Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter
admin | 24 April 2016“The spirit of truth will guide you into all truth”
Along with the repeated mantra “because I go to the Father”, the Gospel readings on these three last Sundays of the Easter season open us out to the power and truth of the Holy Spirit, “the spirit of truth”. Christ’s going to the Father is the condition of the coming of the Spirit. These spiritual movements speak to the fears and uncertainties of our own age and culture, fears and uncertainties which raise important questions about our humanity and about our lives together.
What are our fears and uncertainties? In one way, they are legion but in another way they come down to felt sense of an emptiness within the soul of a culture when we can no longer say what it is that is worth living for, when we can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity.
If there is nothing to live for, then we are the proverbial ‘walking dead’. Zombie Apocalypse is us! There is nothing to give your life to. Yet our lives are primarily about relationships and connections with and for one another. This is precisely where the Eastertide Gospels come so prominently into play. They provide a kind of counter to our current fears and worries about the empty darkness of our world and day, the emptiness within out of which comes such frightening and senseless acts of violence witnessed so frequently in our schools, our cities, our streets, and our world; acts which destroy all relationships. The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness born out of a sense of the nothingness within our souls and our culture, resulting in the active nihilism of terrorism. Added to that are the paralyzing fears of our uncertainties about what we can and should do, throwing up our hands in despair, as it were, retreating into the ghettoes of a kind of passive nihilism. The fearfulness that we have to confront and overcome in every way is our fearfulness. How will we confront it? How will it be overcome? Only in Christ.
Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid.” Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear in Jerusalem or on the road to Emmaus in flight from Jerusalem in fear.
His presence is the counter to our fears. The fear of death and the greater fear of the empty nothingness of life itself is countered by the Risen Christ. He shows us his hands and his side. He opens our minds to the understanding of the Scriptures, providing us with a hermeneutic, a way of interpreting the events of the past and the experiences of the presence. He makes visible his victory over our death and the ways of death which we have chosen against his word and will for us, ultimately, in our will to nothingness. The Resurrection of Christ changes radically the meaning of death.
The Resurrection sets us in motion to God and to one another. It makes life worth living to know that we have an end in God and that his life in us is the measure and the truth of our own lives and our freedom here and now. We can only live for one another when we live to God. This is the simple yet radical truth of our Christian fellowship. “Of his own will he brought us to birth by the word of truth,” James reminds us, “that we should be a kind of first fruits of all his creation;” powerful and liberating words. The Resurrection is that new birth, his new birth in us by dying to ourselves and living for God and for one another. Without that we are dead in ourselves, closed up in the tombs of our souls, paralyzed in our fears and unable to reach out in care and concern for one another, deader than dead in our empty nothingness.
Jesus counters our fearfulness even more by preparing the disciples for the fullness of the meaning of the Resurrection. His going from us is the condition of his being with us. He is preparing them for the radical truth of his Resurrection. It is this. He is going to the Father. This changes everything. It changes especially our relation to the world and to one another. The Resurrection is Creation restored and renewed. We are freed to a world which exists for God and not for ourselves. We are freed to God. Such is the meaning of our lives in prayer and praise, in service and sacrifice.
Everything is gathered into the motions of the Son’s love for the Father in the Holy Spirit. The whole life of the Son, eternally and incarnate, is towards the Father. By virtue of his Death and Resurrection, we are drawn into the motions of that perfect love. The Comforter is the Holy Spirit, the bond of love between the Father and the Son bestowed upon us by the promises of the Father and the Son. All the comings and goings of our lives find their place and their meaning in the comings and goings of the Son to the Father through the Holy Spirit.
This challenges us and our world. The world, today’s Gospel tells us, is “reproved”, even rebuked or convicted, of “sin,” that is to say, for acting as if there is no God, for such is our worldliness, “because ye believe not on me”; the world is reproved, rebuked, convicted of “righteousness,” meaning that what is right and true is only to be found in the spiritual relation and identity of the Father and the Son, “because I go to the Father”; the world is reproved, rebuked, convicted of “judgment,” because all that would stand against God and his will must be shown to be ultimately empty and futile, “because the prince of this world is judged.” Our fears have precisely to do with our lack of faith in the transformative power of the Resurrection.
“The Spirit of truth,” Jesus says, “will guide you into all truth.” There is truth and we are to walk in its paths, whether it is through the dark and threatening ways our world and day or through the fears and heart-breaks of our souls. It means an openness to God’s Word in his Scriptures and in the ordered life of his Church. It means a genuine questioning of the assumptions of the culture and our own lives in the light of God’s Word in his Scriptures. It means holding one another accountable to the principles of our spiritual life which alone define us. These are not easy things. They never have been. In a way, when we expect things to be easy then we deceive ourselves and one another. But the spirit of truth is promised to us by the Christ who goes to the Father. We are gathered into the community of divine love and that makes all the difference. It is the counter to all our fears and uncertainties.
“The spirit of truth will guide you into all truth”
Fr. David Curry
Easter 4, 2016