Sermon
Easter 6, Series A
Synod Assembly weekend
May 21, 2017
Prepared for use in congregation by Bishop Martin Wells.
This sermon is prepared for congregations that will worship without their usual preacher on Sunday morning, May 21st. Your pastor is at Synod Assembly in Spokane where we are doing the work of the regional church. Our Eastern Washington and Idaho Synod is 89 congregations in Eastern Washington, Idaho, and far west Wyoming.
This weekend we have elected a new shepherd/bishop for the synod, Pastor ______from ______congregation in ______, ___. Our prayers today will include prayers for this new bishop who begins work on September 1, 2017.
[To the one who will read this sermon: Please invite your pastor to alert you, before Sunday morning the 21st, as to the name of the newly elected bishop!]
Besides the election of a new bishop the Assembly has passed a budget for next year, heard and considered resolutions, and listened to reports from our officers. Our synod is one of 65 synods in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and part of our Assembly time was listening to a report from our national church partner, ELCA Secretary Chris Boerger. This was also an assembly for giving thanks, offering gifts of laughter, joy, and best wishes for Director for Evangelical Mission, Helga Jansons, and for myself as I leave office for retirement.
But as is always the case when we gather for worship, our primary task this morning is to listen to the Word of God, reflect on it in the course of a sermon and then, refreshed, to prepare ourselves for the week ahead in our callings of service, prayer for the world, and mutual consolation. So let us attend to the text from John 14, part of a longer “farewell discourse” where we listen in on Jesus’ passionate last words for the disciples.
“Promise” is the central aspect of Lutheran theology; promise in baptism; promise in forgiveness each week; promise in our calling to bear witness to God’s love in daily work; and promise to the end, our death, that our lives are and have been made infinitely worthy because of the promise of Jesus’ love for us. We live our lives as blessed people because of the way God has showered us with promise!
Today we receive another part of the great promise as Jesus promises an “Advocate” to be with us forever. Note that this is “another advocate,” Jesus being our first advocate, defender, and Savior. This advocate is “the Spirit of truth,” the Holy Spirit of God.
We receive the promise that this Spirit will “abide” with us, be in us, as close as life itself. As part of this promise Jesus seems to break into ecstatic speech, trying multiple ways to describe the glory of this promise. Listen: “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 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.”
I love this tangled mess of sentences! Imagine the departing Savior wanting to say everything important to his most beloved disciples and knowing that time is short and thatthe end to one way of life is upon them all! We have to remember that these words were said and prayed before the crucifixion when the great crisis of life itself was bearing down on Jesus and squeezing from him everything important.
So he makes another promise, the promise of an “advocate,” otherwise known as the Holy Spirit, the counselor, the teacher.
I hear Jesus promisethat this one will be “on our side” forever, offering to bear truth to us so that we don’t have to be afraid.
There’s a new book out that I commend to you.
It’s written by a young woman named Maggie Rowe and is entitled “Sin Bravely: A Memoir of Spiritual Disobedience.” Her title recalls that great quotation from Martin Luther to Phillip Melanchthon: “Sin boldly,” but more boldly still believe and trust in God.
In the book the author describes her growing up years in church. To all appearances she is a first-rate Christian, like most of us early in faith she’s a sweet fundamentalist, faithful in Sunday school, a regular reader of the bible, and one who asks questions of her parents and others. But for reasons that are never revealed this writer can never be satisfied that she has done enough, or knows enough, especially to protect herself from the threat of hell. The book chronicles her life with this question, all the way to the day her parents take her to an institution called Grace Point for extended therapy.
The premise of the book sets up the question that Jesus is answering as he leaves the disciples. He knows they are afraid. He knows the future looks grim and so he enlarges the promises of God to include the gift of the Holy Spirit, the one called the “advocate,” that one who will bring truth to the hearts of the disciples and to us when we are afraid.
In other parts of scripture the work of the Holy Spirit is opened up in a variety of ways: Holy Spirit as comforter; as teacher; as wisdom. There is even one term for the Holy Spirit that conjures up the idea of a divine attorney, arguing a legal case on our behalf.
I love the word advocate.
I imagine this is someone on my side, a defender and advisor. Maybe that’s because I was a scrawny kid in Junior High and one of the things I worried about was the class bully, the big, tough guy who seemed always to be looking for a fight.
At Central Junior High in Anchorage, Alaska, there was a well-known alleyway about half a block from the school and it was reputed that if you were “called out” by the bully, you had to show up in that alley after school to fight.
My solution was to ally myself with Danny, the biggest, gentlest guy in the 8th grade. Danny was a very sweet guy and already 6’ 4” tall so nobody messed with Danny! We stayed friends all through high school and had the best offensive hole in the front line of our football team. The move was called a “cross block.” I would crack down on Danny’s defensive tackle—even a little guy can knock someone down if you hit them from the side—and Danny would slip behind me to take on the defensive end as he came across the line. The running backs loved the hole we created!
Jesus is promising us just such a blocker, a friend who opens the way and won’t let harm come to us!
Jesus knew the disciples would have a hole in their lives when Jesus left so Jesus promises this advocate, this comforter, this teacher, this “spirit of truth” who will abide with them and with us. We are not orphaned. We are not left to fend for ourselves.
One writer says it this way: “In John’s thinking, the Spirit represents the thought that the risen Lord is spiritually present to the believer as that believer wrestles with the problem of Christian existence in the world.”
Maggie Rowe was sent to an institution to “wrestle with the problem of her existence in the world,” especially her fear of hell.
Martin Luther will say it this way: “As a Christian who believes in God and holds to Jesus, you suffer or are assailed, whether it be by the devil or your own conscience; then the Holy Spirit will be your comforter and will address himself to your heart. Be unafraid and do not fear for you are baptized and you believe in Christ. Therefore you need not be frightened either by the devil with all his angels in hell, by your own thoughts, or by your anxiety about your relation to God. God’s anger and all hell are totally extinguished. For that is surely true for believers, even though they still feel sin and weakness.”
This is the struggle the Rowe faces in her book, “Sin Bravely.” She is stuck with the fear that she cannot believe strongly enough and she believes it’s all her responsibility. This is exactly the fear that Jesus is addressing with his promise of another advocate.
But here’s where it gets a little tricky because of sin, our ancient tendency to trust ourselves more than we trust God.
Trusting ourselves more than God: It’s actually a form of arrogance, isn’t it, when we decide God can’t be trusted.
It’s a form of arrogance that holds God’s promises away, concluding they are not meant for me. To trust my own instincts is finally to conclude that no other word matters. It’s up to me.
Time is our ally in this process of sorting out what to trust; time and exhaustion. The Holy Spirit looks for that moment when our yearning to trust finally slips past our insistence on doing it our own way.
This is grace, as in “Grace Point,” the institution where Maggie Rowe has been sent for counseling.
But there’s more. The gift of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, functions as both gift and call.
In the final scene of Maggie’s book, she’s sitting on the steps waiting for her parents to pick her up after 3 months of therapy. A friendly fellow, who turns out to be the son of her therapist, is talking about his dad’s encouragement to head off to college. He says, “I start college in the fall. I’m nervous about it. But my dad says I just got to put myself out there, to not be afraid to fail big. He says fortune favors the bold. He says I should sin bravely.”
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ: The world needs us to sin bravely, to leave our fear on behalf of the call of God. We are “called out” not to fight in an alley, but to live our faith in real time, real life, our real life!
We had many fears to overcome in my first term as bishop. Patiently, and through yearly assemblies where we could listen to one another, we learned to sort out what was most important from that which was not. I think we learned we didn’t need to be afraid. We could listen without feeling bullied.
In my second term we pressed out in mission, taking our confidence to the streets in ways that were intentional and courageous. We surmounted our fears regarding human sexuality and heard the deeper call to receive one another as the creation of God. Fear was conquered by relationships and simple justice.
This last term been a time to deal with contingency and the fear of death.
--What if our structure no longer serves our mission?
--Across the synod our congregations are asking, “What if we can’t make it financially?
--What if we have to change how we are organized in order to be faithful in mission?
--Will we die an ultimate death or can we be confident of a new, but different future?”
And there are new fears ahead.
We live in a world that is starved for a word that is better than what we are told to fear. The Holy Spirit is calling us again to enact in our individual vocations a daring courage grounded in our total acceptance by Jesus and the companionship of his Spirit.
The call is to “Sin boldly.”
“Fortune,” no, the Holy Spirit!, favors the bold who reach beyond fear to the Promises of God!
True life is this daring acceptance of both the presence and call of God. It is our joy to respond under the tender care of our Advocate, the Holy Spirit of God.
AMEN
Sola Deo Gloria
+Martin D Wells