The "E" Word
Scripture Reading: John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
About six months or so before I was ordained—this was back in 2013—I attended a retreat for candidates for ordination in the Presbytery of New York City. Including pastors and ruling elders, there were about forty people altogether. The first thing we did was an ice-breaker activity. We were asked to sort ourselves into three groups based on our answers to certain questions. These were open-ended questions. There were no right or wrong answers.
The first question was: Do you primarily relate to God as Father, as Son, or as Holy Spirit? We were given a moment to think about it and then directed to stand in one of three areas of the room based on our answer. Close to half of those assembled stepped into the Father group, and about an equal number chose the Son group, which left just a handful of people over in the Holy Spirit group—a result that is not the least bit surprising for a bunch of Presbyterians.
The second question was: What is the primary mission of the church…worship, social righteousness, or evangelism? Of the forty of us, perhaps fifteen went into the worship group and about twenty-five joined the social-righteousness group. Now, I know this is church, but you can do the math: 15 + 25 = 40. Okay, so let’s say there were forty-one people at the retreat. That would leave one person—that being me—standing by my lonesome in the evangelism group. I suppose I can’t even call it a group. I was the evangelism individual.
The rather uneven distribution of the three groups caused some mild laughter. A few people even gave me a nod of the head, a smile, or some other show of affirmation. But the truth is I didn’t then—and I don’t now—consider myself in any way, shape, or form to be an enthusiastic evangelist. I’m not. I just felt that somebody in the church had to stand for the importance of evangelism. And that’s all I had to do…just stand there. I didn’t actually have to go and evangelize.
The Holy Spirit and evangelism…not exactly the most popular sermon topics for a Presbyterian church service. But here we are. And here we are once more in the Gospel of John. Two weeks ago we were in chapter 15 and heard Jesus say that he chose us for a mission of love. Last week it was chapter 17, in which Jesus set apart the church from the world even as he sent us into the world to bear witness to the gospel.
Now today we jump back to the end of chapter 15 and a good chunk of chapter 16. Although we’ve skipped around a bit, we haven’t left the scene of the Last Supper. The Last Supper takes up three entire chapters of John’s Gospel. It must have been a 12-course meal.
But seriously, this is one of the challenges of preaching from John. There are no parables and few short and easily digestible stories. Instead, we have these lengthy narratives that take up almost an entire chapter, or in the case of the Last Supper, three entire chapters. And as you heard last week, John’s language can at times be dense, repetitive, and not always flow in the most logical way for modern readers.
That’s why rather than attempting to walk through the entire passage, I’m going to focus on one just one theme—this notion of testifying that we find in the first two verses. Let’s hear them again. “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. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.”
The Advocate will testify, and we will testify. The Advocate—my Bible has a note saying that the word can also be translated as Helper, which is fitting. Jesus is preparing to leave the disciples, but he is not going to leave them alone. He will send the Advocate to testify on his behalf and to help the disciples testify as well. And if we wonder why the disciples might need help testifying to Jesus, who called them, taught them, formed them, and befriended them, let’s remember that shortly after this supper has ended Peter will deny even knowing him. If we think that we, with our mainline Presbyterian sensibilities, are reluctant to testify to our relationship with Jesus…well, we’re hardly alone. We can look to Peter as the prime example.
Knowing that the disciples will need help in order to testify, Jesus sends them—and sends us—the Advocate, which is to say, the Holy Spirit. You may be aware that Presbyterians have sometimes been accused by our more Charismatic Christian kin, meaning those who have a more robust appreciation for the Holy Spirit, as having virtually forgotten that there is a third person of the Trinity.
To the extent that that accusation may be true, it’s probably because we tend to be skeptical about dramatic displays of emotion in church, finding them, at best, peculiar, and at worst performative and attention-seeking. Leave the dancing, the shaking, the crying, the upraised arms, and the shouts of “Jesus!” to the Pentecostals and other Holy Rollers. We will do things decently and in order, with committees, quorums, and white papers!
First and foremost the Holy Spirit is simply the presence of Jesus Christ here among us now.
While culturally and theologically I am mostly in the mainline camp, if we as Presbyterians think that the Holy Spirit is only about these enthusiastic displays of emotion, then we fundamentally misunderstand who the Holy Spirit is and what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit is not just tongues of fire and pyrotechnics. First and foremost the Holy Spirit is simply the presence of Jesus Christ here among us now…in our communal life together as a church and in our individual lives outside the church. The Holy Spirit is the continuing presence of Jesus in the lives of his followers…in our joys and in our sorrows, in our faithfulness and in our waywardness.
Or as expressed in the prayer attributed to St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland:
Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right,
Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down,
Christ when I sit down,
Christ when I arise.
That’s who the Holy Spirit is—Christ himself here and now. What the Holy Spirit does is testify to the truth that Jesus is the Son of God…the Son of God who was sent by the Father to bestow grace to sinners and to model for his followers an alternative way of being in the world.
Because the Spirit testifies to this truth, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the “Spirit of truth.” The Spirit of truth guides the disciples into all truth: The truth of forgiveness for sins accomplished on the cross; the truth of life overcoming death through the resurrection; the truth of God’s inexhaustible love and grace for sinners.
Through some of Paul’s letters we have learned to associate the Holy Spirit with spiritual gifts—things like wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, prophecy, speaking and interpreting tongues (yowza!) (see 1 Corinthians 12:8-10), but also ministering, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading, and showing compassion (see Romans 12:6-8). But all of these gifts are grounded in the truth and serve to proclaim that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who gave himself for the life of the world. This is what the Spirit testifies to and this is what the Spirit empowers us as followers of Jesus to testify to.
Evangelism is simply sharing how God has moved in your life. We all have a story to share.
I’ve been using the word “testify” because that’s the word used in this passage, but I could also use the E-word. Wait! Are we allowed to say the E-word in the Presbyterian church? To heck with it! Let’s throw caution to the wind. Evangelism! There, I said it! Report me to the presbytery. I don’t care.
In all seriousness, when many of us hear the word “evangelism,” we instinctively recoil for a few reasons. We associate it with tawdry televangelists who prey upon pensioners. Or closer to home, we think of those fire and brimstone street preachers you sometimes encounter in Times Square or in Manhattan subway tunnels. Or maybe, in a more positive sense, we remember those Billy Graham crusades attended by tens of thousands of people and think that one must have a special calling to evangelize.
But that is not so. Evangelism isn’t about getting up in front of thousands with a microphone and quoting Scripture. And it’s certainly not about haranguing people by using the Bible as a weapon or as a tool to making a buck. Evangelism is simply sharing how God has moved in your life. We all have a story to share.
I mentioned before that a few weeks ago I attended a conference in New York City. One of the speakers was named Andy Root, who is a professor of youth and family ministry at a seminary in Minnesota (it’s unsettling when the professors are younger than you are). He mentioned how he had been intrigued by a book called When God Talks Back, which was written by a Stanford University anthropologist who wanted to study the phenomenon of people who claim that God speaks to them. Unsurprisingly, the author focused on evangelical expressions of Christianity, where the claim that God speaks to you earns you a pat on the back, whereas in the mainline church it causes people to step back (his words).
However, intrigued by the concept, Andy wanted to do his own research within his mainline Protestant context. He did a series of one-on-one interviews with a dozen mainline Christians—Lutherans and Presbyterians. He asked them, “Have you ever had an experience of God speaking to you?” One of the interviewees, a man in his seventies, said he didn’t trust anyone who claimed to hear God speak, and thought the whole idea was ridiculous and manipulative…except this one time when he experienced God speaking to him.
Every single one of the twelve people that Andy interviewed had at least one experience of God speaking to them. The stories were beautiful, and he felt privileged to hear them, but when he asked if they had ever told anyone about them, every single person answered the same: Nope. Not even your pastor? Nope. Nobody. Then, in words that still haunt me, Andy rhetorically asked of those of us in attendance, “How long can the world continue under such a subtle God?”
He ended by telling us about his most meaningful interview. It was with a young woman named Rachel. She was Presbyterian. Although she had volunteered to be interviewed, she seemed bothered by the process and gave only perfunctory answers. Yes. No. An interviewer’s nightmare. She kept repeating that she was a single mom and didn’t have a lot of time for this.
Wanting to bring a merciful end to the interview, Andy improvised one last question. “Rachel, have you ever had an experience where you felt so deeply ministered to that you were sure it was the very presence of Jesus Christ?”
That’s when her demeanor changed. “I have,” she said, “but I’ve never told anyone this story.” She proceeded to explain why she was a single mom. Four years earlier her husband had gotten on a plane to fly from Seattle to Chicago for a business trip. He was supposed to be gone for three days, but just thirteen hours into his trip Rachel received a phone call from the hotel where he was staying. The young man on the other end sounded nervous and had difficulty getting the words out, but he eventually managed to say, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but your husband is dead.” The maid had entered his room in the morning and found him lying in bed already deceased.
Hearing that her husband was dead, Rachel had the experience of not being in her body. The color drained from the room. “My life is over,” she thought.
She arranged for someone to watch her two young children and flew to Chicago, a city in which she did not know a single person. She handed her cab driver a card with the address of the morgue. So lost in her grief was she that she didn’t even realize that they had arrived and the cabbie had parked the car.
The workers at the morgue were expecting her. They took her to a side room where she waited but for a minute, although it seemed to have no end. Then the doors opened and a man in a hospital gown wheeled out a gurney with a body on it covered with a sheet.
Just as the man was about to pull the sheet from the body, Rachel felt a hand on her shoulder, and an arm came around the front with a water bottle. As she was telling the story to Andy, she started to cry and said, “It was the cabbie.” She added, “I have never felt more ministered to. I wasn’t sure how I was going to put my life back together, but I knew that God had not abandoned me. Jesus Christ was going to see me through.” She ended by saying once more that she had never told this story to anyone.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, the God of Peter—your God and mine—heals the sick, mends the broken-hearted, and raises the dead. This is not just the biblical story; this is your story. Don’t be afraid to share your story.