Pentecost - Jesus Had to Go
Jesus Had To Go
Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15
Romans 8:22-27
We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning. I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts. Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
Prayer – Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of Life, we gather this day, the birthday of the church to be reminded that as Jesus came into the world, he showed us how to live, faith-fully, and filled with your Spirit. When it came time for him to go, it frightened the disciples, and to be honest Lord, it still makes us uncomfortable to imagine that even with the Advocate here, we are to carry on Jesus’ work. We ask once again O Holy Spirit to come and help us to do Jesus’ work of loving God and loving one another each and every day – amen.
Everywhere you looked, you saw people in tie-dyed shirts. Mothers gave drinks of apple juice to their children, while men in gray pigtails sipped Budweiser and tossed the empties beneath somebody’s car. Teenagers spread blankets out on the asphalt and took naps in the summer sunshine. Middle-aged hippies danced freely throughout the Philadelphia parking lot. Hundreds of mourners spontaneously gathered outside the Spectrum to bid goodbye to rock guitarist Jerry Garcia.
Whenever Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead came trucking into Philadelphia, the Spectrum was their preferred arena for concerts. They played some fifty concerts at the Spectrum. So it was a natural site for fans to gather when Garcia died of a heart attack in a California drug treatment facility. His music had gathered different generations in the same psychedelic experience. Under his influence, the Grateful Dead built a huge following by their live concerts, rather than through their infrequent recordings. The stood free from the star-making machinery of the music business. The made music about joy, peace and spontaneity, and large numbers of weary, stressed out, buttoned-down Baby Boomers found freedom and consolation in their tunes.
“We just feel like it’s the end of an era,” a New Jersey fan said. “We’re not lost. Our life is not ending, but it was such a good thing.” Then someone else added, “I don’t know how we are going to live without Jerry.” (Philadelphia Inquirer) Whether or not we know Jerry Garcia and his music, most of us know what it is like, how difficult it is to say goodbye to a hero. I was recently stunned when I saw the movie American Sniper and saw the crowds and the devastating looks on their faces at the funeral of American sniper and war hero Chris Kyle as the movie concluded. For those of us who belong to the Christian church, we are especially sympathetic, for in a far more profound sense, we lost a loved one who has been the center of our lives, the source of our joy, the well-spring of our celebrations. Each week we gather in the name of Jesus, the head of the church, who had to go. And whether or not we realize it, our Christian faith is an attempt to answer the question, “How are we going to live since Jesus had to go?”
Now somebody will probably say, “Wait, Jesus hasn’t gone anywhere. He is still present with the church. He’s right here, present in our hearts!” That certainly sounds like a cozy and comforting thing to say. But how dare we say it? A young father tried to hush his exuberant young daughter who stumped around the church on a weekday afternoon. “Please be quiet, this is God’s house.” With that, the curious girl pushed open the doors to the sanctuary, peered around and then announced to her father, “Don’t worry, God’s not home today.”
The text we heard this morning reminds us that the fundamental crisis of the church was the departure of Jesus. He is the source of our lives, like the vine beneath so many branches. We did not choose Jesus, he chose us, and appointed us to be faithful followers. Yet he had to go. That is what Easter means. “He is risen,” the angel said, “and he is not here.” Easter faith tries to make sense of Jesus’ 2000-year plus absence.
The NT writer who deals with this issue the most is John. In the fourth gospel, Jesus speaks at length with his disciples about this impending death and resurrection. On that last Thursday night, he washed their feet and reminded them of his love and the expectation he had that they love one another similarly. He tells them at length that he is on his way out of town. He prays for them as if it is graduation night and someone will be departing very soon. Then comes the actual departure and as Fred Craddock says in his commentary on John, “Before the departing Christ, the disciples had been as children playing on the floor, only to look up and see the parents putting on coats and hats. The questions are there, and they have not changed; where are you going? Can we go? Then who is going to stay with us?” (Fred Craddock, John, p. 98)
As a people of faith, following in the tradition of those first disciples, we have wrestled and tumbled and tried desperately to live out those questions over the last 2000 years. Where are you going? Can we go? Then who is going to stay, and essentially take care of us like you have? Ultimately, why did Jesus have to go? How are we going to live if not survive without Jesus? The answer, according to the gospel of John, lies in the presence of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete. With Jesus off to heaven, the Spirit’s presence draws near to Jesus’ followers. Jesus had to go or the disciples would have continued to rely on Jesus to take care of all that Jesus business and more than likely we would have continued that pattern even today. The reality is that if Jesus had not left us, the Spirit would not have come. Jesus had to go for the Advocate to come and dwell with us.
Admittedly this sounds like typical preacher double-talk to a lot of people, both inside and outside the church. It is difficult to talk about the Holy Spirit. Outside the church, whenever people talk about a person’s spirit continuing on, they usually point to the people left behind who hold the same values as the hero and who extend the impact for what their hero did or said. After Jerry Garcia died, for instance, an MTV interviewer pointed a camera in the face of somebody in San Francisco, “How are you handling the news of Garcia’s death?” she asked. “Jerry’s music lives on, man! His spirit will always be with us.” To which the interviewer added, “Like wow, man. Right on!” To translate, we may never get rid of the sixties, but there are certain things that live on – good, bad and then well, who knows?
Inside the church we find it hard to talk about the Spirit of Jesus. It’s fairly easy to say, “Jesus has left the building and the Spirit is here now,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean we hold those same values or extend our lives around this Spirit-led idea. It seems that we struggle to wait for the Spirit, to be led by the Spirit, to live by the Spirit who has many things to tell us that we cannot yet bear to hear. It is difficult to wait for the Spirit when we cannot touch or see. No wonder, then, that sometimes our impatience leads us to mere mortals for guidance. We turn to the church for undue authority, expecting a list of what we should and should not do. Either that, or the church itself fills the absence of Jesus with its own false certainty and pretends to have all the answers.
A pastor I know tells the story of a horrifying experience that occurred of all places – a Christian bookstore. The pastor, a female, was looking for a commentary on the book of Deuteronomy when a man with an earnest face came up to her and said, “How are you doing, sister? Isn’t this a beautiful day the Lord has made? Praise the Lord! Let’s say Amen together.” She ignored him. Unfortunately, that made things worse. He began paying attention to her. He said, “Maybe you didn’t hear me when I said, ‘Praise the Lord!’ Listen sister, I want to hear you say a good word for Jesus.” He continued to annoy her. Finally she stopped him and said, “I’m the pastor at a Presbyterian Church and I’m shopping for a Bible commentary. When I find the book I’m looking for, I will use it to write a sermon in which I will say a lot of good about Jesus. In the meantime, please leave me alone.”
“You can’t be a pastor,” he said. “My Bible won’t allow women to be pastors.” She reached into her wallet, pulled out a business card, and handed it to him. Then she turned back to her shopping. “No, listen,” he said, “The Bible doesn’t say anything about women becoming preachers. You’re wrong. Your whole life is a sin.” “Well,” she replied, “why don’t we let the Holy Spirit decide, since it was the Holy Spirit who called me into ministry? In the meantime, I found my book and I’m going to pay for it now, good-bye.” “I can’t let you go yet,” he said, “Your salvation is at stake. You’re a woman and you don’t know your place. Worse than that, you don’t know the Bible. I’m worried about your soul. If you should die tonight, you would go to hell. I would be held accountable if I didn’t tell you the truth.”
By this point, dying wouldn’t have been so bad. At least she would be free of silly fools in Christian bookstores. Somehow she found the strength to speak to him and said, “If you’re so concerned with truth, let me tell you what I know. In life and death, I belong to God. God called me to serve God, regardless of whether or not that’s written down in your Bible. My ‘place’ was choosing to obey him. I believe the Holy Spirit led me into this truth, and I trust the Holy Spirit will sort it out.” Then she added, “As far as hell is concerned, that is God’s decision, not mine and not yours. If it were up to me, hell would be full of people who cling to their Bible they never think about, and heaven would be full of people who trust in a God they cannot see.”
The truth is that Jesus had to go. He couldn’t continue to hang around and keep the show going. The early disciples relied on him to do all those amazing things he had been doing for three years and they were not going to try and do his work as long as he was still in the picture. So Jesus had to go and that meant that the first disciples, and even the disciples of today, needed some help to keep Jesus’ work going. Jesus knew his work had to be entrusted to those who had observed and who had experienced all that had been done over the course of the previous three years; they were the faithful ones who could tell the story. Jesus also knew that they couldn’t do it on their own – they needed help. And thus, his promise to send the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to guide, to testify to the truth of Jesus’ life, work, faith, divinity, and redemptive power.
Jesus promised the coming of the Spirit, and he claimed that the mission and sending of the Spirit occurred by his authority. Jesus offered assurance to the disciples then, and to us now, that this Spirit can be trusted as true because it comes from God and because it will testify to the good news already made known in the life, death and resurrection of the Christ. With all of that being true, then the Spirit’s identity is centered in modeling and empowering that same witness in the community of Jesus’ disciples – and thus the church then and today. In other words, as the church today, our jobs is to be the “word made flesh.”
That is what Christian faith is all about – faith in Christ. We are the remnants of those first disciples, and like those first disciples, those first believers, the Advocate continues to lead us to truth, continues to lead us into the life that Christ came to give and not just a prescribed set of beliefs. As we gather on the Pentecost Sunday, we celebrate that oneness in sending and mission, and we celebrate too that we as believers, not only are objects of that love and grace, but that we too are called, empowered, and sent to join that mission of loving God and loving one another.
Remembering the story of the pastor and the man in the bookstore, I am challenged and I challenge you with this question – Could it be time for faith to be lived as a lifestyle, rather than a specific belief system? My guess is that the truth, as testified by the Spirit, will set us free – thanks be to God – amen.