John 14.23-29
23 Jesus answered, “Whoever loves me will keep my word. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. 24 Whoever doesn’t love me doesn’t keep my words. The word that you hear isn’t mine. It is the word of the Father who sent me.
25 “I have spoken these things to you while I am with you. 26 The Companion, w the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I told you.
27 “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. I give to you not as the world gives. Don’t be troubled or afraid. 28 You have heard me tell you, ‘I’m going away and returning to you.’ If you loved me, you would be happy that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than me. 29 I have told you before it happens so that when it happens you will believe. 30 I won’t say much more to you because this world’s ruler is coming. He has nothing on me. 31 Rather, he comes so that the world will know that I love the Father and do just as the Father has commanded me. Get up. We’re leaving this place.
Let the words of my mouth
and the meditations of my heart
be pleasing to you,
LORD , my rock and my redeemer.
When we confess our faith, we talk about God who is Three in One. Three persons, one God.
We do that because, early on in our history, the Church recognized that every time we talked about our Creator, the Father, who shelters us as a Mother Hen, we were talking about God. Every time we claimed Jesus as Lord, we recognized the Nazarene as God. Every time we talked about the Holy Spirit, we breathed in and out the very inspiration of God.
But when we hear about any one of those persons in contrast with another in scripture, we also reconize that they are distinct.
Yes, they are all God. Yes, God is one. But these persons are different.
And that problem is what the early Church gathered to work out. And even though the Council of Nicaea came up with the Nicene Creed, a slight difference in verbiage managed to rip the Church in two, East and West.
The Church of Constantinople, whence derives the Orthodox Church (“orthodox” means “right belief or confession”), and the Church of Rome, whence derives the capital C Catholic Church (“catholic” means “universal”).
And, of course, the Church has been splitting at the seams ever since. It’s taken us two millennia to even come close to being able to productively talk about cooperating or working together. And a lot of our denominations, quite possibly The United Methodist Church included, are still suffering from fragmentation.
Because we’re too hard-headed to see past our disagreements and work together.
I digress.
Trinitarian theology. It’s not something that’s distinctly stated in scripture, but today’s gospel reading comes about as close as anything else.
Judas asks Jesus how he will reveal himself to them without revealing himself to the rest of Creation. So the Son talks about the Father’s love in sending the Holy Spirit to us as a Companion. Son, Father, Spirit.
The gospel reading is relevant today because it looks forward to an upcoming holy day, happening in two weeks: Pentecost.
More on that later.
Today’s reading is preparation.
The text prepares us for the upcoming event. And Jesus prepares the disciples for what is to come.
You can read around this passage on your own and see that happening, too. This is Jesus’ farewell, his last words of hope and encouragement. I’m sure it freaked out the disciples. Don’t you get freaked out when people start getting all morbid and talking about “Listen, when I go…”?
It’s not a comfortable conversation. And maybe that’s why Jesus reminds them that the Spirit who will remain with them is Companion and Comforter.
When we’re faced with fear, with grief, with change, what we seek is comfort.
I think that’s why our reading from the Revelation today is so often used in funerals and memorial services. It offers a beautiful picture of a glorious reunion.
And that’s about as deeply as some people will see it.
But I’ve asked you to look at staging before. There are important things to notice in the story.
Sure, we’ve all heard that there’s no temple and no need of sun or moon, because God is the temple and the light.
But there’s this bit about the river flowing through the street from the throne.
That’s weird, first of all, because the river flows through the street. Typically, that’s exactly what you want to avoid when building a street. When I was in the Sudan, the daily rains would wash through the streets like rivers, and the result wasn’t pretty. Gullies so deep in the road that you could stand in them. I’m glad I wasn’t driving.
But that’s not the most striking thing about the river.
It flows from the throne, and it’s got to go somewhere. And if it’s got to go somewhere, where do you think that is?
It’s not a fountain, y’all. It’s a river. Rivers follow gravity. They have to go somewhere. They don’t just recycle, not until they evaporate and rain again.
The river has to go out.
And John tells us:
On each side of the river is the tree of life, which produces twelve crops of fruit, bearing its fruit each month. The tree’s leaves are for the healing of the nations.
It’s also a weird image because trees almost always have one root system, and a river can’t just flow through a tree. If you need to, maybe you could think of the kind of plant that drops tendrils from its branches and takes root over and over again in different places.
The point, though, is that the tree of life is along the river. The leaves are for the healing of the nations.
What I want you to picture is the tree of life dropping its leaves into the river, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb through the city and into the nations, offering healing.
In fact, think of a healing tea. That is, after all, what happens when you combine leaves and water.
The river of life is the healing tea for the nations.
And because of that healing:
There will no longer be any curse.
Because nothing comes from God that is not blessing.
When God speaks, there is no curse. When God speaks, there is only blessing. When God speaks, there is only healing.
Is that good news?
I think it is.
It trumps the Abrahamic expectation that the Israelite line would survive and prosper. It trumps the prophetic expectation that Jerusalem will outlast her persecution and triumph over the kingdoms of the earth.
It sure trumps any short-sighted American dream of prosperity and victory.
It looks forward not only to the triumph of God over evil, but the triumph of God over death itself!
Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. I give to you not as the world gives. Don’t be troubled or afraid.
Man, I wish we could quit our bickering and griping about who’s right and wrong. I wish we could drink of that Throne of God tea and know that God’s got this in the end.
I wish we could hear that good news and stop complaining about how evil the world is, how bad things are getting.
I have serious doubts that things are as bad as we’re making them out to be.
We’re just afraid.
But Jesus doesn’t give us fear. Jesus gives us peace.
Why can’t we just shut up and trust that peace?
Why is it that we have to rail and rant every time we hear something we disagree with? Why can’t we just offer each other Throne of God tea and trust God’s healing to work everything out?
Because, in the end, God will work it out. It may just not look like it when you’re in the middle of it.
Take, for example, Paul’s excursion into Macedonia with his crew. God said, “Go to Macedonia!” and Luke lists this big route they had to go through, but they went.
Jews. Going into Gentile territory.
It’s like Christians going into Bahrain or something. What would you do if God said to you, “Go to Baghdad and preach the good news!”
Do you have that kind of courage?
Jews in Gentile territory. They meet this woman. This Gentile woman. A proselyte. That’s what Luke is pointing out by calling her a “God-worshiper”. She was a Jewish convert. But she’s still a Gentile. And she’s still a woman. And they’re still Jews in Greek land.
Filthy, unclean situation. They shouldn’t be there.
But not only are they there; they stay at her house!
Scandalous!
But the Holy Spirit is good at leading us into scandal. The Holy Spirit is good at going into the places where we don’t want to go, because that river flowing out of the City doesn’t just go where we want it to. It goes everywhere God wants it to go.
We don’t control it.
So let’s stop being so surprised when the good news is being proclaimed in places and by people we don’t think it oughta. Let’s embrace it, revel in the glory of God that we can’t begin to imagine! Let’s throw away our expectations and preconceived notions, because they’re only based on our own prejudices anyway.
Let’s give that all up and trust the peace of Jesus, because there isn’t a dogma in the world that’s as good as Jesus’ love.
Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you.… Don’t be troubled or afraid.
God is with us, who is all that we need, Three in One, Alpha and Omega, our Companion and our Comforter, our Emmanuel. God is with us.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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