The Sixth Sunday of Easter

The Rev'd Canon Mariclair Partee


John 14:15-21

The idea of a tripartite God is often the hardest for kids, also for adults, to grasp in catechism. Our church spent its first thousand years or so trying out different explanations for how our God could be three but one, and many lost their lives as heretics in the mean time. This is one of the reasons that we don’t hear many sermons about the Holy Trinity to this day, and we hear perhaps less concerned solely with the Holy Spirit, but that is what we have in our Gospel today, so let’s jump right in.

I think the best description of the Trinity that I ever heard was of Dad, his Son, and their pet bird. We’ve struggled with the Holy Spirit the most, I think, because we don’t get a whole lot of scriptural  discussion like we do with Jesus, with God the Father. Some identify the Holy Spirit with Sophia, the Greek personification of Holy Wisdom, and having a feminine member of the Trinity is a comfort to some, gives a feeling of inclusion in this holy mystery. Others recall the Holy Spirit present at Creation, traveling over the waters like a wind. In the gospel today quite technically the Holy Spirit is called the paraklete, a Greek word meaning something like counselor, comforter, advocate, or quite literally “someone called to your side”. Jesus in this passage form John is describing this advocate, this paraklete, as solace and companionship for the disciples after his own death, a means of ensuring that they are not left orphans when Jesus departs his earthly ministry. Throughout time and church history this advocate has taken on more and more of a lawyerly form, pleading our case in God’s court. This of course requires an angry God, one who must be dissuaded from damning us for eternity, and I don’t think that is an image of God that most of us identify with. I was discussing this notion of the Holy Spirit as divine attorney with a friend over email and his reply was so perfect that I have to share it with you:

“So, what do we do with this idea of the Spirit being an Advocate, or Counselor? Well, let’s try looking at it from a different perspective. What if Jesus is sending the Advocate to make his case to us? What if the Paraklete comes to us to make God’s case against our judging hearts? What if, as Jesus says, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.” And notice he says, “another Advocate?” Seems that maybe Jesus is the first Advocate, doesn’t it? As if Jesus came to make the case, to show us the love of God in his words and deeds, and now another Advocate will come to continue to make the case to us. But, “the case” seems the wrong term, really.

Have you ever read the play, Cyrano de Bergerac? Or, seen the movie? Or the Steve Martin version, Roxanne? Even if you haven’t, you kind of know the plot, I’m sure. Cyrano loves Roxanne, but ends up putting words into the mouth of Christian, and captures Roxanne’s heart through a messenger, or advocate . . . and it’s hard to tell which one is the advocate for the other, in this play. Now, you never want to press an analogy like this too far, but since we’re dealing with John’s gospel (where Jesus is called the Word), maybe it’s more apt than it seems at first. The great lengths that Christian and Cyrano go to in order to win Roxanne’s heart are perhaps a good glimpse at the effort that God goes through to win our hearts. It’s not a court of law, you see? It’s a romance!

What if the Advocate is not coming to be our helper in the courtroom? What if instead the Advocate is sent by God in order to win our hearts? What if God so loved the world that he sent his only son? Doesn’t Jesus show the ultimate depths of God’s love for you, in that he is willing to lay down his life proclaiming the love of God? Jesus walks among us, preaches the Good News to us, and then . . . well, we have to kill him. We don’t want to hear it.

But God does not give up. Here comes the Advocate to deliver the same message. The Spirit knocks on your heart’s door with the message of God’s love, and will continue to do so forever, because forever is how long God’s love for you lasts. Well beyond the grave, I might add.

And I will tell you the most important part of the message. Jesus says it himself in today’s Gospel: Because I live, you also will live.

There’s a lot more to the message, of course, but it all grows out of that main point: Because I live, you also will live.”

This is what the Holy spirit is, this is what God is trying to tell us, over and over, if only we can listen: the Holy Spirit is God’s love, working in our midst, singing the love songs of the Holy, calling us always back to the care of Him who made us.

“We cannot come to Jesus unless the Father draws us. And the Father draws us by sending the Advocate to plead with our hearts. And the Father and the Spirit together draw us to this altar today, where with the saints of every time and every place…with all of them, we meet the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread.”

(Quoted correspondence is between the author and The Rev'd George Baum)

The Fifth Sunday of Easter

The Ven. Richard I. Cluett

1Peter 2:2-10    +    John 14:1-14

Today’s Gospel speaks of some things of great importance. Most of us are familiar with the gospel scripture in the context of the burial of someone we love or have known. It is good to remember, though that Jesus was speaking to the disciples he was about to leave behind. He speaks about their life ahead and the way forward.

He speaks of fidelity and commitment and trust. In the midst of his disciples’ feelings of abandonment, betrayal, grief, and fear, Jesus speaks a word of comfort, “Do not let your hears be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.” The Greek word could as easily be, trust. “Trust in God, trust also in me.”

The opportunity to fall into despair is regularly presented to us by the happenstance of life, by the action of others, by the frailty of our own selves. The tendency to despair lies not far below the surface of any one of us.

Barbara Crafton once wrote, Life is hard. For some, hunger and thirst, the grinding daily experience of poverty and want, from birth to death. For some, lifelong physical pain, or terrible terminal illness. And for those whose physical needs are easily and consistently met, other things: the loss of love, the crippling inability to give oneself completely and its corresponding loneliness, the paralyzing presence of chronic anger. War, and the fear of war. Disappointment. Betrayal. -- For everyone, something.

We share a common human experience of being – in our hearts, in our minds, in our behaviors – at some times, the most wretched of sinners, at other times just ground down by life and circumstance, and at the same time we are people who have known, received, and experienced mercy, the amazing grace of an infinitely loving God.

Everyone, without exception, either has stood or will stand before God at sometime in his or her life hoping against hope that the Good News is really true and dis­covering that it is true, and then being washed new and clean and be­ing freed and empowered for a new-born life.

The lesson of today’s scripture lessons is Don’t give in, don’t give up. Believe in all I have taught you, believe in all I have shown you. Believe in me as I do in you. Trust in me, as I trust in you. If you have trouble believing my words, then believe what you see. “Believe me because of the works themselves.”

In my life I have believed at times, but I have also doubted. I have trusted at times, but I have also been afraid, not trusted. And then I catch a glimpse of what happens when people believe, when people trust, when people don’t give in, when people don’t give up, when people don’t walk away, when people believe and carry on, when people trust and plow ahead. When I see others, then I find I can believe, I can trust – again.

Jesus is speaking about a new-born life, one that lives in hope, believes in salvation, finds power in fellowship with other believers and strugglers, knows purpose in being God’s people – not only comfort, but purpose; a reason to be, a reason get up, a reason to go on, a reason to go out, a reason to seek and finally to find. It is amazing what happens, when we believe, when we trust.

In my national work for the church, I have seen the dead raised. I didn’t believe it possible at first, but I have seen the lame walk and begin to run. I have seen hope triumph over despair.

For those who may not know, I have been privileged for the past 3 years to work with dioceses that had been abandoned by leaders and members seeking, what they would call, a greater and more fundamental orthodoxy than they found in the Episcopal Church.

In a sense not one stone was left upon another stone in these dioceses. In one sense all that was left was the chief cornerstone and a faithful remnant. Church buildings and property were gone, all the holy books, vessels and vestments, leaders, records, funds, trusts, members, history and traditions, friends and even family members. Gone. All that was left in some places were a few people and their faith.

They could have gone to the local Lutheran church or some other congregation. No one would have blamed them. But battered and bruised as they were, they would not let their community die. So they gathered, a faithful few in living rooms and club halls and church basements, and shops, still the Episcopal Church of St. Whomever of the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy or San Joaquin or Fort Worth or Pittsburgh. They had their faith and they had each other. Period. They decided not to die, but instead to live, to be reborn, and to grow.

In the Diocese of Quincy all that was left was one full parish and two small congregations with about 1/3 of their original members remaining in their buildings; 2 full-time clergy and two retired, and that was it. No bishop, no diocese, no vestries. That was 3 years ago.

Last weekend I was in the Diocese of Quincy to help lead their first-ever Diocesan Ministry Training Conference. 180 people from nine congregations participated in ministry training workshops, learning about leadership and governance, Eucharistic and pastoral visitors, stewardship, Christian formation, evangelism, community advocacy, and more. The day ended in an extraordinary celebration of life and thanksgiving in the Eucharist, and the commissioning of these faithful people to carry on the mission of the church.

I have seen what was lost, found. I have seen what was dead, come alive. And if that can be true in Illinois and California and Texas and Western Pennsylvania, it is true wherever and whenever life needs a new birth. It is true for a diocese, it is true for a congregation, it is true for the lives of God’s people, and it is true for your life and mine.

For, We are … God's own people, in order that we may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once we were not a people, but now we are God's people; once we had not received mercy, but now we have received mercy.

Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.