Sixth Sunday of Easter: May 1, 2005.

Acts 17:22-31

Psalm 66:7-18

1 Peter 3:13-22

John 14:15-21

K: The texts this week are forthright and honest about the absence of God. This may sound shocking, for we know that God is never absent from us. Perhaps the pursuit is better undertaken if we embrace the words of Paul in Acts. Absence is replaced with "unknown." (Am I being redundant if I once again point to ginosko?)

I ask not only every preacher but every person of faith: What if it were all taken away from us? No, not everything mentioned in the last stanza of "A Mighty Fortress." What if our way of talking about God, our commonalities of understanding, our ability to say "Jesus Christ" and immediately have an image of the cross or the empty tomb--what if we did not know anything about God? How would we preach without our shortcuts? No keywords, no catchphrases, no memories or images to evoke? What kind of challenge would this be?

It is exactly the challenge facing Paul. There he stands, looking around at the marbled figures of Greek gods and goddesses, with none of the comfortable Jewish traditions or the radical Christian ideations to connect the true and living God of heaven and earth with a society that had not experienced the Word of God in their midst. What kind of message does a preacher deliver?

T: What if we are preaching into a vacuum again? For thousands of years, preachers had the luxury of assuming a baseline understanding, at least an overhearing, of concepts and words about Jesus. That wasn't so for Paul, of course, who is truly preaching and proclaiming an "unknown God." There are some within mainline denominations who look to the future of Christianity and conclude that, in the United States at least, the twenty-first century is likely to be more like the first century than the twentieth. They point to similarities such as a plurality of religions and truths, highly variegated ethnic populations and cultures, and the loss of an assumed "Christian" cultural foundation. If they are correct, we may find ourselves preaching into a vacuum much sooner than we expected! Is there perhaps a lesson to be learned here from Paul?

K: Paul preaches our interconnectedness, our familial relationship with God. He also honors the search for God. There seems to be less condemnation and more encouragement from Paul, a trait that he does not always show to those who do not know God. For this group of people, he acknowledges that the search for God sometimes involves groping, stretching, reaching, finding. He asks them to think about what is precious, what invaluable commodities they have. Then he tells them of a person more precious and valuable than anything they will ever know and more powerful than anyone their society could ever elevate. Love and judgment are wrapped in words that hit them where they live.

T: He quotes Greek poets to Greek citizens. And even if the twenty-first century isn't like the first, still we have the similar problem of making our proclamation fresh and new every time we preach into the assembly.

K: The Gospel is more specific in dealing with the absence of God. John's community has lived for more than a generation trying to grapple with this loss. Jesus himself talks about it frankly in the section of John that is widely known as the Farewell Discourse. Farewells are commonly used rhetorical tools intended to invite the listener/reader into the moment. They can be simple, grand and sweeping, melodramatic, or emotionally wrenching. (Think about the actor or actress who emotes for ten minutes during a death scene: "Goodbye, cruel world!...") Above all, it touches some emotional truth in those who participate in its retelling. What Jesus is doing is inviting us into an intensely private, deeply connected moment with God.

Discourse is teaching, usually following an activity or event. All other discourses in John are told to explain what has previously happened. This discourse is to invite us in and explain what is about to come: the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Today we are taught that we will not be left alone without divine presence in our lives. But how does one translate Paraclete? There are at least sixteen different translations, ranging from "Spirit of Truth" to "Advocate" (vv. 16-17).

T: If our linguistic and philological experts can't come to a consensus or-a definitive answer, maybe as preachers we need to look in another direction. Do we as preachers perhaps define parakletos by our experience of it? The Paraclete is that which helps us remember Jesus and helps us to hold to his teachings. How would your congregation define it?

K: We also could approach it through the root word parakaleo, meaning "to call to one's side."

T: Call for backup. Call for reinforcements. Call for company and moral support. Call for testimony and corroboration. Call for advice. In Acts, Paul says, "God made all the nations to inhabit the earth ... so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us." I think Paul is perhaps talking about our need for a Paraclete, someone we can call to our side for help and guidance. Because, as he says, it feels sometimes like we grope and search for God. We know, because we've been promised, that God is not far from each of us. But sometimes it seems awfully dark, and we're awfully blind, and groping is awfully anxious. We need a guide, a help, a light in the darkness. That's the Paraclete, the Advocate, the Helper, the Guide.

K: Today's Gospel contains a conditional response. When Jesus says "If," I'm not so sure I want to know the "then." There are some translations of this passage that read "If you love me, keep my commandments." It is translated as an imperative. And the love? It is a present subjunctive, which implies a continued act of loving Jesus. So, could we translate this very well known verse as "When you keep on loving me, you keep my commandments"?

It is the "keep" that we have perhaps lost the intensity of. In the Greek-English Lexicon (BDAG), none of the meanings include "obey." Obey would smack more of an ultimatum than a condition; the words for "keep" are more intimate than that. They imply "holding dear" or "placing great importance on." Jesus tells us that it is so important for us to hold onto those commandments of love and respect for God and each other that we are to keep them precious and close to us. We are to live in and follow them. This is the new law, the new condition of being in God's family. We are taught that it is so precious that we cannot help but keep the commandments.

T: In his book Stewardship and the Economy of God (Eerdmans, 1992) John Reumann talks about the ancient sense of "steward" as being the highly placed (and highly trusted) slave who knows the mind of the owner/master. This is a slave who doesn't follow rules (that's easy!) but rather is expected to know what the owner/master would wish without the owner/master having said anything on the matter. Perhaps this can provide an entrance into this notion of "keep." If you love me, you will hold to my precepts, my values, my understandings and convictions. If you love me, be of the same mind as I am. (I'm pretty sure I've read that in an epistle, by the way.) If you love me, you will be my steward: living according to my mind, even without instructions, because you know and love me and my mind enough that it becomes your mind.

K: One last observation. Keeping and loving are inextricably bound together. In chapters 14 and 15 alone, there are four times when one comes immediately before the other. This is law and gospel. And this is the work of the Paraclete. God confronts us with our sin, our inability to keep Jesus' commandments, and the very real moments of God's judgment. We know of love also. It is the love of Jesus that came to save sinners. Keeping and loving are inseparable.

T: That sounds to me like a Lutheran way of motivating toward social ministry and justice. We cannot motivate through guilt trips or requirements. But, since "love" and "keep" are linked, it's clear that keeping Jesus' commands to love the enemy and feed the poor are required for us as Jesus' loved ones who love him. KH/TK