May 31, 2020 (Day of Pentecost) – John 20:19-23
John 20:19-23
John’s Pentecost
Day of Pentecost – May 31, 2020
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Has the boredom set in yet?
The boredom of our lives’ restrictions?
The boredom of the sameness of days?
It could be monotony and routine that is getting to you,
even if you are trying to work from home and care for children at the same time.
There is – or can be, maybe – something instructive about this strange time we are living in.
Freed from distractions, yes: we will become bored, anxious, fretful.
But is that all we are when we are stripped of everything else?
Is there nothing beyond that?
In our Gospel reading, it is Easter Sunday evening.
The disciples are in a scene we have become familiar with: they are locked in a room.
They are probably not bored yet,
but like us they are experiencing a measure of anxiety and fretfulness.
And they are afraid.
They have forgotten the promises made to them over all the chapters of John’s Gospel.
John proclaimed that Jesus would baptize them with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus himself told them that he had the ability to give the Holy Spirit “without measure.”
And of course he promised them “another Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to be with them forever.”
These promises culminate in today’s scene when Jesus gives them the promised Holy Spirit.
They are more than their anxiety, more than their fretfulness, more than their fears.
On Pentecost Sunday we remember and celebrate this giving of the Spirit to the first disciples.
And we celebrate and remember that it is given to us to, to equip us for Jesus’ mission.
We are celebrating this event 50 days after Easter Sunday because according to Luke’s account
in the book of Acts that’s when the Spirit came to Jesus’ followers.
This is the account we usually think of on Pentecost Sunday,
when the Spirit blew through the house they were gathered in with a sound like
a mighty rushing wind, when it appeared with what looked like tongues of flame,
and when their speech was understood by people from across the ancient world.
Compared to that dramatic account, John’s story is much more subdued and intimate.
But it is no less powerful.
One of the things I love about this story in John is that Jesus breathes his Spirit into them
(not just “upon,” as our translation has it).
The word for “spirit” in Greek can also be translated breath or wind.
So in Luke the Spirit is associated with wind while in John it is associated with breath.
The breathing of Jesus’ breath into the disciples is very intimate,
like the action of mouth to mouth resuscitation, which brings new life –
it is very like the moment when God breathed life into the first earth person in Genesis.
John understands by this action that the fullness of Jesus himself is given into the believer.
Therefore, the disciples can accomplish things similar to those he accomplished;
indeed, Jesus will say, they will accomplish even greater things –
for they are many while he is one.
They are indeed much, much more than their current anxieties and fears.
The Spirit reveals the risen Jesus’ presence to them,
and Jesus reveals the fullness of God himself.
Just so, in John’s understanding, since we too have received the fullness of Jesus’ Spirit,
we followers also have the ability to reveal the fullness of God
to all those whom we encounter.
As I mentioned in the Devotion Moment yesterday,
this is a mighty responsibility:
We have the ability to disclose God and God’s love for the world.
We can set free the love that is in us – or we can not.
And if we do not, if we fail to do so,
others will not come to the knowledge of what God is up to in the world through Jesus.
There is, obviously, great intimacy between God and humanity here.
Intimacy is a great theme of John’s Gospel.
The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are in very close relationship in John’s understanding.
But so, too, are human beings with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
Christian theologians characterize our God most precisely as a Trinity.
Ask one of our confirmands at FLC about what God is like and they are likely to say,
“God is most like a loving community of three persons.”
But in John, maybe there is a footnote to that definition.
John’s understanding of what is really going on in our lives with God is maybe
not so much about a Trinity, but what Jamie Clark-Soles has called a Quattrinity.
After all, what does Jesus say concerning the day he will give the disciples the Spirit?
On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. . . . Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. (John 14:20, 23)
The Father, the Son, and the Spirit now home with us: the Quattrinity.
There is more – much more – to us than our anxieties, and fears, and boredom.
Much more to us than our failures and our mistakes and the injustices and abuses we suffer.
There is much much more to us than our apprehensions and our guilt.
We are, in John’s understanding, a very intimate part of something grand.
But we don’t always recognize it.
Way back in the day, when the first difficulties of the Christian church were being overcome and
when Christians were becoming more accepted in the Roman Empire;
when it would not be too long before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity
the official religion of the Empire –
When all this was happening, there were those who wondered what might be lost in this
more general acceptance of Christianity.
Some worried that Christianity would become watered down now that it was becoming more
acceptable to the powerful.
And they worried that in increasingly busy cities, it would be difficult to arrive at
the most essential things they wanted to know:
knowledge about themselves, and knowledge about God.
So they moved away from the distractions of the city . . . to the desert.
They became known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers,
and laid the foundations for Christian monastic communities across the globe.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers intentionally isolated themselves for long periods of time.
They prayed and simply observed their thoughts and feelings ebb and flow before them.
Free of distractions, they quickly became bored.
Then they became anxious and fretful,
while swimming up from deep within themselves they discovered worries and boredom.
Their anxiety, they found, increased until . . . it didn’t anymore.
Those who stuck with it discovered that beneath the anxiety and boredom was something
more permanent and lasting.
They discovered that our lives – our truest selves – are ‘hidden with Christ in God’ in a place of
stillness, safety, and hope. (L. Roger Owens in The Christian Century:
They discovered precisely what Jesus in John’s Gospel promised:
the Father, the Son, and the Spirit now home with us.
We are, as I sign my communications, “in Christ.”
We are in God, and God is in us.
That is the deepest, truest thing about our lives.
God, of course, does not home in us as an end in itself.
The purpose of God is the restoration of all things,
the reconciliation, redemption, and renewal of creation.
And in those purposes care for the vulnerable has a very special place,
as the ministry of Jesus revealed to us.
So Jesus sends the newly in-spirited disciples: as the Father sends me, so I send you.
He sends us to love a world God so deeply loves.
In the beautiful words of L. Roger Owens, we are sent to engage the world – our families, our friends, our coworkers, the suffering, the marginalized – from that place of stillness, safety, and hope where we abide with God in a divine hermitage of love. (Ibid.)
We can do these things most effectively and powerfully when we are together, of course.
But we are still “in Christ” even when we are apart.
We can still reveal God’s love to all whom we encounter.
We have been given the Spirit – Jesus lives and breathes in us still.
We are at home in God.
May this time of isolation remind us that we are more than our fears and anxieties and boredoms.
There is much, much more to us:
with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit we are a Quattrinity of love.
So together, let us say a virtual, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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