John 14:15-31
May 19, 2013
‘If you love
me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give
you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the 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 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.’ Judas
(not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to
us, and not to the world?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my
word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home
with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that
you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.
‘I have said
these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy
Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and
remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I
give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be
troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, “I am going
away, and I am coming to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am
going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told
you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe. I will
no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no
power over me; but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may
know that I love the Father. Rise, let us be on our way.
Do you know the old philosophical question, “if a tree
falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” It’s
the kind of stupid question we pondered in college, late at night, after a
party, when we were feeling kind of philosophical. By the way, the answer to
that question is “no,” it doesn’t make a sound. If there are no eardrums to
receive the push of air molecules and interpret it as sound, there is no sound;
only the percussive movement of air.
There is a spiritual corollary to this question: If the Holy Spirit speaks or acts in our
lives, and we don’t hear or notice, does it really speak or act? The answer
to that question is “yes.” In fact, generally this is how the Holy Spirit
works—without anyone listening or noticing. We often determine God’s presence
and action based on whether we see or feel what God is doing. If we don’t feel
or see anything, we basically assume it’s because God is too busy elsewhere
exploding a star, forming a moon, or dealing with Middle East violence to pay
attention to us. What we don’t realize is that most often God’s Spirit acts in
ways we never sense or see, and that God is never too busy.
I learned a lot about how the Spirit works in a series of
life events that eventually led to my becoming a pastor. I know I’ve told this
story before, but I experienced the Spirit’s way of working back when I was in
my early 20s.
At the time I was working as a therapist in a psychiatric
hospital with children and teens. It was a very difficult place to work because
of the drama of working with suicidal, violent, and/or schizophrenic kids. I
loved the work, but it slowly drained me, mainly because I was working shifts
of 7 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., or 3 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. Both shifts made it difficult
to have time with friends, or even to meet new friends, other than those I was
working with in the psychiatric hospital. Also, we had had a series of violent
male patients who had started riots, and a few who were targeting me for harm.
Going into work each day not knowing if I was going to get attacked was hard
psychologically.
In the midst of all this I broke up with my girlfriend of
four years, who I had assumed I would eventually marry, so I felt isolated. It
all came to a head on my 24th birthday. I had applied to a number of
Ph.D. programs in clinical psychology. When I got home that day I opened my
mail and read my last rejection letter from a program I was convinced I was
going to accept me. They said that because I had taken two classes at the
University of Pittsburgh several summers before, and because they hadn’t
received a transcript from Pitt, they couldn’t consider my application. What a Happy
Birthday present!
Feeling sorry for myself, I was cleaning the bathroom when
the phone rang. I stood up quickly and hit my head on a cabinet corner, leaving
a gash in my head. Blood trickled down my forehead as I answered. It was my
father, wishing me a happy birthday. I burst out crying, telling him how
unhappy I was, and that I didn’t know what to do with my future. I didn’t want
to work as a counselor anymore, I had been rejected by all the Ph.D. counseling
programs, I had no money, and I felt trapped. He went on to tell me that he
might have an answer. He had met the president of Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary a few days before, and was told about a program they had. He said,
“Don’t laugh at me, Graham, but he said they have a program where you can get a
master of social work (a counseling degree) from the University of Pittsburgh
at the same time as a master of divinity degree from the seminary.” I laughed.
I then said, “Dad, could you actually see me as a pastor?” He said, “Graham, I’ve always seen you as a
pastor.” I was stunned, but laughed
again, replying, “But I haven’t been to church in eight years. I’ve never even
joined the church. How could you think that I would become a pastor? It won’t happen in a million years.”
I eventually moved home and underwent the darkest period
of my life. I was unemployed and the unemployment rate in the Pittsburgh area
was 12%. There weren’t jobs available. I interviewed for sales jobs in a lot of
places, but was told that either there was a hiring freeze or a freeze on
training programs. I had walked away from a career in counseling, but I didn’t
know what I wanted to do. And every door in front of me seemed to slam shut.
That February I went to a hockey game with my sister,
Connie. She began to ask me why I had left the psychiatric hospital, and why I
had moved home the previous May. I told her about all my experiences in the
hospital, how burned-out I had gotten, and how I didn’t know anymore what I
wanted to do. It was in the midst of that conversation that I realized I did
want to go back to school to get my master in social work, and I felt a need to
also explore seminary—if only to help me understand spiritual issues that come
up in counseling. A few days later I applied to the program between Pitt and
Pittsburgh Seminary, and it was as if every door started to open before me. It
was amazing. I was experiencing the Spirit fully in my life.
I learned a lot about the Spirit from that experience. I originally
couldn’t hear the Spirit speaking because the Spirit’s invitation didn’t fit my
expectations. I figured that if the Holy Spirit was really a good Spirit, then
the Spirit would help me get what I wanted. It was my crisis that allowed me to
finally listen to and hear the Spirit calling me to do what it wanted.
This often is how it is with the Spirit. We ignore it, we
go through difficulty, we open up, and then we discover Spirit has already been
there. Our passage for today is a precursor to the disciples receiving the Holy
Spirit. They were looking at Jesus, listening to what he was saying, but they
weren’t hearing or understanding. It wasn’t until after Jesus’ crucifixion and
death, and their crisis of having everything they believed in collapse around
them, that they finally heard what Jesus had been saying to them about the Holy
Spirit. When they were with Jesus, the Spirit—Christ’s Spirit—was speaking, but
they weren’t hearing.
I think that one of the problems with our understanding
of the Holy Spirit is that we’re not sure what to make of the Spirit. The
reason is that we often misunderstand how the Holy Spirit relates with God and
with Jesus. The whole idea of the Trinity gets in the way of many people’s really
understanding of the Spirit, God, and Jesus. Perhaps a visual might help. Look
at the figure below. This is how many Christians and non-Christians understand
the Trinity:
Basically what they think is that the Father is the one
who is really God. You can hear this in our prayers. Who do we normally pray to
when we pray? It’s usually God, Lord, or
Father. As a result, we don’t know what to do with either Jesus or the Holy
Spirit. Are they sub-gods or angel-like beings who help us? Is the Father really
the CEO God, with Jesus a vice-president in charge of the department of
salvation, and the Holy Spirit in charge of the department of miracles? That’s
not really the idea of the Trinity at all.
The Trinity was an understanding of God that developed
out of people’s experiences of God, as well as their relationships with God. It
is not a concept of three gods, but an understanding of God who we can form a
relationship with each of us in three ways. It might look like this:
The Trinity teaches that we can have a relationship with
God as Father, or as Jesus, or as the Holy Spirit. In a way it is like a
relationship you might have with me. You have a relationship with me as pastor.
As a pastor you experience me in certain ways, and have certain expectations of
me. But my wife, Diane, also has a relationship with me as husband. In fact, I
don’t think she wants a relationship with me as pastor. I also have a
relationship with my kids as Dad. They know I’m a pastor, but they really
experience me as their father.
Despite these three different kinds of relationships, I’m
still the same person in all three roles. Despite your relationship with me,
I’m more than just a pastor. And the more open anyone is to who I am in my
fullness, the richer and deeper a relationship a person can have with me.
This is the idea of the Trinity. When you have a
relationship with God in Christ, you are also experiencing the Father and the
Spirit. And when you relate with the Father, you are experiencing the Spirit
and Jesus. And when you relate with the Spirit, you are experiencing the Father
and Jesus. That fancy word at the center of the diagram, “perichoresis,” is a Greek
theological term for the idea that in one person is all three persons. So these
are not three gods in one God. They are three experiences and relationships
with the One God. And the more open we are to all three, the deeper our
experience of God will be. And for us Presbyterians, becoming open to the Holy
Spirit can be difficult because we like our God nice, neat, and orderly.
So what does all this mean to us today? It means that the
Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, is in us, around us, through us, and for
us,… always ready to work in our lives. But we have to be ready to let the Spirit
work in our lives. We have to be willing to listen, to open, to be ready, and
to follow. Let me close with an example of the kind of thing the Spirit can do
if we are open to it.
Do you know the name, Ken Glaub? I’d be surprised if you
did. He’s a radio evangelist who has been in ministry for about 50 years. When
he got started as an evangelist in the early 1970s, he sort of had a Christian
Von Trapp kind of family, where they travelled around the country offering
entertainment through their singing. He had been the pastor of a church in
rural Kentucky, but decided to relocate to Yakima, Washington, where he set up a
ministry of Christian entertainment and inspiration.
It was not an easy ministry for him or his family as they
spent countless hours traveling the nation’s highways, going from city to city,
town to town. At one point, after doing an event in Indiana, he was driving the
bus south of Dayton and he wondered if what he was doing really was God’s will.
Was he making any difference? He was feeling so burned-out. Was this still what
God wanted? He reflected on his life to this point. He had already been fairly
successful as a pastor. He had formed a fairly strong radio ministry that
reached all over the country. He also was dabbling in a television ministry. At
the same time he was drained, despite all of his successes. “God, is this still
what you want for me?” he asked.
His thoughts were interrupted by his son: “Dad! Let’s get some food. I’m hungry!
Pizza, we want pizza!” Ken said okay and started to pull off the
highway. He looked for pizza signs and thought to himself, “A sign. That’s what
I need, a sign. God, please give me a sign if this is what you want for me.” He
was lost in his thoughts and prayers as he pulled into the parking lot of a
Pizza Hut. As the people poured out of the bus and rushed into the Pizza Hut,
Ken walked slowly across the parking lot, lost in his own thought. From his
right, he kept hearing an irritating noise. It was a telephone ringing. A pay
phone next to the building was ringing, but there was no one there to
answer.
Feeling kind of foolish, he walked over to the phone and
picked it up. “Hello?” he said, holding the phone to his ear. On the line he
heard the operator say, “Long distance call for Mr. Ken Glaub. Is there a Ken
Glaub there?” (this was back when operators used to help with long-distance
calls). Ken was confused and replied, “I don’t understand. How can you be
calling me?” The operator was insistent: “Is there a Ken Glaub there?” “But
Operator,” he said, “how can someone be calling me at this number.” The
operator persisted, “Are you Mr. Glaub or not? This is a long-distance call.” Finally,
he said, “Yes, Operator, I’m Ken Glaub.”
Then he heard another voice on the line, “Pastor Glaub,
this is Millie, Millie from Harrisburg.”
“How did you find me at this number?” he asked. “Isn’t this your office
in California?” she said. “No, my office is in Yakima, Washington, but right
now I’m at a payphone outside of Dayton, Ohio. How did you get this number?”
Millie went on to tell her story. Her life had fallen
apart, and she had decided to end it all by committing suicide. As she wrote
her suicide note, she started to pray:
“Oh God, if only I could talk to that Pastor Glaub I heard on the radio.
I know he could help me. O Lord, what should I do?” As she prayed, some numbers
came into her mind, and she wrote them down on her note. She finished the note,
but then put it aside, deciding to wait a couple of days before going through
with her plan. As she did, she kept thinking about those numbers. Finally, she realized
that they looked like a telephone number. So, she decided to ask the operator
to dial it with the hope that it was Ken Glaub’s number.
Stunned, Ken took a deep breath, realizing that the Holy
Spirit had just touched him. He spent the next thirty minutes talking with her
and giving her the names of people in her area to talk with. Finally, he hung
up the telephone. He had just been given a sign from God—from God’s Spirit—telling
him that he was doing the right thing. (from Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul, by Jack Canfield and Mark
Victor Hansen, and from Internet sources).
This story may sound too fantastic, but is it anymore
fantastic than what the Bible says about the Spirit? The fact is that the
Spirit is speaking to you and working your life. But are you open enough to
discover and experience it?
Amen.
