Good morning and Happy Pentecost Sunday!
A few weeks ago, when we started our Bible study, we first listened to this powerful (if a little strange) story we have just heard from the book of Acts, and we started to share a bit about our own experiences of the Holy Spirit – the way we have felt the Holy Spirit coming in our own lives. As you can probably imagine, those experiences weren’t quite as dramatic as the experience the Apostles had on that day – although some of us agreed easily that they were quite powerful and a little strange too. Our stories of encountering the Holy Spirit were quite different for each one of us, but one of the things we all noticed is that we got pretty emotional remembering these experiences and telling them to one another. Because we experienced that God was here. God was here, even if we couldn’t explain how or why.
Theologians say that the Holy Spirit is “the one who mediates the presence of the Lord” – The one who enables the Risen Christ to come among us – and it is certainly what they can conclude when studying closely the passage of John we have just heard. We are, once again, back in the Farewell Discourse (Our last Sunday with it). Last Sunday we were in Chapter 17, but today we go back one chapter to spend time on the promise of the Holy Spirit – A reading appropriate for Pentecost, even though the passage of Acts is probably much more well-known.
Jesus is about to depart but he promises his disciples that he won’t leave them on their own, and that he will send them the “Advocate”, the one who testifies on his behalf. The Holy Spirit will take what his Jesus’s (and we have to understand: his teaching, his miracles but also the story of his life, death and Resurrection) and the Spirit will reveal the truth about Jesus. Now that’s a lot of words, isn’t it? And we got a bit used to that after 4 weeks in this passage of John’s, but still: What does it mean, in the end?
Well, I was wondering about that when I was reminded on those stories we shared about the Holy Spirit during our Bible study. As I have just said, one of the things we all noticed is how emotional we got as we remembered those stories because what they all had in common is that we had experienced God’s presence – God was there for us – God, as we came to know him revealed in Jesus. And so, theologians will say to us that the Holy Spirit is the one who mediates the presence of the Lord, John will say the Holy Spirit reveals the truth about Jesus after Jesus has physically left the disciples – and I would put it with even more simple words, as I remember the expression on your faces as when we shared our stories:
The Holy Spirit is the one who makes it real. The Holy Spirit is the one making God, God revealed in Jesus, real for us – in our day and age, in our particular life condition. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes the story of Jesus’s life and everything you’ve ever been taught about God, and every question you have ever asked and prayer you prayed – and the Holy Spirit makes it alive, real and present before you.
The Holy Spirit comes and then you know it’s real – you know it not so much in your head or even in your heart but in the depths of your being and yes sometimes you can get pretty emotional about that. And it might not be a powerful feeling everyday – but you can go back to it again and again and something settles in you and you know it’s true.
I really like it that we read from John’s today. Maybe you’ve learned about the Holy Spirit at church, at Sunday school and if you’re like me, you’ve learned about all the gifts of the Holy Spirit – Wisdom. Self control. Kindness. – and this is all what the Holy Spirit does according to Paul. But John, John does not talk about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, in Jesus’s mouth the Holy Spirit is in himself the gift.
The Holy Spirit is the gift and the gift among all gifts. A gift you don’t put on a shelf, but a gift that keeps on giving – who continually brings to us the presence of the Lord and renews the presence of the Lord among us (and we pray the Holy Spirit in our Eucharistic prayer, don’t we?). The Holy Spirit is the Present. The Presence.
In John’s Gospel, there are no complicated Sunday school lessons about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is simply the one that makes it real. After Jesus is gone, the disciples afflicted by sorrow will suddenly wake up from their mourning because they will receive the gift, the gift that makes the Lord present, and at their turn, they will have to make the Lord present for others. The Holy Spirit mediates the presence of the Lord, but he also mediates through the disciples. And this is, to me, the heart of our Christian calling. Experiencing the presence of the Lord, we have to make God real for each other. And we know that after they have had this extraordinary experience, that’s all that the disciples are going to do: Making God real for people. In words and actions, and also just in being the persons they have become. They will bear testimony. And they don’t necessarily bear witness with some mind blowing experiences, they bear witness by their patience and kindness, their faithfulness and their hope, their attention to the little ones, their readiness to tell the story of Jesus, to share what they have, to rejoice in goodness – and these are after all the gifts of the Spirit.
It does not mean that the Apostles had it all figured out – And we see that a lot in the book of Acts, they also had time of doubt, discouragement and conflict. From John’s Gospel it does not seem that we are meant to experience the Holy Spirit on our own. It’s a communal experience. We get to know God when we gather together. We make God real for others and we make God real for each other. As Christians we are meant to support and comfort each other and to continue to seek together how the life of Jesus speaks to us and how we want to live it out in our Christian community, in our families, in our neighborhood. Together, we are to be witnesses of the Lord’s presence. As a church.
Today, we will receive John Richard as a novice in the Community of the Gospel and we will also commission our new vestry. And I would like to remind you that this root of our call, before leading liturgy or conducting meeting, or making decision about the church. Our call is, experiencing the presence of the Lord, to make it real, to make it manifest and express it in the way we worship and pray, in the way we involve ourselves in our communities and serve them, in the way we relate to each other and in the way we live – and I would add,even in the way we can disagree with each other or be in conflict, or hurt or disappointed with each other. When Jesus say to the disciples that the Holy Spirit will come to reveal the truth, it’s also a warning: It means Christians will have to deal with what’s broken in themselves, in their community and in the world.
Now how do we do that? Where do we start? Well, that’s the sense of our ceremony today. You will all be making a step towards the altar (a traditional way of doing things in the church). There is no Sunday school exam – and you don’t have to be a special people. Disciples certainly weren’t – the evangelists actually insisted a lot about how ordinary the disciples were. But there were present. Present. Given to God. At that’s what we do at the altar. We give to God. The bread, the wine but mostly: we make ourselves present, gift. We give ourselves and what we have and allow God to use us. I read one day a beautiful quotation that I never forgot: God uses our availability rather than our ability. We’re obsessed with our abilities (or lack thereof), but we forget we first need to be available and receptive. Of course we need abilities. But the first thing is to allow God to use us to mediate God’s presence.
So will you take the first step?