Presence

 

Last Sunday (6-27-21), I urged the congregation to see that our greatest joy is found in God’s presence.  Being with God is better than getting what (we think) we desire.  You can watch that sermon here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnytxbCHJMw (begin at 19:20 mark).  Be with God.

            Here I follow up that message with an encouragement for you.  This summer, 2021, discover what being is God’s presence is like for you. Prayer walking.  Periods of silent meditation.  Worship singing.  Journaling.  Find the mode and context in which you are able to tune out distractions and focus on hearing from God.  Feel God speak to your spirit. 

            Jesus promised “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20b).  Paul promises nothing in creation can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).   Why is it good news when we say “God is with us?”  I bet you can answer that question intellectually or rationally.  Or, if you don’t know the answer, you can research it and discover a cogent response. 

            Why is it good for us experientially?  I suspect this one is harder to articulate.  And this is not something you’ll learn by a google search our hours spent reading thick theology or spirituality books.  To experience God, you have to invest significant time and focused attention walking with God, sitting with God, and listening to God.  Do exactly that this summer.  Dedicate this summer to knowing God in your spirit.

            There will be trial and error, and frustrating periods of silence.  It’s worth the agony.  Transformation comes in the journey.  And, you’ll see the world around you differently, and you’ll become a new creation.  Practice the presence of God.  Discover who you are in light of your relationship with God in Christ. 

How Much is God Really in Control? (1 Kings 17:8-16)

Sunday, November 11, 2018

            Whew!  Big exhale.  Why?  She has looked at me with a solemn face as she asked me to pray for her.  What I say next is really important.

I respond, “Tell me about it.” 

Every single one of us has a story.  Even the seemingly unremarkable daily occurrences move the story of your life.  It might mean nothing to someone else, but this is your story.  You don’t know what’s on the next page until you get to it.

When someone asks for prayer, she (or he) is reeling from what happened on the previous page; agonizing through the page she’s currently on; and, fearing what’s on the next page.  We don’t ask for prayer in the happiest parts of the story.  We’re blissful in those moments.  We ask for prayer when things are tough and we’re worried, afraid.

It’s clear she is a believer in Jesus.  Her thought that prayer might help was an indication of this.  As she tells her story, she says, “I know God is control.”  Why say that?  I think it’s because we absolutely hope that is so.  It’s a veiled desperation heave.  O God, I hope you’re in control. 

God could have stopped the mass shooting in California; and the one in Pittsburgh; and the one in Parkland, Florida; and the one … . God could have stopped it all if God wanted to.  Did God just not want to? 

Telemachus Orfanos was at the Las Vegas concert last year.  He survived that mass shooting.  I wonder if he said a prayer of thanks that included the words, “God is in control.”  He was 27 years old, a U.S. Navy veteran.  We honor veterans today. God is in control.  He who survived Las Vegas was killed at the shooting in California last week.  God is in control?  How much control does God really have? 

The book of First Kings in the Old Testament, after taking us through the golden age of King Solomon, then details the tragic story of God’s chosen people as they, against God’s intentions, split into a Northern Kingdom, Israel, and a Southern Kingdom, Judah.  Both were ruled by a series of kings, many of whom tried to be faithful to God’s ways.  Just as many abused power, disregarded the suffering of the poor, and led the nation into sinful idolatry by mixing worship of God with worship of other peoples’ pagan gods called Baals. 

At the end of chapter 16, we meet the new king of the north, Ahab. It says, “Ahab did more to provoke the anger of the Lord … than had all the kings of Israel before him.”  Ahab married a non-Jewish queen, Jezebel, daughter of the king of Sidon.  Ahab happily followed as she led him into idolatry, an insulting disregard of the God Ahab was supposed to represent and serve and love. 

Flipping the page to chapter 17, without warning or ceremony, we meet Elijah the Tishbite.  No introduction is offered.  He bursts onto the scene, his first recorded words a direct threat to King Ahab.  He tells Ahab there will be a 3-year drought in which rain will only come at his, Elijah’s word. 

Why don’t we receive background on Elijah, the Old Testament’s most prominent prophet?  Prophets only existed to point people to God; often, pointing to God’s displeasure.  Prophets meant to speak and then diminish as the message of God dominated the story. No one believed the idea that God is in control with as much commitment as the prophets.

Implied in his pronouncement of the drought was a condemnation of Ahab and Jezebel.  This drought is God’s punishment for their wickedness.  Immediately God sends Elijah into the wilderness, on the run.  By declaring the environmental disaster and blaming the king, Elijah becomes an enemy of that king.  Ahab kills his enemies.  And Jezebel is more coldblooded than her husband. 

The entire episode displays God’s control.  God tells Elijah to flee to the Wadi Cherith, a barren, dry place of wilderness; and that was true even when there was no drought.  Now, no one survives out there.  It is the perfect place to hide because Ahab will never think to chase Elijah there.  No fool would hide there. 

God makes water flow from the dried up wadi and Elijah drinks.  God instructs ravens to bring Elijah food and they do.  Control!  God controls the rain and the animals and the streams. 

But this begs the question, what about everyone else, besides Ahab and Jezebel.  We know that in natural disasters – floods, droughts, hurricanes, fires – the poor suffer worse than the rich.  Yes the drought punishes the wicked king and queen, but must God punish everyone as a drought clearly does?  We have to look back at the story – Elijah’s story; Ahab and Jezebel’s story; yours and mine.  I meet God in my story, but I do not know what God is doing in others’ stories.  There was a drought.  It does not tells us how God acts in the stories of common people throughout Israel during the drought. 

Then, the next account tells us exactly that; not a king’s story, but the presence of God in a very common person’s story.  Elijah has been in a place where his only hope of survival is God’s ability to command nature – ravens to provide for him.  Also, Elijah depends on his belief that God wants to help him. 

To Elijah in his Cherith wilderness hideout we read that “the word of the Lord came to him.”  “Go now to Zarephath and live there.”  Zarephath is in the coastal region to the west of Israel.  Sidon is the capital city of the region.  Remember Sidon?  That’s Jezebel’s hometown.   It’s like telling a runaway slave in 1860 to hide in the home of a poor white farmer in Mississippi. 

God tells Elijah, “I have commanded a widow there to feed you.”  The narrator of 1^st Kings does not let us in on Elijah’s, thoughts, not yet, anyway.  Elijah goes and meets the woman at the Zarephath town gate.  She doesn’t look very good as she gathers kindling.  She’s dangerously thin, with sunken cheeks and sallow complexion.  Elijah asks her to stop what she’s doing and fetch him a drink of water.  Without protest, she moves at his word and as she does, he asks her to bring him bread. 

This is too much.  She replies, “As the Lord your God lives” – she knows who Elijah is, that he is the prophet of the God who’s caused the misery of this drought – “As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering sticks so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son so that we may eat it and die.”  She is preparing for her own last supper. 

First, God sent Elijah to survive in the wilderness around the Wadi Cherith.  He lived in a place of death.  Now, God has sent Elijah into enemy territory to get sustenance from a woman who is planning to starve to death in the midst of the drought God has sent. 

Elijah’s next words show how utterly idiotic we can sound when we say exactly what God tells us to say.  “Fear not,” he tells her.  Then he tells her to go ahead with plans, a last supper followed by death by starvation.  Yeah, go ahead with that, but first bring me a little something to eat.  It’s so ludicrous, it defies description.  And that’s the point. 

We heard the telltale phrase of Old Testament prophets when Elijah was sent to Jezebel’s stomping grounds.  “The Word of the Lord came to him.”  Now we hear a similar phrase that signals God is in the midst of this inexplicable contradiction in Elijah’s words.  “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel.”  We know something profound is coming.  Your jar of meal from which you make bread and your jug of cooking oil you use to prepare it will not empty until the rain comes.  So, go ahead and prepare for your death, but know this.  God is preparing life for you.  Not only that, but you will be a part of the story of God’s word convicting and then redeeming Israel. 

We say “God is in control” as a desperate hope that God will do something to rescue us from the darkness we’re in; we cling to the hope that God will heal us from the trauma we have suffered.  God did not cause the shooting in California or Pittsburgh or Florida.  God did not spare Telemachus Orfanos in Las Vegas just to have him die this past week.  These shootings happen because God allows us to have free will.  When we human beings have free will, often, we choose evil.  These shootings and deaths are evil.  Evil is present in the world.  I don’t know why this young navy veteran died.  His story is not my story.  What I believe is God was in his story.  I know God is in mine. 

God is first in control of God’s self in a way that I cannot control myself.  I overreact to things.  I get emotional.  I lose my temper.  I can be selfish and, sometimes, shortsighted.  I lose control.  I believe we all do.  God is steadfast.  God doesn’t direct every movement of my life or course correct every time I make a bad decision.  God lets me live with the consequence of my mistakes.  God lets me suffer the natural outcomes of my sins.

When I turn back to God in repentance and faith, God forgives.  God creates a new future.  When, from the darkest parts of myself, I turn to God, God shines His light in the darkness.  God draws me to it.  We see this in the Apostle Peter.  He denied knowing Jesus three times as Jesus was being tried and flogged.  A week after the resurrection, Jesus restored Peter, three times allowing him to pledge his love.  Peter bore scars on his soul from his sin, but those scars were signs of healing restoration, not shame. 

The widow in Zarephath “went and did” according to Elijah’s word (v.15).  She doesn’t question.  She keeps scooping ground meal, pouring oil, baking bread, and feeding God’s prophet, her son, and herself.  With each meal, with the restoration of her health, with each moment of feeling full and satisfied, she discovers what it means to live according to the word of the Lord. 

When the pages of your story tell of that part when you have to walk, as Psalm 23 says, through “the valley of the shadow of death,” and your only recourse is to ask a friend to pray for you; there’s no other solution.  I don’t know that God promises to make the next page in your story instantly easier or to immediately solve all problems. 

Here’s what I am sure of.  God promises to be there.  Life is out of control.  You and I feel out of control.  So we pray.  And when we do, we meet a God who gives hope to starving widows who have lost it.  We meet the God who confronts wicked kings with truth and power.  We come face to face with the God who loves us so much, he let his only son take our place in death. 

Maybe in your story right now, the next line is, someone, please, pray for me.   Maybe that’s how things are.  Of course, you have people to pray for you and with you.  God is here.  He loves you.  Whatever you have going on, in this very moment, turn to Him.  Ask him to help you.  Turn to Him and see what it looks in your life when he fills your cup and blesses you with His love.

AMEN

Stressed? Pause and Pray

            You’re driving out of your neighborhood, headed to an early meeting.  You didn’t leave the house quite early enough.  Now, traffic ahead of you is stopped.  Oh, no!  A school bus.  And there are 9 kids at stop, lined up, s-l-o-w-l-y boarding.  Yes, it’s the first day, but must each parent give such a prolonged “goodbye”?

            Groan!

            Finally, the bus gets moving, but then, as you turn onto the main road, it hits you.  You have to drive right by the school, which will be backed up with parents dropping their kids off.  Really?  Today?  Ugh!

            You get past the school.  Now you’re sweating a bit.  It won’t look good if you’re late to this meeting.  You’re thinking about the day ahead and don’t really pay that close attention to where you’re going.  Driving on mental auto-pilot, you take the route through town as you have all summer.  Only a few seconds too late do you realize, the university is also back in session. 

School is back in session!

Downtown Chapel Hill is going to be overrun with cocky Tar Heel undergrads crossing the street wherever they feel like it, and 1000’s of other people who seem to have arrived in town en masse for the start of the semester.  Maybe it won’t be so bad, you pray as you near the heart of the city, only to discover it is as bad as you anticipated.

Now, you’re going to be late for the meeting.  And, after enduring the long stare and furrowed brow of your boss, you’re going to have to hear your co-workers chatter incessantly about their kids’ first day. 

            Take a deep breath.  In and out.  Take several if you need to.  The traffic is moving slowly, you have time.  This is the part where you remember that you’re a follower of Jesus.  When you step into the world, your primary calling is to live in a way that shines His light and emits His love. 

            As you sit in traffic, think back to that mom you saw wiping away tears as she ushered her kindergartener onto the school bus for the first time.  This is a big day for her and she’s full of emotion.  Ask God to comfort her and help her through the day.

            Think of that other kid from the bus stop, the one with mussed up hair who kept slapping the backs of the other kids’ heads.  He couldn’t keep still.  What an annoyance!  Maybe he has ADHD and his medication doesn’t work, and that’s why he was constantly wiggling in a way that made everyone around him try to keep their distance.  Maybe he has some other condition.  Whatever it is, if he can’t get it under control, he’s going to be lonely because no one will want to be his friend.  Pray for that child.  And, definitely pray for God to help that child’s teacher. 

            As you make your way through town, there’s someone you did not notice.  It’s a college student who did not get accepted into the program she really wanted.   Now, she wanders toward her first class in a cloud of anxiety.  She’s not sure what to major in, not sure of her future.  She needs to know God has her in His hands.  She may or may not know that she needs that, but she does.  Pray for her. 

            As you pull into a parking spot at work, pray for your co-worker who will talk about her school-aged kids from now until the end of May.  Why does she do that?  Is it because she is so concerned about them and she feels so powerless to help them?  After all, she’s here at work while they are out of her arm’s reach at school.  Pray that God would gently help her let her children grow up.  Pray that God would remind her that this is OK. 

            Finally, when you look into your own eyes in the bathroom mirror at work, pray for yourself.  Why are you missing out on this back-to-school fun?  Are your kids grown?  Is your annoyance really a cover for your sadness because you love your kids and they’ll never be little again and you miss them?  It’s OK.  Tell God you’re feeling a bit and sad ask God to sit with you in your sadness.  He will.   

Or, is your sadness of a different sort? You never had the opportunity to have children and you protect yourself from the pain that brings by telling yourself kids are a bother who just get in your way.  Maybe deep down, that’s what’s really eating at you today.  It’s OK.  As you look into your own eyes, tell God your feelings, your real feelings, the deeper emotion beneath the irritation.  You’ve prayed for the kids and their teachers and parents.  You’ve prayed for the college students.  Now pray for yourself.  Ask God to replace your irritability with compassions and joy, and ask God to fill the empty places in you. 

Let the happenings of today lead you into prayer. 

And tomorrow?  Leave the house earlier and remember not to drive through town!

New Season (Hosea 14:1-9)

Sunday, August 19, 2018

            I was talking recently with a woman whose discipline in prayer I greatly admire.  She writes down her prayer requests in a notebook and dates the entry.  Then she reads scripture and prays.  This is how she starts every day.  Whenever, she sees God respond to her prayer request, she writes God’s answer down, next to the original request.  This is how her on-going conversation with God happens.

            I was with her a few weeks ago, and as we talked, I told her of my admiration for her discipline.  She looked at me and said, “O, I stopped doing that about a year ago.”  I was devastated.  She said, “Now, when I get up in the morning, I check my email.”  As we continued discussing it, she committed to a return.  She would go back to her practice of beginning the day in conversation with God.  I committed to spending a bare minimum of 10 minutes per day in concentrated prayer.  And since, I have I returned to Chapel Hill from the visit, I have kept my commitment.  From my correspondence with her, I know that she has too. 

She has returned to morning conversations with God – the God who loves her.  God’s been waiting all along and was ready to welcome her and to welcome me back with open arms.  That’s the theme this morning – returning.  Return to God – the God who loves you.  Return to a life with God at the center.  Maybe this is a life you have never lived before.  Maybe you don’t know what it is to live with God at the center of everything. 

God’s there, in your life, waiting for you to stop fixating on gadgets or new romance or career goals or the miseries you’ve endured.  Gadgets and phones are fun; everyone wants to be able to tell “Alexa” was to do and see her do it.  A new romance is wonderful.  Career goals are admirable.  And personal miseries cannot be ignored.  But God has to be bigger than all of this in our lives; God loves us and will not tolerate being second to anything. 

I titled this sermon, “New Season.”  I don’t mean a new football season, although I, of course, am excited about that too.  No, what I mean by this title is a new season of life.  I was single until I got married at 32.  Life dramatically changed for me.  I had entered a new season and there was no going back to the old me.  Whatever I liked or hated about being single, after January 11, 2003, that was all behind me.  This is what I mean by a “new season.”

It can come for us at any time, but Fall in Chapel Hill is a special time of transition and of the beginning of new eras in people’s lives.  Of course students are back at UNC.  We rent parking spaces to UNC students.  All week, the church office was abuzz with students and their parents coming in to pick up their passes.  Many that Dina and I met are freshman, off to school, away from home for the first time in their lives. 

It’s not just the freshmen who enter a new season.  Upper classman have had a year or a couple of years to get used to Chapel Hill, and now return with a greater sense of purpose.  They come with sights set on the degree and the career that degree will prepare them to begin.  Graduates arrive in town to begin post doctorate fellowships.  New faculty move into town.  Many visiting scholars from other nations have just begun their time at UNC, in Chapel Hill.

The university is an enormous community and when things get rolling in the fall, the entire town feels the difference.  There’s a different vibe.  

Yet, many people in our church family and in our area have nothing to do directly with the university, and yet this is also a time of new things for them.  Anyone with school-aged children will send those little lovelies back to school a week from this Tuesday.  Maybe one of your kids is beginning elementary or middle or high school for the first time; or maybe, kindergarten, for the first time.  If you aren’t associated with UNC and don’t have school aged kids at home, immediately after Labor Day, it’s time for you to go on vacation; everywhere, the rates go down and the crowds are smaller. 

In church, Wednesday night dinner starts back up in September; family missions’ projects start back up in October; Sunday supper clubs get going again.  This is a time for each of us to look deep inside our lives and see what new thing God is doing in us.  We have the opportunity to respond to the grace of God and live life with God at the center; God shapes our sense of self, our identity; God defines all our relationships; and, our idea of success and fulfillment.  We discover what life looks like with God at the center of it all.

It might be odd to talk about a new season as we come to the very last chapter of the words of the prophet Hosea, who we’ve been hearing from all summer.  But, Hosea has been leading us to this point.  Up to now, Hosea has made two major claims.  First, the ancient people of Israel have turned away from God.  They have worshiped idols – statues of stone and wood that neighboring peoples, the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, have passed off as gods.  In direct disregard of the first of the 10 commandments, Israel had worshiped ‘other gods,’ false gods.  Along with this offense to the one true God, the Creator of all that is, injustice was everywhere in Israel.  The poor suffered greatly.  Hosea drove this point home with the graphic imagery of Israel as a prostitute, unfaithful to her husband. 

Hosea’s second major point, has been to insist upon the absolute dependability of God’s love.  God is angry.  God is hurt.  But God loves Israel.  Though punishment is coming, God will not give Israel up to destruction.  The punishment of exile, which is an event that happened in history, was a part of what God was preparing for Israel: a new season in which the people would once again live in a relationship of love, trust, and dependence upon God. 

In her great commentary on the Minor Prophets, the late Elizabeth Achtemeier, offers a daring interpretation of the exile that Hosea predicted and that ultimately befell Israel.  She likens it to the Jews in slavery in Egypt many centuries earlier.  God led them out of bondage and, eventually, into the Promised Land.  However, between Egypt and Promised Land was 40 years in the wilderness.  There, the only thing the people could do to survive was depend on God.  Achtemeier proposes that Hosea’s words show that exile is a second wilderness.  God is leading Israel there, and there God will once again woo Israel as the object of God’s affection.

God did not need a temple in Jerusalem or shrines at Samaria or Bethel.  God did not ask the people to offer more animals as blood sacrifices.  What God wanted from his people was their love and their trust.  In exile to Assyria in 8^th century and then to Babylon in the 6^th, the people had been stripped of all possession, all position, and all power.  All they had left was desperate prayer that they lifted to God.  Achtemeier suggests that God caused exile or at least allowed it because we are at our very best when we live dependently.[i]  When we see God at the center of everything and depend on God for success in everything, that’s when we have joy and hope.  That’s when we see the power of the Holy Spirit transform our lives. 

The form of Hosea 14:4-7 is what leads Achtemeier to her interpretation.  The the images that fill these verses come from traditional romance poetry.  God says, “I will love them freely.  … I will be like dew to Israel,” refreshing the people each day.  “… They shall live beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom like the vine, their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.”  God is romancing his people.  But God won’t give such attentive love to a people who ignore his advances.

Israel had flirted with Assyria and her gods, and then Egypt and her gods.  Each insistence of infidelity to the only true God went as badly it possibly could.  Only when the people had lost everything and could see their own sins and could see the evil of the pagan empires that tried to dominate them could they then, finally, focus on the God who is truly all-powerful and who truly loved them.

What distractions have grabbed our attention and caused us to move God out of the center?  What in life has deceived us into thinking we could take our faith and our relationship with God, set it on a shelf, and let God collect dust there as we pursue other interests?  The images of arresting beauty in Hosea 14:4-7 hint at the good God has in store for His people once they have been fully brought back from their sins.  The ultimate fulfillment for Israel comes in the birth, life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s son, God-in-the-flesh. 

He didn’t die on that cross so that it would become a piece of jewelry.  He didn’t come so that we’d make church and faith a part of our lives.  He came to be our very center.  Have you focused on success in school or in career?  Shift that focus!  This is your time, the new season, the day when God moves to the very heart of your thinking.  Set your eyes on Him and let Him bring the success.  O, work hard, for sure!  Study, put the effort in, and strive for greatness; but do it in a way that never allows you to forget that God is ever before you, and ever with you because God loves you so much.

Has your pain or the losses you’ve endured or the frustrations you’ve had to bear become what defines you?  Ambition is one idol that occupies the space God is supposed to occupy in our lives.  Suffering is another.  Many fall to the point that they only know themselves by the daily ordeals they have to endure.  Shift your focus!  It’s a new season in your life, one in which God wants you to flourish and to blossom like the most beautiful of flowers.  To God, that’s what you are.  I know, the pain is still there.  Doctors and the church family should come around you and try to help put that pain behind you.  When that’s impossible, then the community of God-worshipers, the church family, is to help you live with whatever is that makes life such a struggle.  That hurt, that condition, can’t bring you down, because now, you realize God is with you, loves you, and will give you purpose and joy in your life. 

What beginning is beginning in your life today, right now?  Hosea told Israel, “Take words with you, and return to the Lord.”  He meant words of confession and words of faith.  They had brought animals to sacrifice many times.  God was done with that.  He wanted His people to come with words that revealed hearts turned to God in faith.

It is time for us to bring our words to God, words that tell our stories.  Are you a student?  What words tells who you are?  What words do you bring?  Dean’s list?  Scholarship?  Or, failure? Academic probation? 

Are you retired?  Retired people enter new seasons with God; it’s the perfect time.  What words can you bring to God, words that communicate your heart?  Relaxation?  Accomplishment?  Smiles and grandchildren?  Or, worry.  Or, tears, regret, and disappointment? 

Are you new to town, literally beginning a new season?  What words do you bring?  Hope?  Or, uncertainty?

Gather the words that tell your story.  Then, return to the Lord because He is beauty, he is welcome; He gives fruit and shade.  He is a father, and He is love.  Decide today that this is, for you, a new season, one of honesty before God, full confession, and trust; believe that God will make you new and fill you with His Spirit. 

The final word from Hosea – “Those who are wise understand these things; those who are discerning know them.  For the ways of the Lord are right, and the upright walk in them.”

AMEN

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[i] Achtemeier, Elizabeth (1996), New International Bible Commentary: Minor Prophets I, Paternoster Press (Peabody, MA), p.111.  She writes, “In the future, God will begin a new saving history, leading Israel once again into the wilderness, where he will woo her tenderly, and make her his own.”

“The Holy Spirit: God-Breathed Love” (John 14:16-17; 15:26-27; 16:4b-15)

Sunday, May 20, 2018

            We pray, hoping that someone is listening.  Does this make sense?  As Christians, we believe that good wins in the end.  More specifically, we believe God, expressing God’s love, ultimately prevails over evil.  Under this audacious belief, we live lives in which we expect things to turn out well.  Should we?  We hope for the good and live as if we’ll get what we’re hoping for.  Does this make sense?  Such hope stands on what, exactly?  What’s the foundation of our faith?

            Reading an Edgar Allen Poe poem last week, I was swallowed by a damp, thick, vague, darkness.  It is what Han Solo means when he says, “I have a bad feeling about this.”  People familiar with Poe might tell me I have just described all his poems, not just the one I was reading last Thursday.  Yet poets and Star Wars characters are not the only ones to trust their gut instincts instead of evidence.  I have seen the most down-to-earth of people fall prey to indescribable, untouchable yet still palpable feelings.   Something is there.  Intuition. I have heard the most sober-minded of church members talk about the feeling of being blanketed by a thick spiritual heaviness. 

            I’m no poet and I wasn’t in star wars.  But I have had my own moments where feelings existing outside the realm of 5 senses have overcome me. 

            I was on the streets of Washington DC in 1993 outside an establishment that featured exotic dancing.  As men with lust in their eyes and wads of cash in their hands lined up to pay the cover charge, I felt evil in the air.  It clung to my skin like the steamy air after a hot summer rain. 

            Indeed, why should we Christians have optimism or hope or faith?  Evil is about in the world.  Demons; temptation; the sin of man against man, woman against woman; what good news can we offer?  To what hope can we cling?

            We stand at a border in a war zone.  Before us is no man’s land.  That phrase originated in World War I.  Between the German trench line and the French trench line was a space uncontrolled by either side.  Any venture in might mean poisonous gas, bombs, or exposure to enemy gunfire.  To go into no man’s land was to stare into death.  But there was no winning the war without advancing.

            After the resurrection of Jesus and the ascension, where Jesus went to sit at the right hand of the Father, the disciples sat in utter uncertainty.  Were they destined to be executed as Jesus was?  If so, would it do any good?  If death was before them, did they have the courage to face it?  They had become dependent upon the physical, bodily presence of Jesus.  Were they ready for life without him with them?  Staring into the void, exposed in no man’s land, the disciples saw God’s love for them in the coming of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit came as Jesus promised the Spirit would. 

            We cannot see the Holy Spirit.  We cannot measure the Holy Spirit through any form of scientific observation.  Relating to God the Spirit, even believing in God the Spirit, is an act of faith.  We live in this condition, in faith.  And that lands us right in that most dangerous of places – no man’s land.

            We have our life experiences.  I live with what I have seen and felt.  I have severely sprained both ankles in pick-up basketball games.  The pain is alive in my memory.  When I am watching a game on TV, and player is injured, and the broadcast shows it over and over in super-slow motion, I can’t even watch.  I feel the horrible pain. 

I remember a time in a Hardees restaurant, 27 years ago.  I was visiting my friends at Radford University.  We were in the restaurant laughing about something, and a Radford student thought I was laughing at him.  The next thing I knew, this guy was threatening to fight me.  I was so shocked to go from carefree laughter to fight or flight mode, I didn’t even really size up my attacker.  Thankfully that confrontation was posturing, not an actual fight.  Still, all these years later, I remember.

I remember the best hugs I have ever had. I remember times my dad and brother and I laughed at the silliest of things, laughed until we cried.

I remember watching my son joyfully run up the garage steps upon returning home from school.  I delighted in his happiness.  Then his foot slipped and he went down, face first, breaking his tooth in half on the steps; all that blood.  I get a little nervous now, when the kids run up those steps.  I walk up those steps with a little more care.

These are tactile experiences, memories with taste and touch, emotions and reactions.  I cannot recall “seeing” the Holy Spirit of God in any of these experiences.  From this no man’s land, this space of memory, I – we – stand at the border of the physical world and the great unknown.  We have deeper cuts than sprained ankles and broken teeth.  We have injuries to the soul, wounds only God can heal and we cannot see this God we desperately need.  We have no choice.  We have to step forward into the unknown future.  Where is God?

We were made for relationships.  Even those among us who enjoy quiet and solitude need others.  We all need intimacy.  Yet, nothing hurts us as much as the person we love who rejects us.  We cannot look into the mind and heart of another person.  So we step into relationship not knowing if we will be laughed at or loved.  And if we are laughed at, then who picks us up?  Where is God?

All we can do is step into the future.  We cannot be squatters in No Man’s Land.  We can live isolated from relationships, a life lived alone, but that leads to intolerable emptiness.  We must step into the unknown.  But how?

            I mentioned the uncertainty of the disciples at Jesus’ death.  Even seeing him resurrected, still they were unsure of what was next.  They had lived life with him, in his bodily presence.  They were in the boat when he calmed the raging storm.  They saw him raise dead people to life.  Being so close with him, they discovered their very best selves.  Once he ascended to the Father was gone, no longer with them in body, could they continue to be their very best selves?

            I doubt they really understood the mission or the message at this point.  We venerate Peter and Andrew, James and John, Matthew and Thomas and the rest, and rightly so.  But in that short time between ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit, I believe the disciples had greater anxiety than the spiritual uncertainty we live with daily.  They surely felt that their lives were on the line.

            The teaching of Jesus at the Last Supper, recorded in the Gospel of John, specifically what’s in chapters 14, 15, & 16 is God’s answer to the disciples’ tremulous confusion in the days after the ascension.  What Jesus says there is for us in the moments when we desperately ask, “Where is God?”

            God is here!  “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate” said Jesus (14:16).  “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” (15:26).  The New Revised Standard Version uses the word ‘Advocate’ to translate the Greek word ‘Paraclete.’  In reality, no single word in English adequately captures the meaning of this word; we might even say of this name. 

            The Paraclete is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit sent by God.  English translators have called this one ‘Advocate,’ ‘Comforter,’ ‘Helper,’ ‘Teacher,’ and ‘Mediator.’  The Spirit fills all of these roles.  The presence of the Holy Spirit is so important for living the life of a follower of Jesus, he actually said it was for the best that he depart.  His ascension was the best thing that could come for the disciples because the Holy Spirit would not come until he departed.  I find it hard to understand how I am better off apart from Jesus’ bodily presence, and I never met Jesus in the body.  How much more would these disciples whose feet were washed by him become incredulous when he said his departure was for the best?  But that’s what he said.  They, we, need the Spirit more than we need Jesus present in the body.  We cannot be disciples apart from the Holy Spirit.  We cannot be Christians apart from the Holy Spirit.

            However, this does not mean we strain to see or hear or feel the Holy Spirit.  Yes, we can listen, quiet our minds, open our hearts, and truly listen.  But, communing with the Spirit is not something we accomplish.  It’s something we receive, a gift of God’s grace.  The Spirit is sent by God as God’s presence with us.  We have this gift and God won’t ever go away.  God may sit patiently waiting for us to be responsive to the Spirit, or the Spirit may act in ways we cannot easily see, but the Spirit is God’s promise that God is always with us.  As we come to understand this, we see that No Man’s Land is transformed and becomes God’s Space.

            In John 16:8-11, the Spirit is an accuser who proves the depths of error found in the world.  Remember, in the Gospel of John, the world is fallen and dying, and is a dangerous place.  If we get too wrapped with the world, apart from God, we die with it.  The Spirit shows that world does not understand sin, righteousness, or judgment.  Sin is life lived in rebellion against God.  Righteousness is life lived in right relationship with God.  Judgment is God’s verdict that the world will die and be destroyed before entering the resurrection and being made new.  The Spirit exists within the evil world to teach this lesson about sin, righteousness, and judgment and at the same to time to speak God’s condemnation. 

            Such wrath-filled rhetoric might give us pause, raise our fears a little, but we can be comforted.  The same Spirit that speaks judgment to the world takes the church, the followers of Jesus, by the hand.  The Spirit guides us to the path of absolute joy and eternal life.  I would say the Spirit guides us gently and much of the time that is so.  But sometimes, some of us need more than an arm on the shoulder.  We need a swift kick to get us moving in the direction of God.  When need be, the Holy Spirit provides the necessary nudge. 

            Jesus said, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth” (16:12).  He’s called the Spirit of truth and he guides us into the truth.  And by the way, the Holy Spirit has no gender.  I say “He” because of the insufficiency of language. Earlier in John 14, we hear Jesus say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  So when Jesus declares that the Spirit will guide us he means two things.  The Holy Spirit enables us to truly see the world as it is, and guides us to Jesus. 

            Jesus says that he sends the Spirit.  He also says the Spirit comes from the Father.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus and the Father are one and whenever one acts, we are assured it is as if the other said that word or performed that deed.  All that I am saying does nothing to clarify the mystery of the Holy Trinity.  I cannot make the 3-in-one nature of God simple.  Next week we will talk more about our Trinitarian understanding of God.  I fear confusions will persist.  What I offer – what the Bible offers – what Jesus promised is not answers, but presence.

            God knows that John’s gospel presents the world as evil.   God knows the struggles, the uncertainty, and the sense of isolation that we face.  God knows.  God loves us and what God has done for us is to come to us.  God is with us in the person of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit is the ultimate testimony that God is love.  God’s ultimate value is love.  When you or I feel abandoned or defeated or collapsed in guilt or lost, God says to us, “I love you.  I will show you my love by being with you.”  This is God: love.  God is love. 

            Many years on Pentecost Sunday – today – we would read Acts 2 and see how the dramatic coming of the Holy Spirit launched the beginning of the age of the church, the body of Christ alive and active in the world.  This year on Pentecost Sunday, rest in who God is.  God is the one who loves you and is with you.  The world is dying in sin, but you are rescued for eternal joy, eternal love, and eternal life.  The Spirit has come and is here.  We need not fear.  Because of who God is, we can live in the midst of evil as witnesses to the truth.

AMEN