Advent Lutheran Church

"The Advocate for You (Sixth Sunday of Easter)"

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            It is said that Hollywood legend Marilyn Monroe had the uncanny ability to walk into a room filled with total strangers and almost immediately pick out those who had been orphaned as children.  Monroe herself had grown up in an orphanage and was very familiar with the experience of being abandoned.  One of her ex-husbands, playwright Arthur Miller, suggested that her childhood in the orphanage had helped her develop almost a six sense for identifying people who had gone through the same upbringing.  Maybe, he suggested, it was a certain expression; perhaps a look of loneliness, or uncertainty, or fear about the future.

            When Jesus prepared his disciples for his departure, we’re not told about their state of mind, but surely uncertainty and fear for the future would have been heavy in the air.  This was their last gathering before Jesus would submit himself to a brutal process that would lead to his execution by the state.  But death would not have the last word: Resurrection would come!  Jesus knew that, but his disciples did not, and as he told them what was to come, fear would have been an understandable response.

            After all, they had been present with Jesus for a series of conflicts with the religious authorities.  They hadn’t been drawn into those conflicts, but everyone knew that they were Jesus’ friends, and once he was gone there would be no buffer between themselves and those who wished them harm.  So he told them directly, “I am not leaving you orphaned.  I am leaving you physically, yes, but afterward I will be with you in a form that you do not yet understand.  I will ask the Father to send you in Spirit what I have been for you in the flesh; a Holy Spirit who will be with you not temporarily, but forever.”

            Every fall, our graduating confirmation students gather on a Friday night to write their statements of faith, which they read to the congregation on the Sunday before they are confirmed.  My task on that Friday night is to brief them on the various components of that statement of faith.  That statement has to include the following: What do I believe about God? What do I believe about Jesus?  What do I believe about the Holy Spirit?  With two of the three persons of the Trinity, our students have no problem.  “God?  Easy; the Bible’s full of stories about God.  Jesus?  Again, no problem; the New Testament has got Jesus all over it, and we’ve even got a portrait of Jesus hanging in our library.”

            But the Holy Spirit?  The Holy Spirit gives them fits.  How in the world do you find words to describe the Holy Spirit?  It’s tough.  And I have to admit, it’s tough for me too, until I come back to this passage in John’s gospel, because it’s here where, finally, we see some clear characteristics of the Holy Spirit.

            First, Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit operates as an advocate.  He’s very specific about using that term.  Sometimes, an advocate describes a helper, sometimes a counselor.  Literally, the term “advocate” means “one who comes alongside.”  This Holy Spirit of God, this Advocate, will come alongside the disciples and remind them of what Jesus has taught them, and will do more than simply remind: it will give them strength to follow through and actually live out those teachings.  Living out the teachings of Jesus is a direct extension of loving Jesus.

            The German poet Heinrich Heine became noted for saying, “I like to sin, God likes to forgive; the world is wonderfully arranged.”  But Scripture is clear in its warning against that attitude and against that type of living.  We are not to take advantage of God’s grace.  Instead, if we love Jesus we do what he says, imperfectly, yes, but we are conscious and intentional about orienting our lives around his teachings.  We act like citizens of the Kingdom of Grace that Jesus embodied, and as we do we find that we are given power for that life by the presence of this one who comes alongside.

The Advocate, Jesus says, is also the Spirit of Truth.

The whole notion of truth has fallen on hard times.  We’re jaded from hearing too many bits of so-called truth that turn out to be false.  At best we’re skeptical, at worst we’re deaf to the white noise of rhetoric from our politicians that turns out to be just rhetoric; advertisements that promise more than their products can deliver; claims of friendship that turn out to be empty.

Harold Camping was playing to a skeptical national audience when he told us that the world would end a week ago last night.  Admittedly, he was running on a poor track record; he had first predicted that the end of the world would happen in 1994, and when that didn’t pan out he moved the X on his doomsday calendar to a week ago last night.  Now, he’s confident that the world will end on a date in October.  No, I won’t be holding my breath either.

We might laugh at Harold Camping, but a lot of people are not.  A number of people turned over their life savings, sold their homes, sold their businesses because they banked it all on a message of judgment and fear.  But the Spirit of Truth does not speak a word of judgment and fear; it speaks a message of hope.  It brings the Easter word that life, not death, has the last word. 

The people who most need to hear that word, in addition to ourselves, are people whose lives are driven by fear, people whom Jesus described as “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”  You know someone like that, someone driven by desperation, from whatever source.  Think of that person, bring him or her to mind for a moment.  Now imagine that you are the only one who can tell that person the truth: that God loves him or her no matter what.  He or she needs you, needs your steady witness to Jesus, needs your calm in the midst of their storm.  They need the truth, and that comes from the Spirit of Truth.

We also see that this Advocate behaves a lot like Jesus.  If you’ve ever seen someone stand up for someone else, ever seen someone bear someone else’s burden – you’ve seen the Advocate in action.  If you’ve ever stood up for someone, ever borne someone else’s burden – you’ve been acting under the influence of the Advocate.  Yes, the Advocate behaves a lot like Jesus, and that’s good news for people who want to be faithful, but it’s bad news for people who want to maintain control over their own lives.

Let me say that again: The Advocate behaves a lot like Jesus, and that’s bad news for those who want to maintain control over their own lives.

There is a deep paradox at the heart of the Christian life, and at the heart of the Christian mission.  On the one hand, God is all about continuity and consistency and constancy.  Jesus is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, the Bible tells us.  Amid all of the changes of this life, God is the one reality that does not change.

But it is also true that God is full of surprises.  The Holy Spirit of God, the breath of God, blows where it chooses and is completely free of human control.  It will do what the Spirit wants to do.  We say, “I want to go here!” and the Spirit says, “No, I need you over there.”  We say, “But I have a plan!”  And the Spirit says, “My plan might be different!”  This Advocate refuses to be domesticated, refuses to conform to our agenda.  Instead, it’s the other way around: we are swept up into God’s agenda, and the Spirit takes us where God wants us and the world needs us to go.

We’ve all seen the news coverage of the horrendous damage that has taken place in Joplin.  More than 130 people killed and over a third of the city wiped off the map because of the deadliest tornado on record.  Most of us have just watched the television coverage and read about the disaster and the recovery efforts.  But one of us, Bart Stuckey, was able to be part of that initial response to the devastation.  Bart is a volunteer with Heart to Heart International, and he drove the organization’s medical unit down to Joplin on Monday. 

Bart and I talked and emailed through the week, and Bart was amazed at the smaller stories behind the big stories, like snapshots taken at random.  There was the college student from Pennsylvania who heard about the tornado and the destruction, jumped into his car and drove straight through, simply wanting to help.  The retired couple from Texas who packed their RV full of food and drove into the midst of the destruction, hauled out their grill and started cooking for and feeding whoever came by.  The Walgreen manager who forgot about profit and loss and handed out his store’s contents to whoever had need.  The nurse who, operating for three days straight on just adrenaline, performed procedures she never would have imagined in a fully staffed and functioning hospital – but when you’re in the middle of a disaster, and it’s just you, you do what your conscience tells you has to be done.

People stepped up all week, Bart said, but what really caught his attention was the bigger picture that those snapshots, once assembled, revealed.  In an email to me just a couple of days ago, he wrote this:

“I think that after tragedies, everyone is equal, there are no boundaries, no distinctions of race or ethnic group, no rich or poor, no ‘I am better than them.’  Everyone is equal in what they are experiencing, everyone wants to reach out to help and be helped.  What I saw was the Kingdom of God, and I wondered why tragedies had to happen for it to be seen.”

He continued:             “We have been taught … that to experience joy and happiness we must have things.  You realize quickly that this type of joy is short-lived and you need more things to bring about the same joy or happiness.  As you allow yourself to experience God’s relationship, you realize what you have been taught about happiness and security is wrong.  The world looks differently.  You experience more pain than before because you realize that society is broken, but you must allow yourself to experience this pain, for on the other side is where you experience God’s compassion and grace.  You experience joy and happiness differently; it is not based on things but on people and creation.  You experience joy in a flower blooming, in a rainbow, and even in the midst of the devastation of a tornado.  It is here that we get to experience God at his greatest, because here we see most clearly that life, not death, has won the victory.”

You don’t need to become a Biblical scholar or possess secret knowledge or develop an intricate spirituality to know what God is up to in the world, and you don’t need a natural disaster to become a part of it.  The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, this one who comes alongside – this one will take you by the hand, guide your steps, open your eyes and show you.  May we – each of us – have the courage to follow wherever that Advocate leads.  Amen.