5-26-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Acts.

During the night, Paul had a vision.

There stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, Come over to Macedonia and help us.

When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.

We set sail from Troas and took a straight course from Semerithrace, with following day to Neapolis and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony.

We remained in this city for some days.

And on the Sabbath day, we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer.

And we sat down and spoke to a woman who had gathered there, to the women who had gathered there.

And a certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us.

She was from the city of Tyradia and a dealer of the purple cloth.

The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.

And when she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay in my home.

And she prevailed upon us with the word of the Lord.

A reading on the sixth Sunday of Easter.

Let your ways be known upon earth.

Let the peoples praise you, O God.

Let the nations be glad and sing for joy.

Let the peoples praise you, O God.

The earth has brought forth its increase.

O God, give us your blessing.

A reading from Revelation.

In the Spirit, the angel carried me away to a great high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb, and the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.

The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.

Its gate shall never be shut by day, and there shall be no night there, but the people will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations, but nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, the brightest crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.

And on either side of the river is the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

And nothing accursed will be found there any more.

But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and its servants will worship him, and they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads, and there will be no more night.

They need no light but lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

The word of the Lord.

And the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.

I've said these things to you while I am still with you, but the advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and will remind you of all that I have said to you.

Peace I live leave with you.

My peace I give to you.

I do not give to you as the world gives.

Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

You heard me say to you, I am going away, and I am coming to you.

If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.

And now I've told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe.

No longer are we hearing about appearances, the disciples are inviting us to remember things Jesus said before he was crucified and risen, things that are only starting to make sense to them in light of the resurrection.

And I sort of think it's like a game that all of you played.

Whether you remember it or not, you remember it if you played it with your kids, but as kids we often forget.

You can do this with anybody in the world.

It's a delightful little game called peekaboo.

Because the infant brain does not understand conservation of matter, what you see is what you get, and what you don't see isn't there.

So you can do this with a newborn baby.

You cover up your face or you cover up their eyes, and to them you are gone.

And what a delight when you appear.

Because again, when they can't see you, you're not there.

And then there you go, and you show up.

And this game morphs a little bit as kids grow to the game hide and seek.

Now you can play this with a two or three or four-year-old, and here's a great hiding place for a two-year-old.

And then it's amazing that you're there.

The worst thing that can happen when you play hide and seek with a three or four-year-old is that you don't find them quickly.

Quickly.

Ten or fifteen seconds.

If you don't, they'll come out and say, Where were you?

Because it's dangerous, don't you see, that you've been gone that long.

Even when you get to be seven or eight, most of the fun in hide and seek is being found.

You may not even remember this.

This is before your teenage years, but finding a great hiding place starts to become really scary.

So much so that you give yourself away.

All kinds of noises to give yourself away so that you can be found.

We need this in the development of our brains as we start to get our Medeo and our neocortex.

We need it.

And so I suppose we needed it in our faith lives.

Jesus is going to be with the disciples only 40 days before the ascension.

And so he's telling them, listen, I am going to leave you, but I'm not going to leave you like you've been left before.

See, the thing is, you won't see me, but I'll be with you more strongly than just sight.

This is the mystery of faith.

And he goes on to tell them today, the way that they'll experience his presence is with the Holy Spirit called the Advocate.

Today we hear the Advocate.

It's great legal language, the Advocate.

And that's actually a really helpful way to consider what Jesus is saying today.

To do it, you have to really dial with me.

There's these two words that we've kind of spun out of control to be this terrible personality opposed to everything good in the world.

The first is the word Satan.

That's a Hebrew word that means accuser.

The Satan is the accuser.

The Greek equivalent is the word diablos or devil, and that means slanderer.

Now in the Bible, your name is who you are.

So in the Hebrew Bible, the Satan is the accuser.

In the New Testament, the devil is the slanderer.

Thinking about legal language, the accuser, the slanderer, well, that's like the district attorney.

That's the one who goes around making sure that the guilty are prosecuted.

It can get out of control really fast when people accuse you and slander you.

Just look at the book of Job.

So I wonder if part of what Jesus isn't trying to offer us in legal speeches, hey, you are beset by accusations of your merit and your worth and your motives all the time.

So God's going to give you a court-appointed defense attorney, the Holy Spirit.

Now this is really critical because in general you don't want the court-appointed defense attorney.

You all know that, I think.

Not because they're bad attorneys, but because the caseload is way too big to manage.

God's not going to appoint one of those.

God's not going to go find somebody to represent you.

No, the Holy Spirit is going to advocate for you.

The court-appointed defense attorney is God.

Now that's nice.

That means when we're beset by, frankly, accusation and slander, I don't mean, hey, you did that.

I mean when we are beset with slander about whether we're good enough or worthwhile enough, does God actually love you?

Our defender in the heavens is God.

I think it's a wonderful theological point.

But I think the other thing we're invited to consider is how is it then, if God is advocating for us like so in heaven, how do we be advocates for one another on earth?

And what does it really mean to advocate for your brother and sister in the Lord?

Now our Acts readings have tried from the beginning, including today, to show that the Holy Spirit hops over every hurdle that the disciples put in the Spirit's way.

So consider that last week we heard about Peter's vision of the unclean animals.

And it wasn't about food, it was about unclean people.

It was about people who didn't eat kosher food.

How did God feel about them?

Well, what do you know?

The court-appointed defense attorney said, I love them like I love everybody else.

That was Peter's vision.

Today it may not make sense.

Oh, he's gone over to Macedonia.

Well, remember that Macedonians were barbarians.

Barbarians.

Literally, their language was so incomprehensible to the highfalutan Greeks that it sounded like they were just saying bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar all the time.

Macedonians weren't Greeks.

Paul has a vision of a Macedonian, a barbarian, a tribal person.

Somebody who's illiterate, or somebody who doesn't have social graces, saying, please come, we need new life.

It's the Holy Spirit advocating for people that are less than us, don't you see?

That's the Spirit's advocacy on behalf of people we think are less than us.

And Paul follows.

And this is the beginning of what's going to be actually the strongest church that Paul establishes, and how curious the leader is a woman.

The Holy Spirit does not bend to our whims in God's advocacy.

Rather, the Spirit invites us to change our pictures on behalf of all of God's children.

The way C.S.

Lewis writes about it is C.S.

Lewis says that God is the great iconoclast.

As soon as we make an image of God that we're very comfortable with, God sets about to destroy it on our behalf so that we can worship a God that is bigger than ourselves.

God is the breaker of our images for our sake, and of course, for God's.

There's a wonderful story about advocacy.

Tony Campoli was the spiritual advisor to Bill Clinton.

I don't know if you know him.

He's a fiery red-letter Christian.

And he told this story that once he was invited to speak in Hawaii, and he went, he's a native Pennsylvanian.

So he went to Hawaii, and of course, the time zone had his sleep schedule completely ruined.

So at three in the morning, completely awake, he went to a little diner across the street from the hotel, one of those 24-hour deals.

And there were two ladies in there.

It was clear that they were working the oldest profession on earth.

And he overheard a conversation that they had.

One of them said, Hey, tomorrow's my birthday.

And the other lady said, Who cares, Agnes?

It's just a regular day.

And Agnes got a little tear in her eye.

She said, I just wanted someone to know it's my birthday.

Within 30 minutes, the ladies had left.

And Tony looked at the clearly the owner operator behind the counter and said, Hey, we gotta do something for Agnes.

Does she come here every night?

And the guy said, Yeah, in fact, he does.

So Tony and uh the little cafe manager conspired, and sure enough, they ordered a cake with her name on it.

And the next night at around three in the morning, Tony went over, and here were these two ladies again.

And Tony and the and the gentleman who owned the place came out from behind the counter with a cake.

They sang happy birthday.

And Agnes froze.

And they said, Here, have some cake.

And she said, No, I don't think I could ever cut into that cake.

And eventually she left, clearly floored to have been advocated for once and who knows how many years.

The man behind the counter, after Agnes left, said, Hey, that was a pretty good thing you did.

You must be some kind of church guy.

What kind of church do you belong to?

And this is where Tony's a great speaker, because he always comes up with these pithy things.

He said, I belong to the church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at three in the morning.

And that I put to you is the advocacy of the Holy Spirit.

And what Jesus promises the disciples is that that kind of advocacy is going to be accomplished by you.

And what we rarely realize when we read the New Testament is the difference between you singular and you plural.

And this is why it's great we live in Texas because all of the reading today really says y'all, y'all will do the advocacy work of the Holy Spirit.

Now you may not even realize that y'all are already doing it.

So I want to tell you about some of y'all.

It's not just about shoes and backpacks.

Y'all do that.

But I want you to know about three weeks ago, we had somebody who within a day or two was in desperate need for some help.

They had to move.

And they were faced by doing it solo.

And y'all within a couple of days rounded up a group of people and moved somebody in their greatest need.

I want you to know that a couple of weeks ago I visited somebody in the hospital.

They had five children, and they were absolutely stunned to have this sickness.

And what do you know?

They were a member of a four years' dinner group.

And a couple members of that dinner group said, Y'all are gonna be taken care of.

And what did they do?

They took kids to school, they picked them up, they brought meals several days of the week, and that's the advocacy, don't you see, of the Holy Spirit.

A couple of months ago, we had a family that was hard off.

They didn't know if they could continue sending their child to school here, and it's been such a wonderful place for them.

And one of y'all stepped up and paid their tuition.

It's not that y'all knew each other.

It's that you knew a little bit of advocacy could go a long way.

Yesterday we had a wedding here for a family we haven't seen in years.

And not only did we do that, a couple of people stepped up and rewrote the whole wedding policy.

Y'all did it to advocate for people y'all don't even know.

Oh Mike, that's just being nice.

No, it's advocating for one another as the Holy Spirit does for us in heaven.

Yesterday, I did a funeral for a man who's never been to church here properly.

Because one of y'all told him the priest would be willing to do something like that.

Y'all connected a family with somebody who in their greatest point of need was afraid to even ask.

That's what y'all do.

And that's what the Holy Spirit does.

And that's this grand vision that we get in Revelation, don't you see?

The gates of the city of Jerusalem are always open.

Those gates are not like ours.

Because I can tell you, you want to come into my gates, there are very specific hours.

I don't just mean during the day.

And I have very specific watchmen to make sure only the right people come in.

And the Holy Spirit says, friend, no, open the gates.

Open the gates.

In the heavenly Jerusalem, there will be no temple.

If you notice that, there will be no sanctuary that is discreet and different from the rest of the city.

Because in the heavenly Jerusalem, God lives not only in St.

Thomas, but in the arrow apartments and in the sapphire apartments and in the park and on the bench where the homeless person sleeps.

The temple of God will be everywhere.

And this is not something that God is just gonna do later.

This is something y'all get to advocate for.

It was a challenge to the disciples that they could no longer see Jesus right in front of them.

And it's an invitation for us, didn't you see, to find Jesus right in front of us in every person that we meet and to advocate for Jesus, especially when we're worried.