle of this time of cultural upheaval, that we are going through this is not unusual. Looking back at history shows a clear pattern, just about every five-hundred years, the world goes through a massive change just like the one we are in the midst of now. Five-hundred years ago, in October of 1517, Martin Luther hung his Ninty-Five Theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenburg and started the Reformation. Five-hundred years before that, the Great Schism of 1054 split the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic church. Five hundred years before that, the fall of the Roman Empire ended the imperial church and ushered in an era of monasticism. And five hundred years before that was the event we celebrate this morning, the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. History cannot predict the future, but it can assure us of this. The thing that is coming on the other side of this will look totally different from what it is today, but there is something coming on the other side of this. Life, faith, church, the good news of Jesus Christ, continues. We don’t know what the church will look like in fifty years, but we know there will be church.
So let’s take a look at that first great shift in what it meant to be a follower of Jesus that took place two thousand years ago. Last week in Luke we heard the resurrected Christ tell the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they had “been clothed with power from on high.” How anxious must they have felt, cooped up in Jerusalem, waiting for this thing to happen that they could not understand, explain, or even know what exactly what they were waiting for. Jesus told them to wait in Jerusalem on the evening after his resurrection, so Easter evening, and Pentecost literally means fifty days, so for fifty days, they were just sitting around in Jerusalem, waiting for something to happen, having no idea what that something could be. Twiddling their thumbs, biding their time, wondering what they were waiting for, how they would know when it occurred, whether they would miss it when it came, if they’d even understood the directions correctly in the first place.
As they waited, I wonder if they reflected back on those words Jesus had said to them that we heard in our Gospel reading this morning, that Jesus would ask the Father, and the Father would send them another Advocate, who would be with them. This word translated “advocate” is the Greek word paraclete. And there’s no really good translation to English, so there are a lot of different ways it gets translated. The NRSV we heard today uses Advocate, but other translations you might come across are comforter, counselor, friend, guide, or spirit. All of these concepts are tied up in the Greek word paraclete. And all of these concepts, comforter, counselor, advocate, friend, guide, all of these are roles that Jesus had held for the disciples while he was with them in the flesh. So, as they waited for this other advocate that Jesus had promised would come, I wonder if they found themselves asking why they couldn’t just have the original paraclete back. Why Jesus couldn’t have just come and stayed with them, and once again fulfilled for them the role of advocate, guide, friend, counselor, and comforter.
But then, the Holy Spirit showed up and things got all kinds of crazy. Because the Holy Spirit, like Jesus’ responses to the disciples’ questions in the Gospel of John, is not so much an answer as it is an invitation to wonder even more broadly about just how expansive is the love of God. As our Acts reading announced, “when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” Now, just to clarify, this isn’t speaking in tongues as it is often portrayed today, where people speak in languages that cannot be understood. And hear me out, this is not me knocking that, while it is not a form of worship that works for me, I fully embrace it as an important form of worship for other Christian traditions. But, what the crowd that surrounded the apostles experienced was each of them hearing the good news of Jesus told to them in their own native language. In their mother tongue, in the way that spoke most deeply to their heart. To put this in context of modern worship conversations, that meant that the people for whom speaking in tongues was how they worshiped, they heard people speaking in tongues. For people who hear God in silence, they heard silence. People who love contemporary Christian rock heard contemporary Christian rock. Lovers of the old green hymnal; heard the old green hymnal. Each heard the same timeless message of God’s overwhelming love for them, but they heard it in the unique and varied ways that spoke best to their soul.
But wait, some in the crowd protested, and, let’s be honest, how familiar does this protest sound to how we tend to react to those whose way of experiencing God is different from our own, how can it be, that each hears God in their own native tongue. “They are filled with new wine.” Translation, they are drunk.
But Peter got up and assured the crowd, ““Men of Judea… these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel…that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” This is what Jesus told us would happen. When he was opening the scriptures to us, when he was teaching us along the way, when he said he was going to the Father, but another was coming. This, this miracle where each of us hear the promise of the expansive goodness of God in the words that speak most deeply to us, this is the very thing that Jesus had told us would happen.
The presence of the Holy Spirit means that all the roles that Jesus held when he was on earth in the flesh, as teacher, as comforter, as guide, as advocate, as counselor, as friend, all of those roles are still filled today. We still have Jesus with us in all the ways the disciples had him two thousand years ago in Galilee. The only difference is the flesh in which we feel his presence. The Holy Spirit is within us, so the body of Christ is now our body, the voice of Christ is our voice, the physical space which Christ takes up on the planet is our physical space. If you want to see the Father, look around you. If you want to touch Jesus, touch a friend. It is crazy, expansive, hard to comprehend good news, but the Spirit of God is alive in this world, the Advocate whom Jesus has promised is here, is in our very midst, is in fact, in us.
The world is changing, things are different. But history has shown us that while the Spirit is always present, every five hundred years or so the Spirit really shakes things up to get the church prepared to be God’s presence in God’s every-changing creation. These are big words and big promises, but as Paul assured the church in Rome, we did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back in fear, but we have received a spirit of adoption. So let us go forth with the hope of Christ’s presence. Because the Holy Spirit is loose in the world, and when the Holy Spirit shows up, things get all kinds of crazy. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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