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Pentecost

John 14
15 “If you love me, keep my commands. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— 17 the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be[a] in you.
25 “All this I have spoken while still with you. 26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. 27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

Psalm 139
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.


If you have elaborate travel plans for the summer, try to stay within the law. I give you this advice because your Canadian habit of seeking out a good lawyer won’t work in other countries.

So in the UK, for example, you’ll need a solicitor. They’ll get things straightened out, unless you end up in court, and then you’ll need a barrister. In South Africa, you’ll need an attorney, which is the same as an English solicitor, but not a barrister. In the United States, an attorney is more-or-less both, yet may choose to call themselves a lawyer. But watch out, because in the US anyone who graduates from law school is considered a lawyer and may not belong to the bar, and therefore cannot represent you—but they can still give you advice. In Ireland, you’ll need a counsellor, but only after you’ve seen a solicitor.

And just to add another layer to the confusion, in much of Europe you should seek out an advocate, which generally means someone to stand in for you, but it’s an actual class of lawyer. Curiously, becoming an advocate in Scotland is called devilling, which only seems to play into the stereotype.

Best advice: stay out of trouble, it’s just too confusing.

Pondering all this, listen again to the words Barbara shared from John 14: “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” This is part of the rationale of Pentecost, the background that explains what the wind and flame and tongues seek to achieve.

So the first task of the Spirit is to teach. The Spirit can show us things and direct us to things that will aid us in learning. For St. Paul, it was dramatic—literally a road to Damascus experience that changed everything. For Peter the Spirit speaks through a dream, the things that God creates cannot be considered unclean. For Mary, the Spirit magnified her soul, and gave her a vision of a world made new through the child within her.

So the first task of the Spirit is to teach. The next task is to recall, to remind us of everything Jesus said and did in is time on earth. This begins, of course, with the disciples who call to mind the words and events and pass them on to the evangelists. The evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—record them for us even as they acknowledge that this record in incomplete. At the end of his Gospel John says:

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

And so implied in these words is the third task of the Spirit: to generate new meaning. Just as the unrecorded deeds of Jesus could fill endless volumes of scripture, the Spirit takes the scripture we do have and generates new understandings and new meaning for every time and place. This “generative capacity” is a gift of the Spirit, revealing truth through each page.

Just as an aside, there is a phenomenon that most preachers will describe, whereby someone during the week may say something like “on Sunday, you said...” What’s curious about this phenomenon is that often the words recalled didn’t actually pass the preacher’s lips: they simply arrived at the ears of the person recounting the words. This too is part of the generative capacity of scripture and the Word proclaimed in worship. The Spirit can speak quite apart from whatever words we share.

So the Spirit is teaching us, helping us remember, and generating new meaning. That’s a lot, but it only begins to describe the work of the Holy Spirit. Next, we need to look at John 14 once more. Jesus said:

“If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth.

This seems closer to the meaning of advocate that we began with. Jesus gave us a specific set of instructions (at this moment simply “keep my commands”) and acted as an advocate as we tried to follow. And what does an advocate do? Offers advice (“love the Lord you God with all your heart, mind and soul”), provides a way forward (“love your neighbour as yourself”) and a way to maintain all that he has given us (“feed my sheep”).

Jesus the advocate argues that the Kingdom of God includes tax collectors and sinners, the sick, those possessed by demons and the those crucified by his side. It belongs to the least and the last and even those of us reading centuries on who fit in all or none of these categories.

So sending “another advocate” means that the Spirit is doing everything Jesus did in life, everything that we expect, having spent time with Jesus in the scriptures. But my sense is that this vision of another advocate may be too small, and we need to look father afield to truly understand this role of advocate. And the farther afield was also in the words Barbara shared this morning, from Psalm 139:

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.

This advocate is tireless, seeking us in all the places we find ourselves. From highest heaven to the depths of Sheol, the Spirit is seeking us yet. To the ends of the earth and everywhere in between, the Spirit searches. Even when we run and hide—if only from ourselves—the Spirit is searching for us. The Spirit as advocate will not leave us, but stand by our side.

And at the last, when human living begins to resemble a courtroom drama, we will still have an advocate standing by our side.

And as every argument is met with an equal and compelling counter-argument, the advocate is still beside us.

And as the evidence mounts and direction of our case seems hopeless, the advocate will hang in to the end.

And when the conviction is finally rendered, and the world has found against us, the most remarkable thing will happen: the advocate, the one who has stood beside us all this time will take our place, and pay the penalty that belongs to us.

From teaching to recalling to generating new meaning, and even following us to the end of the earth, our advocate completes the sentence that allows us to remain free—free to love and serve others, free to seek justice and resist evil, and free to proclaim Jesus—crucified and risen. May the advocate remain by our side, now and always. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 6:20 AM