WORD AND SPIRIT Acts 2:1-21; Rom. 8:22-27; John 15:26-27, 16:4-15 In a little over a week, a week before her due-date, Juliane will give birth to a son. She will be spared labor pains, unless she goes into labor early, but if you have seen her of late, you know she has been laboring for quite a while in carrying her baby to term. A new little person. And life goes on, the wheel turns as it always has, life renewing itself, over and over and over again. Modern medicine will help Juliane s birthing along, as it has been helping the process along by regular monitoring of mother and baby s health. But it is still the age-old process, nine months in duration, a cycle completed, a relatively brief cycle embedded in longer cycles, Juliane s lifetime, the lifetime of the family and the society and the species, cycle upon cycle, spinning and spinning. As Christians we live in these cycles, adding to them the cycles of a weekly Sabbath and the Church Year. We recognize them and we celebrate them. It is one of the ways that we tell time, the hands of the clock go around and the years go through their seasons and cycles and it is spring again, and it s Christmas and Easter and Pentecost. But we also think about a progression and that there is forward motion so that things are not simply going around in circles but are going somewhere. It is a mark of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, that we understand time as a line from past to future. The eastern religions are inclined to think more cyclically. A long time ago I think I suggested to you that the best image for living through time might be the spiral. 1
In any case, when St. Paul thinks about time, it is mostly as a line of progression that he now sees as coming to an end, or at least to a moment of fulfillment. The sign that this is so is that Jesus has been resurrected. It will not be long before all things will be resurrected, the forces of death conquered, a new world born. No more labor pains. The end and the beginning are near. Paul writes his Letter to the Romans sometime between the years 54 and 58 of the Common Era, about 1959 years ago. St. John writes his Gospel some 50 years after Paul s Letter to the Romans, and he writes as if the end and beginning are not just around the corner. He puts more emphasis on continuing to believe in Jesus even though everything has not been made new and in fact seems further from being made new than ever. In today s Gospel John stresses the role of the Holy Spirit as Advocate and Spirit of Truth. Jesus will not be here, but the Spirit is, and it is by the Spirit that Christians and the Christian faith will live. The message is shifting to help the followers of Jesus see that whatever else one might hope, the Christian faith is to be lived in the Spirit of Truth. When John speaks of the Spirit of Truth he is thinking about keeping faith with Jesus who is the truth about God, and not being drawn away from the faith, especially in the face of the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire. Christians are people who believe that Jesus is the truth about God. This is unique to us. Muslims believe the truth about Allah is in the Koran; Jews think the truth about Jahweh is in the Torah. But for us, it is Jesus. Muslims and Jews are people of the book different books, in fact but each find the authority for their respective faiths in books. We, too, of course, depend upon a book for our faith. We know what we know about Jesus from the Bible and the New Testament in particular. If someone says, Jesus once took a trip to Bombay, India, we will 2
want to know how they know this, and it is to the New Testament that we will turn to see if they are right about this. There s nothing in the New Testament that says he went to Bombay or didn t go to Bombay Bombay is not much mentioned but from the New Testament it seems unlikely that Jesus went to India, and we will want to know where else we might look besides the New Testament to learn about the travels of Jesus. This having been said, the New Testament does not tell everything that there is to know about Jesus life. More specifically, what the New Testament tells us is about the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit. We don t know what Jesus was doing on May 24, year 28 of the Common Era. Nor do we know if Jesus was tall or short or where he got whatever education he had. We don t know for certain whether or not Jesus ever existed and actually walked the dusty roads of Galilee. I don t think there is good reason not to believe that Jesus existed, but we don t know this with the same assurance that we know that Abraham Lincoln existed. But we do know the Spirit of Jesus from the New Testament. The Spirit! This is what we have. And it is what we need. For Christians, the Word of God is not the Bible, and we should do everything we can to banish the notion that the Bible is the Word of God. This confusion has done tremendous harm throughout history. From a Christian perspective, believing the Bible is the Word of God is bibliolatry: making an idol out of the Bible. For Christians the Bible is the Word of God only insofar as what it says is testimony to the Holy Spirit of Jesus who is the Word of God. As a case in point, think about all the misery suffered by GLBTQ people when the Bible is idolized as the Word of God. The Bible has a very, very few verses that are anti-homosexual, and even these need to be interpreted in their context to understand what they are saying. At the same time, 3
it must be admitted that the Bible is generally heterosexist and assumes that heterosexuality is the normal state of things. Bible believers who are so inclined will jump on this tendency to prove that God condemns anyone who is not heterosexual. We come to a very different place if it is Jesus who is the Word of God. Is there anything anything at all that you can find in the Spirit of Jesus that suggests GLBTQ people are under threat of condemnation by God for being who they are? Anything? The Spirit of Jesus is the spirit of grace and love, and what is opposed to the spirit of grace and love is opposed to the Spirit of Jesus. The Christian life is life lived in the Spirit of Jesus. And I take it that the description of people hearing the gospel of Christ in their native languages on the first Pentecost is a way of saying that the Spirit of Jesus can be expressed in many different ways and is available in all places and all times and to all people. I began this sermon talking about different ways of thinking about time, whether as a series of cycles or as a line extending from some point in the past indefinitely into the future or some combination of these. However one thinks about time, from the point of view of our faith, the Holy Spirit is eternally present, the Spirit that makes the world and of which we believe we have caught a glimpse in Christ Jesus, the Word of God in the flesh. To be a Christian person is to live in and according to the Spirit of Jesus and to be striving to be people full of grace and mercy and peace and truth in what we say and do. And on the Day of Pentecost, it is good to remind ourselves that when we speak of God we are speaking of the Holy Spirit as we have come to know it in Christ Jesus. Amen. The Day of Pentecost, May 24, 2015 4
Emanuel Lutheran Church 5