The Holy Spirit as our Advocate

By The Very Rev. Sherry Crompton

May 31, 2009

Read: Ezekiel 37:1-14, Acts 2:1-21 & John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Last Sunday we heard about the Ascension, when Jesus rose into the air and seemingly disappeared. We talked about God not saying goodbye, but saying Hello in a new and different way. We talked about it being an exchange. Jesus’ Ascension was necessary in order for the coming of the Holy Spirit. And today, is that great feast of Pentecost. Also called the birthday of the church, because of the coming of the Spirit marked by wind and flame.

The decorations and toys all have something to do with the flames and the wind. In our reading from Ezekiel, we heard about the dry bones. And God’s breath giving those dry, dry bones life. New life. “Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” And in Acts, when they were all together in one place, suddenly “from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind” and “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them”.

So what does that seem like to you? Does it seem calm, quiet, meditative, serene? I don’t think so. Pentecost is our reminder that there is another side to God’s Spirit – one that can set us on fire, transform our lives, turn the world upside down. It is not predictable. It is risky and it is beyond our control. And thank God for that! When we think of the Spirit, we remember that “the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”

In John’s gospel today, Jesus is telling us about this arrival of the Spirit – he will send an Advocate. Other words for the Greek, parakletos, are: comforter, helper, counselor, “one called to assist another”, advocate. What does that mean for us? To have the Spirit’s presence with us always as an advocate. There is a story that illustrates a bit of what that means for us.

A woman named Linda set out in a little Honda Civic to drive from Canada to Whitehorse, Alaska. She stayed overnight in a motel, and asked for an early morning wakeup call. The clerk looked surprised when she asked for that early morning wakeup call, but she couldn't imagine why. But the next morning, when she got up, she understood. The place was totally "socked in" by fog.

She went to the restaurant for breakfast, and two truckers asked to join her. They asked where she was going, and she said, "Whitehorse." The truckers laughed, and one of them said, "Whitehorse! In that little Civic! No way! The pass is dangerous in weather like this."

But she said she had to get there, so the trucker said, "Then I guess we're just going to have to hug you."

Linda said, "Don't you touch me!"

But the trucker said, "Not like that! We'll put one truck in front of you and the other in back, and we'll get you through the mountains."

So Linda spent the morning following the two red taillights of the truck in front of her -- and had the comfort of knowing that there was another truck following her -- and they made it through the mountains.

Those truckers were Linda's Paracletes -- her buddies -- her helpers -- her Comforters.

A precious gift that we all receive is the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is a day about celebrating that Spirit and remembering that we need to allow that Spirit to move and breathe within us and through us. The Spirit gives us the power and the courage to speak our own voice; to be our authentic selves.

The Holy Spirit, the advocate, comes to stand with us and within us as we face the world. The Holy Spirit does not come to give us an excuse for not acting, but rather gives us the power to act. It is not the comforter who pats us on the back and assures us that all will be well, but rather the comforter that pushes us along with words of encouragement. "Go ahead, you can do it."

The advocate is not one who stands in our place, but stands alongside of us and helps us find the words to speak and the approach to take. It is the coach who keeps us focused and on track. The spirit of God comes in so that we may speak out and proclaim the good news of salvation.

Rubem Alves, a liberation theologian from Brazil, says that, “Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it.” The Spirit calls us to imagine this world as it should be, to hear the melody of God’s future. And to dance to it.

But that can be intimidating, can’t it. What if we don’t hear the melody and don’t know the steps. And what if we begin to dance to the melody of the future and someone tells us that we’re doing it all wrong? What if we begin to dance to the melody of the future and someone laughs at us, calls us naïve, or drunk, or worse? What if we begin to dance to the melody of the future and we realize that we’re out there all alone? What if we begin to dance to the melody of the future and it sweeps us away, overcomes us, changes our lives and our outlook altogether? (1)

The prophet Joel, as quoted in Acts today, talks about young men and old men, sons and daughters, slaves seeing visions and dreaming dreams.

In the book, Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver, Codi, who has gone back to her hometown to face her past, corresponds with her sister Hallie, who has gone to teach agriculture to the peasants of Nicaragua during the time that the United States is sending millions of dollars to the Contras. Codi is proud of Hallie, but is scared for her, too, and in one of her letters she writes:

“I feel small and ridiculous and hemmed in on every side by the need to be safe. All I want is to be like you, to be brave, to walk into a country of chickens and land mines and call that home, and have it be home. How can you just charge ahead, always doing the right thing, even if you have to do it alone with people staring? I would have so many doubts—what if you lose that war? What then? If I had an ounce of your bravery, I’d be set for life. You get up and look the world in the eye, shoo the livestock away from the windowsill, and decide what portion of the world needs to be saved today..”

Hallie, in her return letter to Codi, writes this:

“Codi, here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under it’s roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.”

Remember Linda in her little Honda Civic winding her way in the fog, through the dangerous pass, but being “hugged” all along the way. May we be open to the Spirit moving in and through us. May we trust that our Advocate, the Spirit, will be with us as we step out in faith and do a little dancing in our lives.
Breathe on us breath of God! Amen.

(1) The Rev. Cindy Weber, taken from a sermon on desperate preacher site 2008

Jesus' Ascension

By The Very Rev. Sherry Crompton

May 24, 2009 (Ascension Sunday)

Read: Acts 1:1-11 and Luke 24:44-53

Today we mark one of the great and often neglected festivals of the church: the festival of the Ascension. It winds up getting neglected, because it’s fixed on a Thursday, 40 days after Easter. That’s because of the note in Acts that Jesus appeared to his disciples for that period of time after his resurrection.

So it’s often neglected, we moved it to Sunday so it wouldn’t be neglected—and it’s great, because our Lord’s Ascension is worth celebrating, it’s a cosmic event.

Truly, cosmic, I mean, in Acts, we just heard that Jesus was speaking to the apostles and as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. In Luke’s gospel, as He was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.

Did you notice the disciples in this story? One more time, they just don’t get it! They’ve heard the promise of Jesus, that they would receive his power. They were reminded that they are called upon to tell the story of Jesus near and far, to the ends of the earth. They were given a clear and specific task.
And what did they do? Did they spring right to attention, hustle into action, getting right to their work?

Nope! They gazed into heaven, their eyes glued to the spot where they had last seen Jesus.

Artists who have portrayed this story in paintings and woodcuts have not only pictured Jesus’ feet disappearing into the clouds--many of them have also shown us something else. If you look closely at these paintings and woodcuts—not up in the clouds, but down on the ground—you will see footprints on the earth. Some artists have painted indentations in the rock. Others have etched black and white footprints on the ground not far from where the disciples are standing with their mouths open. Perhaps the artists simply have been imagining details that are not in the text. Or, perhaps, they keep pressing us with the question asked long ago: “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

What would you do? And, what difference does it make? What does it mean for us? What’s the benefit of Jesus’ departure, leaving the disciples—the church—alone?
That’s where the Ascension gets puzzling!

A colleague of mine describes what many of us feel about absence:
When someone leaves us there is crisis. Absence creates a void. What will fill it? Absence means silence-awesome, lonely, gaping silence. No wonder we fear it, avoid it, cling to the presence, do anything to avoid good-bye. (1)

Jesus who called, taught, turned water into wine, and raised the dead is gone. I bet they had a thousand questions to ask too. "What’s to become of us?" "Yes, you told us that you won’t leave us orphans, but can we be sure?" Presence gives way to awful absence.

Something deep down in us resists the move from presence to absence. When someone is present to us, our space is filled, we are not alone. There is conversation and communion. When someone leaves us, there is crisis. Absence means silence--lonely, gaping silence.

One thing is for sure--we had better get accustomed to bidding farewell. Life is a series of leave-takings, of movement from presence to absence. Carly Simon sings, "Nobody ever stays in one place anymore..You say hello, but I say good-bye."

We honestly need God when it comes to hellos and good-byes. Our faith used to be embodied in words like the English, "good-bye”, the Spanish "adios", the French "adieu." They all imply that when we part--in that moment between here and not here, between presence and absence, we'd best give someone to God when we can no longer hold them ourselves. Good-bye means God be with you.

So really Jesus' good-bye turned out to be God's big hello! The real story goes like this: God never left. Never moved. Never said farewell. God simply made an equal exchange. A shift in the plan. For tucked right smack in the middle of our lesson from Acts are these words:

...when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,
you will be filled with power,
and you will be witnesses for me in Jerusalem
and in all of Judea and Samaria,
and to the ends of the earth,"

So, far from saying goodbye, God is saying hello in a big way. God is no longer contained to a single person, in a single location on planet earth. By coming into our very lives, God now wants to work through us, giving us the power to live out our faith, to share the Good News, and to grow in our relationships.

Also, because God says hello with the giving of the Spirit, it means that we can say goodbye. We can say goodbye to our attempts to cling to the past, to cling to people, to structures, to old ways of thinking and doing, and even to our comfort zones.

We can follow God's Spirit as the Spirit moves among us to give us greater mission, clearer vision, and the power to do what we've never done before. As we follow the lead of God's Spirit we may also have to risk walking down new paths at times.

But the bottom line is that far from a goodbye, God has granted us the Spirit of Jesus and that means that we are filled with power to follow in our Lord's footsteps--to be in joyful mission to a hurting world. In the midst of our current crises and periods of transition, let us on this day embrace and celebrate God's great big hello, the giving of God's Comforter and Encourager. For we are the people of God, empowered by the Spirit of Jesus. Amen.

(1) William Willimon, “Good-Bye,” Pulpit Digest (May/June 1991), page 19

My Mother Would Prune Me

By The Very Rev. Sherry Crompton

May 10, 2009

Read: John 15:1-8

Happy Mother’s Day! I found a short history of Mother’s Day that I thought you might find interesting:

The earliest Mother's Day celebrations can be traced back to the spring celebrations of ancient Greece in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. It was a pagan celebration. As Christianity spread throughout Europe the celebration changed to honor the "Mother Church" - the spiritual power that gave them life and protected them from harm.

During the 1600's, people in England celebrated a day called "Mothering Sunday". Celebrated on the 4th Sunday in Lent, "Mothering Sunday" honored the mothers of England. During this time many of England's poor worked as servants for the wealthy. On Mothering Sunday the servants would have the day off and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their mothers. A special cake, called the mothering cake, was often brought along to provide a festive touch.

Over time the church festival blended with the Mothering Sunday celebration as people began honoring their mothers as well as the church.

In the United States, Mother's Day was first suggested in 1872 as a day dedicated to peace by Julia Ward Howe (she also wrote the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). Howe held organized Mother's Day meetings in Boston every year.

In 1907 Ana Jarvis, from Philadelphia, began a campaign to establish a national Mother's Day. She persuaded her mother's church in Grafton, West Virginia to celebrate Mother's Day on the second anniversary of her mother's death, the second Sunday of May. By the next year Mother's Day was also celebrated in Philadelphia.

Jarvis and her supporters began to write to ministers, businessmen, and politicians in their quest to establish a national Mother's Day. It was successful as by 1911 Mother's Day was celebrated in almost every state. President Woodrow Wilson, in 1914, made the official announcement proclaiming Mother's Day a national holiday that was to be held each year on the second Sunday of May.

There you have it, the story behind our celebration of Mother’s Day.

Today we celebrate Mother's Day, and with this day we remember the countless ways that mothers and maternal figures in our lives have shared love with us.

So with all of that in mind, what, pray tell, is our primary text for this Mother’s Day? The Gospel of John’s metaphor of God the vinegrower pruning branches on the vine.

Well, that’s interesting. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find a knife wielding mother particularly comforting. Maybe it’s just me, but I immediately started hearing the theme music from the movie Psycho. The whole concept of “pruning” is not necessarily one that we would connect with motherhood. At least not at first. But let’s think about this. Jesus says, “I am the true vine” and God is like a mother who lovingly and carefully tends the vineyard garden. She wants the vineyard to grow and be prosperous so she removes every branch from the vine that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit she prunes carefully, constructively, and surgically to make it bear more fruit.

The pruning metaphor works best if we think of God as a gardener who grieves while watching a violent storm rip through her beloved garden. Afterward, she tenderly prunes the injured plants in order to guarantee survival and to restore beauty and harmony. But we can’t confuse pruning with the crises that overtakes us. No, pruning has more to do with clearing away the debris those crises leave behind.

And there’s one particular brand of crisis that continually calls for pruning. It’s the self-imposed crisis. It’s when we mess up. It’s when we sin that we need pruned the most (Walter Wink, "Abiding, Even Under the Knife," Christian Century, April 20, 1994).

My mother would prune me.

Now I don’t know how your mother handled discipline, but my mother was pretty good at it. Let’s just say I gave her lots of practice. My mother was very good at staying calm and with a very non-anxious voice she would cut me down to size. But that wasn’t the good part. The good part was the way my mother practiced the art of accountability. Her criticism was always to the point. The sin was clearly pointed out. But there was also affirmation of some good that I could build upon. In other words, my mother would prune me. She would acknowledge my inherent worth but help me clear away the debris in my life, the things that were unhealthy and only holding me back.

Needless to say, this was not always a painless procedure. But nothing that involves a pruning knife ever is. Yet there’s a big difference in the way a knife is handled. There’s also a big difference in the kind of knife used! My mother’s acts of pruning were more surgical scalpel than slashing machete. Which I am very grateful for.

And yet we all know what it’s like to have someone come at us with the slashing machete. Criticism is not something we deal well with to begin with. So when the criticism is not constructive, when it’s leveled with malice, when it is used to tear down instead of build up we are left bruised and bloodied. Intellectually we may know that this unconstructive criticism is without merit and should be dismissed, but that doesn’t stop it from hurting right in the gut.

If God’s tender upbuilding pruning is the model then that is what we should expect from one another and what we should extend to one another.

The other side of the coin is true as well here. When we are called upon to be critical, do we seek to prune in love, or do we go Psycho shower scene. If God’s tender upbuilding pruning is the model then that is what we should expect from one another and what we should extend to one another.

But it’s more than just an individual thing. When Jesus says, “you are the branches” that “you” is plural. Together we are a branch.

A man once planted cucumbers in his backyard. He had made sure that the ground was well prepared. He bought the best cucumber seedlings and set to work with the skill of a man who had planted cucumbers for many seasons. To his delight, soon he had cucumber vines all across his back yard. The plants were green and healthy. One day, he noticed that some of the leaves didn’t look as green as the others.

Not many days later, some of the leaves were as good as dead. He followed the vines with the dead leaves until he got back to the main plant. There at the base of the main stem he noticed that some kind of grub had almost eaten through the stem. The cucumber plant was dependent on the main stem for water and nourishment. Life giving juices flow from the main stem to the branches and enables high-quality delicious fruit to appear. It's not possible to produce fruit without being connected to the stem. Even though the man had cultivated the ground carefully and watered daily, the cucumber vines were unable to receive that goodness and so withered and died.

Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote: We ask the leaf, "Are you complete in yourself?" And the leaf answers, "No, my life is in the branches." We ask the branch, and the branch answers, "No, my life is in the root." We ask the root, and it answers, "No, my life is in the trunk and the branches and the leaves. Keep the branches stripped of leaves, and I shall die!" So it is with the great tree of being. Nothing is completely and merely individual.

Once upon a time a man dropped out of church. He figured he could worship God just as well on his own. A few weeks went by and the minister came to visit. They sat in the living room by the fireplace and made small talk. Then the minister took the tongs and picked up a glowing ember and placed it to one side of the hearth. The two men watched without saying a word. In no time, it began to cool. A few minutes later, the minister picked up the dead ember with his fingers and pitched it back into the fire. Immediately, it came back to life. Without a word, the minister put on his coat and started to leave. The man walked him to the door and said, “That was one of your best sermons. I’ll see you in church this Sunday.”

Jesus said,

“I am the vine, you are the branches.
Abide in me and bear much fruit,
for apart from me you can do nothing.”

The Good Shepherd vs. Hired Hands

By The Very Rev. Sherry Crompton

May 3, 2009

Read: Psalm 23 and John 10:11-18

We heard a great deal about shepherds in our scriptures for today. And, not surprisingly, today is referred to as “Good Shepherd Sunday”. Psalm 23 tells us that “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want. ..he leads me beside still waters. He revives my soul”. And in John’s gospel, Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd.”

Today, let’s consider the difference between good shepherds and hired hands; that is, between those who care out of a genuine sense of compassion and love, and those who care because of the benefits, either real or perceived.

John begins with “I am the good shepherd”. What we need to know is that, in Jesus’ day, the term, “good shepherd,” would have been heard as an oxymoron – a contradiction of terms. In Jesus’ day, shepherds were anything but good. They lived as nomads, grazing their sheep on other people’s land. The life of a shepherd was anything but picturesque. It was dangerous, risky and it was menial. Shepherds were rough around the edges, spending time in the fields rather than in polite society.

And so, for Jesus to identify himself as a shepherd is quite remarkable. It goes along with his willingness to befriend the outcast, touch the leper and eat with tax collectors and sinners. It speaks of Jesus’ humility, to become as one of us in order to redeem us from our sinful nature and give us grace to become more like him. Paul said it best when he wrote to the Philippians,

“ … Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave …” (Phil. 2:6-7)

Or, in the case of today’s text, taking the form of a shepherd.

All this is to say, we don’t have to be perfect in order to walk in Jesus’ company, he meets us where we are. The Good News is, we’re accepted, zits and all.

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” That is what makes him good, according to John—his willingness to get involved, to risk his life for the life of his flock. His flock. Not somebody else’s flock, which he gets paid five dollars an hour to look after, but his own flock—the one he has invested his time in, the one he has doctored and protected, the one he has come to develop a relationship with. He cares deeply, he loves, his flock. He is invested in his flock in more ways than one.

His sheep are his livelihood, for one thing, but they are also his extended family. They know his voice, his touch, his walk. If they are grazing with a thousand other sheep and he calls them, they will separate themselves from the crowd and follow him home. His flute is the sound of safety for them—the sound of still waters and green pastures. He knows them too, by name and disposition: Houdini, who is always escaping from the flock; Pegleg, who limps from the time she stepped in a hole; Bossy, who likes nothing better than butting heads.

There is something about a sense of ownership here that creates a certain kind of relationship. The ownership is not about mere possession, but about being bound to something beyond ourselves, about identifying with it so strongly that it becomes part of us. When it is threatened, we defend it as if we were defending our own bodies, and sometimes that can get us into trouble.

Barbara shares a story about visiting a friend in California not too long ago. They met at the airport and as they were getting into the car to leave, my friend opened his door so wide that it whacked the sideview mirror of a red sports car parked next to it. There was no harm done, but the owner of the sports car happened to be sitting inside of it at that time, and when he heard the whack he exploded out the driver’s door.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he yelled at my surprised friend, at which point his friend jumped out of the car and said, “Don’t you talk to him like that! It was an accident, for crying out loud, and you can see for yourself that nothing’s broken.”

“I’m talking to him, not you, buster,” the man said furiously.

“Yeah, well, when you’re talking to him, you’re talking to me.” My friend’s friend said, and the man backed down.

Say what you will about brawls in airport parking lots, there is ownership in that statement. “when you’re talking to him, you’re talking to me.” There is intimate relationship in that, full willingness to risk one’s own safety in order to defend someone else’s. Not because he can’t take care of himself, but because you care for him—you are connected to him, and you know it.

We all deserve to have someone in our lives who will say, “when you’re talking to him, you’re talking to me.” Someone who will tear her clothes off and dive into the water when what is disappearing down the river happens to be us. That is agape, self-giving love, the kind of love the good shepherd practices and the kind he teaches.

If the shepherd had been a hired hand, we would not even know his time. A hired hand would have taken one look at the wolf, or the river current, or the bully, and vanished….because a hired hand does not care for the sheep; he does not involve himself so deeply in their lives that he risks his own to protect theirs. He minds his own business. He takes care of himself.

The good shepherd, on the other hand, lays down his life for the sheep. He cares deeply. The good shepherd is calling and inviting us into a close and loving relationship with himself. Jesus desires to know us and be known by us. Jesus longs to be our leader, to be our guide, to be our friend and our protector.

When was the last time you listened for that voice?

He’s calling today. Amen.