George A. Mason Trinity Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 22 May 2016 Dallas, Texas Swaying Power John 16:12-15 I didn t intend to preach a series on the Holy Spirit. Really. But that s the Holy Spirit for you full of surprises and sometimes delight in just seeing where we re being led. Two Sundays ago I preached on the Ascension and noted Jesus words about how when he went up into heaven the disciples were to stay in Jerusalem until they received power from on high. That staying power had to do with Jesus continuing presence in their lives through the gift of the Holy Spirit that would come just ten days later at Pentecost. Last Sunday we attended to the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that enabled the disciples miraculously to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ to people from all over the Mediterranean region in their own languages. Staying Power had become Saying Power. Communication led to community, and the church was born. My son remarked over Sunday lunch about these two sermons on staying power and saying power. So Dad, what s next week, Slaying Power? Now, we preachers can get clever by half now and then, but it did get me thinking about this Sunday, which is called Trinity Sunday, because we think about how the gift of the Holy Spirit rounds out our understanding of the God who was and is and always will be triune. God is three persons Father, Son and Holy Spirit yet one God. God is God alone, but God is not a lone God. God is personal and relational at the core of God s being. So, what about it, George? Slaying power? My first response was to think about how the Pentecostal movement uses the phrase slain in the Spirit to describe how some people experience the Holy Spirit s power to possess them and heal them. People fall flat on the ground as if they re dead slain by the Spirit that takes all the life out of the person in order to put new life back into the person. Now that would be a way to go with this, but while I
believe in the Holy Spirit, I don t see that metaphor of slaying being the usual way God works. The other reference to slaying power struck me as cultural. Beyoncé s song Formation, which she debuted at halftime of the Super Bowl, has her repeating again and again the phrase, I slay. Now, I ve watched and listened to the song, and I ve read black women see it as an anthem of empowerment. The idea is that black women need to stop depending upon black men or anyone else for that matter since their black lives matter regardless of other people. They matter period. But when she says I slay, she means she succeeds because of her own hard work that pays off. I m okay with that, but at the end of her song she says that the best revenge is the paper meaning money. For all the good empowerment language of personal responsibility, this can lead to another distortion of the Holy Spirit: the idea that God provides us slaying power, which in essence is winning power measured as material prosperity. Despite the extra need in the black community for empowerment overall, the prosperity gospel is not more acceptable for black folk than white folk. Neither Beyoncé nor Joel Osteen is what I m saying. The Holy Spirit is not God s gift of personal power for worldly success. Looking closer at what Jesus said and that s always the right thing to do, don t you know?! we might think of the Holy Spirit as Swaying Power rather than Slaying Power. And we can see this in several ways in our text. First, Jesus is the one who gives us the Spirit. The Spirit Jesus gives works within us to keep us aware of Jesus continuing presence in the world. His resurrection means he is not a dead figure to remember with reverence and fondness. He has been raised from the dead and lives at the right hand of God. His work is not finished in the world. But now it will be accomplished through the swaying power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says that the Holy Spirit will not speak independently from 2
Jesus or the Father. The Spirit is privy to their eternal conversation. The Spirit will only share what God wants revealed to us. And that will always involve glorifying Jesus as God the Son, just as Jesus always glorifies God the Father. The most important work, then, of the Holy Spirit is to sway us into believing in Jesus. No one is slain into believing in Jesus as if we have no part in it but to play dead. Yes, the Spirit gives us the power to believe, but we still have to believe. We are empowered to believe, enabled. But we don t do it on our own. We don t slay, so to speak. Belief is not an achievement. It is a response to the wooing, prompting, swaying power of the Holy Spirit. I don t know how many people you have ever successfully argued into faith in Jesus Christ. My record isn t good. No matter how compelling the evidence is for him being the Messiah, no matter how well the evidence is presented, there is always enough doubt in human terms that people will have a plausible case for unbelief. We can respect that. When Peter declared that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the Living God, Jesus said to him, Flesh and blood has not revealed that to you, but my Father in heaven. In other words, the Father reveals the Son through the swaying power of the Spirit. That was true for Peter and it is true for any of us and all of who come to believe in Jesus. The question is whether we are willing to be swayed. Let me put that more pointedly if you are struggling with faith today: Are you willing to be swayed? The second thing is this: The Spirit continues to lead us into all truth. Jesus tells us there is more truth to come that he could not share with the disciples in his time. His Spirit, however, will be with them and will lead them into all truth in times to come. Jesus will still be at work through the Spirit to lead the church. Our church s mission statement says as much: The Wilshire mission is to build a community of faith shaped by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. We believe the Holy Spirit will lead us and guide us as we consider the ways of Christ for our time. And that s why our vision statement says that we will be a bold witness to the way of Christ in our time. Every church must rely on the work of the Holy Spirit 3
among us, not on our own understanding. Every church must be willing to think and study and pray for the leadership of the Spirit in finding our way in our time. When the Pilgrims sailed for the new world in 1620, their minister, John Robinson, gave them a final charge. Here s a portion of what he said: I charge you before God that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If God reveals anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth by my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of His Holy Word. For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of those reformed churches which will go, at present, no further than the instruments of their reformation. The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; whatever part of His will our God had revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented, for though they were precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to them; and were they now living they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as that they had received. 1 This is a remarkable word, and I ll try to remember to tell you the same thing someday when the pulpit is passed. I can only imagine The Reverend Robinson was thinking about our text from John 16 and our Lord s words about how the Spirit will lead us into all truth, truth that couldn t yet be known in that time. There is virtue in honoring those who have gone before us and listening to their witness even from the grave. But there is virtue, too, in standing on their shoulders and listening to the Spirit in our time even as they did in theirs. This is no easy work, but the Lord has promised to be with us in it, guiding us into all truth by the Spirit s swaying power. 1 http://www.newtestamentpattern.net/christian-articles/sundry-thoughts/the-words-ofjohn-robinson_mayflower/ 4
But there is one more nuance to this that I am loathe to admit. The Spirit will lead us into all truth in our time, but our time is not necessarily my time or your time; it is our time together. And our time may or may not be right now even if you or I want or don t want that to be the case. We have to discern the truth the Spirit is leading us to, and we also have to discern the time as well. Some of us are always in a hurry for the new, and others of us are always content with the old. Some are ever ready to move and others just insist on being unmoved. It turns out none of us is given a perfect sense of timing on behalf of everyone else. Which can only mean we need to honor each other in that tension. When the Pilgrims left Leiden for England, some of them stayed behind, including their pastor. (Which may be the first time in history a Protestant pastor has led from behind.) The others sailed first for England on a ship called the Speedwell to meet the Mayflower in Southampton, where they would sail on together to America. On the way to Southampton, the Speedwell was leaking, so they had to spend a week patching her up. When they finally sailed, she started taking on water again and they returned to Dartmouth for repairs. Then they sailed 300 miles out to sea and she started leaking again, so they returned to Plymouth. Some of the Pilgrims were so discouraged that they couldn t get there quicker, they gave up altogether. The rest boarded an overloaded Mayflower and headed out again. The first half of the 66-day voyage was smooth, but then they hit Atlantic storms that threatened to undo them. Five passengers died on the journey. Sometimes the weather was so bad, they had to drift in the wind and waves because they couldn t use the sails. They had to be patient and just wait out the storms. They finally were able to regroup and head for Northern Virginia, but even then they found their destination wasn t exactly what they had planned. They landed instead on Cape Cod and called it Plymouth, in honor of the place from which they launched. The journey of faith is never easy. It is fraught with danger on all sides. And like those first disciples who feared the future without their Lord, we are prone to worry our way forward. But we have 5
been given the gift of Christ s presence through the Holy Spirit who will never mislead us. Things may not turn out like we plan or when we plan, but it s the Spirit s swaying power we depend upon to lead us in our time. The challenge before us is always the same: to listen carefully and to journey faithfully, together. Amen. 6