On Fire With The Truth

Pentecost Sunday (8th Sunday in Easter), Year B
Text: Acts 2.1-21; John 15.26-27, 16.4b-15

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What follows is the sermon (or beginning of a sermon) that I had written. The sermon given during worship started here, but developed into something else. The Spirit must have been moving! Check out the video to get the full message.

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All the readings we’ve been given during this Easter season have been about belonging. We’ve been being reminded over and over that, as disciples of Jesus, we belong to him, and he is taking care of us and our community. We didn’t choose him, he says, he chose us. We belong to him because we first belonged to God, and nothing can take that way—not sin, not death, not doubt, not fear. We are forever and always God’s beloved children in whom God is well-pleased.

This is the Truth to which Jesus came into the world to testify. It is the Truth he embodied as God’s Son, and it is the Truth he lived out as he taught and preached and healed and blessed. It is the Truth to which he entrusted himself on the cross, and the Truth which raised him from the dead. This is the Truth Jesus wants us to believe about ourselves: not just in our heads, but in our hearts and in our lives, our actions. He comes to live that Truth for us and invite us into living that Truth ourselves.

I don’t think this can be overstated. We so often think and talk about God as a judge on whose mercy we must throw ourselves, knowing ourselves to be guilty. Or maybe we even see God more like a prosecutor, accusing us of the things we’ve done wrong. One of the most fascinating things to me about this reading today is that when Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit, he uses the word “Advocate.” In Greek, the word is paraklete. Maybe you’ve even heard that word before. It isn’t a little songbird; it’s actually a legal term. It means a defense attorney, one who stands up for you in court, arguing your case.

Jesus sees God on our side; not the one accusing us (by the way, in Hebrew, the legal word for a prosecutor or “accuser” is satan), but the one defending us. God is the one who argues our case when the world, or our hearts, or our fears would condemn us and cause us to doubt our belovedness as children of God. God is the one reassuring us, comforting us, defending us from doubt and fear.

That work of reassuring and comforting and defending that the Advocate does is the continuation of the work Jesus did. He came to us so that we might believe this Truth, and the Advocate comes for the same reason. But on this celebration of Pentecost, we are reminded that this work isn’t just about us. Remember John 3:16? “For God so loved the world…” Christians are not the only ones who belong to God and are beloved of God. Everyone—everything—is.

On that Pentecost day that we read about in Acts, the scene that is played out for us is a demonstration of this. All the people listed in that reading—the bane of lectors everywhere—are Jews, whether by birth or conversion; but they come from all over the known world. They speak different languages, they follow different customs, they look very different. The work of the Spirit reminds them—and the apostles preaching to them—that despite all these differences, they are all still Jews—God’s chosen people.

The book of Acts will go on to widen this circle, including not only Jews, but Gentiles and all sorts of various people with various beliefs in this community of disciples. The point is that, no matter what separates us, we all belong to God. We always have, and we always will. The good news is for everyone, not just Jews, not just Christians, not just righteous people or straight people or White people or rich people. Everyone belongs to God. In fact, by the time we get to reading Revelation, we are reminded that it’s not just people who belong to God, but everything that exists. God makes everyone and everything new.

Jesus isn’t looking to make religious converts. He’s not calling us to make everyone Christian anymore than he was calling those first disciples to make everyone Jewish. The story asks us to consider that even Phrygians and Pamphilians, even Cretans and Arabs are already God’s people, regardless of their creeds or customs. If we really believe that Truth, then how does that Truth convert us? How are we changed by this good news?

I know that one of the major concerns of this and every congregation is how we will grow and sustain ourselves; but what if that’s the wrong question? It is one of the questions, after all, that caused the Jewish leadership to become so fearful of Jesus that they had him killed. They feared that his ministry would draw people away from Judaism, that the Romans may even get involved and come to crush an uprising.

By contrast, on that Pentecost morning, when Peter and the others preached the good news of God’s love for the whole world, people came flocking to that message. Following his sermon, we read that the number of disciples swelled that day from around 120 to over 3,000! I wonder if the question this text is asking us might be whether we really believe this good news to be True or if we are just looking out for our own survival and comfort.

To answer that question, we turn again to look to Jesus, the Way. He is the Truth of God’s love embodied, and he is also the Way to that Truth. He shows us what it looks like to live that Truth—or one way it can look. There may be many ways of living that Truth; maybe they are among the things that we “could not bear to hear” just yet; and so we look to the Holy Spirit—the Advocate, our Defender—to guide us into all Truth.

How is God calling us to be Church in this time and place? What are the messages and traditions that we are being called to carry forward, and what are we being invited to lay down? And perhaps hardest to consider: what might it mean if this community were to die? Would it mean that we have failed? Or are we really ready to believe in the Truth of God’s resurrection, that God is already working to raise up new disciples of the Way and apostles of the Truth, both in this community and also apart from it?