Sermon for Senior Sunday and Pentecost
By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, May 19, 2024)
So today is the last Sunday of our academic year and the last Sunday we will be gathering together here. For some of us for a few months. For others of us, who knows? It's also the Feast of Pentecost as we've said. That's why everything's in red. Red is the Pentecost color. Pentecost was a feast for the Jewish people at the time of Jesus. It remains one. It was 50 days. Pentecost means 50 days, 50 days after Passover, the offering of the first fruits of wheat at the temple. And this in Christian tradition is when as we heard in the lesson from the Book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit is given to the disciples gathered there, and it's known as the birthday of the church for that reason.
So it's not just Professor Williams's birthday, maybe appropriately given all he has meant to the church. It is also the birthday of the church. So this day of departures, this day when we are saying goodbye here at church is also the birthday of the church. And there's something a little bit ironic in that or maybe just sort of poignant in that. The reason again it's called the birthday of the church is that this Holy Spirit is meant to be given. That's what we see happening when these folks are speaking in all these different languages and divided tongues of fire land upon them. And our gospel lesson from John is meant to tell us what that spirit is, who that spirit is and how that spirit will assist this new community of folks, the church. And John uses this word which doesn't translate easily or well and so is often left untranslated, the paracletos.
This is what Jesus says. "This other one will come and he will be your advocate." If it is translated, it's translated as advocate, the paraclete. Now that word in Greek, paraclete means the one called alongside you, the one who speaks and stands alongside you and speaks for you. But it also had a technical legal definition at the time of Jesus. Your Paraclete was kind of like your lawyer. When you would go to trial, the person who would speak for you, speak on your behalf and defend you was known as the paraclete, the advocate. And this is who Jesus says will come to the disciples who will come to us, this kind of advocate. And when we read that promise within the context of this gospel and what is going on, we see that Jesus means that sort of literally. He says they're going to try you. They're going to gather you up and try you.
And in fact, there are four verses removed from this passage. If you look in the notes in your service bulletin, we don't decide these things. The church decides, the larger community decides what lessons we'll read and they decided we should not read verses one through four of chapter 16. But verses one through four of chapter 16 are grim. These lines say that you are going to be tried and they're going to pull you out of the synagogues and they're going to haul you in front of magistrates and they are going to kill you. And when they kill you, they are going to believe they're doing God's will. You are going to go through these trials and then Jesus says, and by the way, I'm not going to be there. I'm going away now, but when all these things happen to you, it will be good that I'm not there because this other will be there. You will have an advocate, you will have the spirit standing alongside you, speaking with you and speaking for you.
And again, this idea of a trial is not sort of hypothetical or metaphorical Jesus. He's giving the story the night before he dies? He is about to be tried also. So the stakes here are it's the birthday of the church, festive happy, but John is taking us back to before Easter, back to the night before good Friday, back to the idea of trials. And Jesus is trying to tell these people, tell his friends, tell his disciples, this is what the spirit will give you when you go through all this. This is the gift that you will be given.
So this is what he says. These are some kind of confusing lines in the middle of the passage from John. This is what Jesus says, the spirit, the paraclete, the advocate will do when he comes. It says, "The Spirit will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment, about sin because they do not believe in me, about righteousness because I'm going to the Father and you will no longer see me, about judgment because the ruler of this world has been condemned."
It all sounds nice, but it doesn't really make sense. What about sin? Because they do not believe in me. What does sin have to do with belief? Those aren't things that we tend to think of going together. About righteousness because you won't see me. What does righteousness have to do with seeing Jesus? About judgment because the ruler of the world has been condemned. How does that clarify our judgments?
It's confusing and I think the disciples were confused and they were confused because it is the night before Jesus dies and they don't know what's going to happen to him, but we do. We know what is going to happen to Jesus after he says these words. We know what is going to happen to Jesus tomorrow and what is going to happen to Jesus tomorrow, of course, is he's going to be crucified and he's going to die, but he's also going to, in that act, he is also going to overturn the logic of retributive punishment. He's going to overturn the assumption of retaliation and revenge and vengeance and instead offer something else.
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Tomorrow, these disciples don't know it yet, but tomorrow Jesus is going to offer something besides vengeance and retaliation. He's going to offer forgiveness, mercy, and peace, and in that action we will learn something about what sin is because sin is not about keeping track of our moral impurities and our failings because all of us are fallible and failed. Sin is about believing in the power of love to overcome our failings. If we believe that's how we overcome sin, not by trying to be pure or to judge others' purity, by believing in the power of love to accept one another in our fallenness.
And that's why righteousness is about not seeing Jesus because righteousness is not about rectitude, about keeping a tally of how pure we are against others' purity. Righteousness is about realizing that Jesus is not here and Jesus has given the responsibility for his forgiveness and his mercy to us, and it is we who are now responsible in the absence of Jesus for living and making true his message of mercy and forgiveness and peace. And judgment is not about condemning the world, it's about condemning the way the world condemns, about how the world does judge, how the world does act in retaliation and violence, that the world does look at purity and flawlessness as its measure of justice rather than love and mercy as its measure of healing.
Jesus's death is going to overturn all of this, but the disciples don't realize it tonight and they won't realize it tomorrow. When he dies, they will all run away and they also won't realize it on Sunday morning when he appears to them again. It is only later, only when the spirit comes to them and speaks to them, when it comes to us and speaks to us, speaks for us. When it guides us and gathers us together as the church, that's when they will know. That's when we will know the gift that we have been given, the gift to try to be this community, to be the church.
So what does that mean? It's all nice. So what does the church look like then? If this is what it is, this community that tries to build itself around these principles, around accepting one another's flaws and trying to reach out to one another in love and forgiveness and mercy, what does the church look like? Especially on this birthday of the church? We have images of it today and a great image of it comes from that reading from Acts where all these people are speaking different languages and divided tongues of fire come and land upon them. It's interesting because the Holy Spirit is traditionally represented in Christian theology as a dove.
We have a dove carved into the screen right here as a representation of the Holy Spirit, but that's not what the spirit looks like in this passage, not a dove. The spirit looks like divided tongues of fire. The spirit of the church is not docile equanimity. It is fire and flame and confusion and even mutual unintelligibility. These people can't understand what they're saying to each other. And we know if we read through the book of Acts that these folks were arguing with each other from the first day that they gathered. They were trying to live in community with each other, but they were also fighting and arguing. They were divided tongues of flame among them from that first day.
It's been a long year here at Harvard. We have experienced tension and grief and estrangement and we still experience tension and grief and estrangement, and it has been difficult and painful for all of us and some more than others. What would it mean to recognize our divisions and differences as potential sites of holiness rather than signs of brokenness, as sites where the spirit of love could bind us together rather than a spirit of resentment driving us apart?
And there's warrant for that in the scriptural passage we have, that there's a line verse 13 in chapter 16 of John, where Jesus says, "The spirit will lead us into all truth." The way that sounds, if you read, it sounds like the spirit is going to tell us all the right thing. Give us the facts. But the word lead there, the Greek word is hodegeo, which is a different kind of leading. It's not the usual word for lead. It actually means to lead in the way. A better translation for this line is that the spirit will lead you into the way of truth. For this gospel passage, for the gospels, for Jesus. Truth is not a proposition, it is a way of being.
Look at these early Christians gathered together. They can't understand what they're saying. They're from completely different places. What's holy about their gathering is not their agreement about the facts. It's not even their mutual intelligibility, which they do not enjoy. What's holy about the gathering is the gathering itself, that they have come together in their difference and been spoken to in their difference and they have bound one another to one another in that difference. Truth for the Gospels is not a proposition. It's a way of living with and for one another, living in difference with love.
That's not to say that facts don't matter. Of course facts matter, but the facts do not entitle us to deny the basic truth, that God loves our neighbor and God loves our enemy. And so whatever my facts are, I must do that too. And it bears saying this week when the Harvard motto is plastered everywhere, all over this yard, including on the front mantle of our altar today, veritas, truth, that's something about what Christian truth says is about us committing to one another in love.
So that's the first thing the church looks like. All this diversity, all this difference, even sometimes striven difference, but lived striven difference, lived with love and care. The second thing about the church is that all these people from all these different places, they hear this message spoken to them in their own language, and after they hear it, they don't just settle down and stay in Jerusalem, they go back to where they came from eventually. This message they hear is not about gathering them in to set up something here. It's about sending them out and sending them forth, sending them back to where they came from with this message of living the truth in love. And that makes sense because the Greek word for church, ecclesia, actually means the ones who were called out and called forth, not the ones who were called in and called together, but the ones who were sent out and sent forth from the community.
Being the church is not about building something permanent and perpetual here. It's about supporting one another, caring for one another so we can go out there and do the work that God wants us to do, where God wants us to do it. To be the church means to send you all on your way, to send you out, to send forth on the way of truth, which is the way of love, out into that world which so desperately needs it. It's what we ought to be doing this church every Sunday. We try to do it every Sunday. This Sunday, we are literally doing it because all of us will go and not come back. As I said, some of us will not come back for a few months. Some of us will not come back for longer.
But what we are doing is sending you out, sending you forth, asking you to be the church, the ones called out and called forth to do the truth in love. It's a beautiful thing. It's a reason to gather each week. It's a lovely thing, but it doesn't always make it a happy or an easy thing because I'm going to miss you and this church is going to miss you. But as you go from this place, if you go walking that way, that way of love, then I believe and I will remember each Sunday hence that our common work together will continue to bind us however far you go and however long it is until we see you again. Go in peace. Amen.