St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Owings Mills MD
May 14, 2023
Year A: The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 14:15-21
John 14:15-21
The Spirit of Truth Empowers Us to Do God’s Will
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Today is the Sixth Sunday of Easter – yes, it is still Easter – and in today’s gospel lesson we pick up right where we left off last week.
You may remember that last Sunday we looked back to Holy Week – back to the Last Supper – back to when Jesus gathered with his friends for what sure seemed like their last meal together.
Around the table, Jesus teaches a few final, most important, lessons – he washes the feet of his friends and says this is how it should be among them – among us – love one another, he commands.
He blesses the bread and the wine and says he will be with us each time we gather around the table, each time we remember him.
And, as we heard last week, Jesus promises that he will bring us to the place of reunion – and that we know the way to the place because Jesus himself is the Way.
And Jesus teaches that he and the Father are one – so when we see and know Jesus, we see and know God.
That must have been quite a lot to take in during that particular supper in Jerusalem, as the walls seemed to be closing in, and it felt like hope itself was about to be extinguished.
In today’s memory from the Last Supper, Jesus looks to the future – not the future we will share in the place of reunion – but the immediate future, when the first disciples will be in the same boat as the rest of us, no longer able to see and hear and know Jesus in the flesh, at least not like before.
Jesus reminds the disciples that loving Jesus means following his commandments – and Jesus’ only commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as our self.
Not easy, and only possible with God’s help.
And so Jesus gives a Pentecost preview, promising to send the Holy Spirit – promising that the Spirit of truth will forever be by our side, guiding us during all of the challenges and troubles of our lives.
So, today it’s still Easter - but it’s almost Pentecost.
In last week’s sermon, I mentioned in passing that a friend of mine – an Episcopal priest named Gary Commins – has a new book out.
It’s called Evil and the Problem of Jesus.
Although I finished it about a month ago, I keep thinking about it and looking over the notes that I took – a sign of a good book, I’d say!
Early in his book, Gary makes a point that had never occurred to me exactly. Although once I read it – and once you hear it – it seems plainly obvious.
Gary writes, “In the Lord’s Prayer, we ask – we pray – for God’s will to be ‘done.’ Empirically and prayerfully, our hearts, minds, and senses tell us that God’s will is not done…”
I’m going to repeat that:
“In the Lord’s Prayer, we ask – we pray – for God’s will to be to be ‘done.’ Empirically and prayerfully, our hearts, minds, and senses tell us that God’s will is not done…”
That’s for sure, right?
All we need is to spend a minute or two watching TV news, or just glancing at the front page of today’s newspaper, or taking a good look at our own community, and maybe even our own lives, to know that, all too often, God’s will is not done.
I think this tells us something important about God.
God does not – and maybe even cannot – impose God’s will on us – as much as God might like to do just that for our own good.
Instead, like a loving mother or father, God does God’s best to give us the gifts we need so we can flourish, all the tools we need to do our part in restoring God’s Garden to the beauty and peace that was always intended.
And one of the greatest of God’s gifts is the Holy Spirit – the Spirit of Truth – empowering us to do God’s will.
I met my friend Gary when he was called to serve as Priest-in-Charge of the Church of the Incarnation, which was one of the last three Episcopal churches in Jersey City.
Incarnation was founded in 1910 to be the Episcopal church for the Black Episcopalians of Jersey City.
You see, back then, Black people were not welcomed at any of the other Episcopal churches in the city – including at my future church, St. Paul’s – which was just five or six blocks away from Incarnation – a painful and shameful example of the church most definitely not doing God’s will.
Throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st, the different Episcopal churches in Jersey City developed their own identities and pursued their own ministries, sometimes competing with each other and often having as little as possible to do with each other.
By the time Sue and I arrived at St. Paul’s in 2000, things had changed. Everyone was welcome. And the church had become wonderfully diverse, with people of many colors – it was one of the reasons we fell in love with the place.
But history is a stubborn thing.
I returned to Jersey City and became rector of St. Paul’s ten years ago, right around the same time that that the third Episcopal church in Jersey City also welcomed its new rector, the Rev. Laurie Wurm.
Early on, the bishop sat us both down and told us not to compete with each other. He said that we should work together, and that we should build a relationship with the people of Incarnation, which was without a priest at the time.
And so that’s what we did – finding ways to worship together in the park and at street corners, getting the three vestries together to meet each other, to pray and to learn.
Because St. Paul’s was so physically close to Incarnation, I took on much of their pastoral care – making hospital visits and presiding at funerals – and over time the people of Incarnation began to feel like they were my parishioners, too.
I had come to hope that maybe something new and beautiful was about to be born.
Gary Commins arrived in Jersey City, at Incarnation, a few years after Laurie and me, and he quickly became part of the team – we did even more together, praying at places of violence, opening a community center in a long-neglected neighborhood, and beginning to look into some of the shameful parts of our history.
Over time, the bonds of love and trust grew among the three churches, not perfectly, of course, but it was real and it was beautiful.
And when the day came for the Church of the Incarnation to decide on its future, they courageously and faithfully overcame a century or so of bad history and deep hurt, and they voted to unite with St. Paul’s, and we became the Church of St. Paul and Incarnation.
One Sunday, the Bishop visited us, leading the people of Incarnation to about the halfway point between our churches, where the people of St. Paul’s were waiting. And together, we processed the rest of the way to our new church home.
Now, a few years later, you can’t really tell who was an “Incarnation person” and who was a “St. Paul’s person.”
That unification is probably what I’m most proud of in my ministry.
God did not impose God’s will – God did not do the hard work for us – but God gave us the gifts we needed to flourish – the tools we needed to do our part in restoring that little urban corner of God’s garden to the beauty and peace that was always intended.
In my nearly two years with you here, I have seen and felt the Spirit of truth blowing through this old place more times than I can count.
The Spirit inspires us to welcome everybody, from Afghan refugees to the newcomers walking over that well-worn threshold for the first time, hoping to find welcome and good news.
The Spirit encourages us to be even more generous than we thought possible.
The Spirit calls us to take on new ministries.
And the Spirit reassures us that this historic church has a future far more beautiful and amazing than we can imagine.
Because God does not impose God’s will, but like a loving mother or father, God does God’s best to give us all that we need.
And one of the greatest of God’s gifts is the Holy Spirit – the Spirit of Truth – empowering us to do God’s will.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Amen.
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