On Time
John 16:12-15
‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
You may have noticed, that when it comes to the Holy Trinity, that I tend to really focus on the son—the humanity of Jesus. I always had a tendency to emphasize the fact that our savior is both divine and human, emphasis on the human. I just love a God who has truly felt everything we feel. I love a God who makes it so we’re never alone, no matter how down and out we may feel. But over the past year, I’ve been feeling more of a draw to the Holy Spirit. I think it as a lot to do with being closer with nature now, with feeling the Holy Spirit in the birds and the breezes, and the changing of the seasons. But I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the Holy Spirit is our guide to show us how to really do what we’re called to do out in this modern world, thousands of years after Jesus lived and died and was resurrected.
But explain this a little better, I have to backtrack a little to the lectionary passage from John that I did not preach on last week—John 14:25-26: “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” This was the beginning of Jesus’ farewell, making it known that in Jesus’ physical absence, the Holy Spirit would be our guide. Because of the fact that Jesus was indeed human, he technically had limits. He was of a certain time, he had a human, mortal form, and so when he is gone, there needed to be something in this world to keep his Spirit alive.
The Holy Spirit is what keeps us going in this world—not just what gives us strength to carry on, though surely for some people it does just that—but it’s what helps to make Jesus, relevant to today—“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, [it] will guide you into all the truth,” Jesus says in today’s passage. Why couldn’t Jesus’ disciples bear what he had to say in the moment? What was Jesus going to say to his disciples that was going to absolutely blow their minds? The Holy Spirit, is present, I believe, to kind of gradually guide us towards the truth—some of those truths that the disciples weren’t yet ready for; to guide us to the right place when we’re ready for it—maybe not when we want it, but certainly when we’re ready for it.
There’s a really beautiful new song by the singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, and the chorus of the song reads, “…guess I had to be losing to get here on time.” And I’m thinking about this in relation to Jesus kind of prepping his disciples for his death and prepping them for his ascension and what they’re going to have to do when he’s gone. Remember all those stories about Jesus’ disciples being kind of dense? There’s a story about Peter getting a little too excited, trying to make an altar after Jesus’ miraculous transfiguration, as they may have done in the times before Jesus; there are multiple stories about the disciples arguing about who is the best, who should be on Jesus’ right or left side, relying on oppressive hierarchies as they were instructed not to do anymore; the list goes on. They were still measuring successes, measuring faith, by the ways they knew, instead of really listening to Jesus and really trying to understand this different way of being, this different timeline.
Because we always look for the familiar way, or the easy way, right? We always want things to be painless and simple, we always want an easy answer to what we have to do next. It’s so tempting to read the Bible and take it at face value, to take it literally in order to not have to wrestle or wonder. But the Bible is not a static thing; God is not a static thing; though Jesus was indeed human, his message was immortal, and the Holy Spirit lives on to guide us to the meaning of Jesus in our contemporary world, so different from when the message of Jesus originated. It’s really hard to understand this ancient text in the context of today. It can feel confusing and wrong and archaic. But that’s why we need the Holy Spirit. No matter how lost or confused we are, we have to trust that we’re bring guided towards the right place. That’s why that song lyric really speaks to me—there’s a really deep trust in that line, “…guess I had to be losing to get here on time.” Guess I had to go through trials and tribulations to be in the place I’m meant to be.
We stumble and we hit roadblocks, we go through tragedies and traumas, and we get so angry at ourselves, or at life, or at God, and all of that is valid, and okay! but the one theistic cliché I abide by is that “God’s time is not our own,” and while I wouldn’t so far as to say everything happens for a reason, because that is cold comfort when we’re grieving or full of rage, I do truly believe that we are each guided on certain strange paths by the Holy Spirit, and regardless of how circuitous or bumpy that path is; even when we feel like we’re losing, or we’re lost, or that we’ve failed, we we will get to wherever we’re going on time—maybe not on our time; but we’ll still get there on time.
Church, I’ll tell you, my path to ordination was like this— I graduated from divinity school in 2013, and I got ordained at the end of 2020. For a long time, I thought I had failed, I thought I was losing ground. I felt jealous of my friends who had churches, I was depressed on and off thinking that it was getting too late. All this, despite the fact that I was doing really fulfilling work, and really making a difference in people’s lives as a hospice chaplain. But it wasn’t the plan I had in my head. It wasn’t the easy, straight and narrow path I wanted to take, so it felt like a failure. But that strange and circuitous path led me to Philadelphia, which led me to Chris. And that strange and circuitous path led me to passing my ecclesiastical council just in time to see First Congregational Church of Hartland on that list of churches looking for pastors. The circuitous path led me here. The Holy Spirit led me here. And the Holy Spirit, being so invisible and mystical, it’s hard to feel and understand sometimes, but it’s how we feel and understand God’s calling for us in this world. But we have to be ready for it.
The Trinity has long been one of the most debated and controversial aspects of Christianity. How are three things also one thing? How is one thing also three? As usual, I’m not going to answer this question today. I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if on this earth it’s really possible to know the answer. But we’re still going to grapple with it today. There’s a book I read a couple months back by the author John Darnielle called Devil House. Don’t be distracted by the title, it’s not what you think. But that’s kind of what the whole book is about— it’s about making assumptions; it’s about things not being what they seem or what we anticipated or what we hoped for. There’s a scene in the book in which a troubled teenager is creating this bizarre, kind of disturbing art project, this huge human-ish sculpture. He writes of this fictional art piece,
Adorning the portrait, some simple white clouds to the right and left, establishing the face’s unearthly origin firmly enough for those who saw or heard about it later to put a name to it. A monster, a specter, a fiend. A ghost. A devil. It’s easier to rely on familiar things when you’re describing something different than to imagine a context whose parameters require faith and vision. It’s a sure bet that when people see the easy way across differences, they will take it.[i]
When things feel wrong, or out of whack, or when things feel like they’re going against the grain of society, we can feel a little panicked. We can make harmful assumptions about others or about ourselves. Because the expectations and priorities that this society sets for us are not the ones that God sets for us. The expectations and priorities that we set for ourselves are often not the ones God has in mind for us. So we have to listen hard for the Holy Spirit. We have to trust that the Holy Spirit is guiding is, regardless of how long or difficult the journey feels sometimes. Because we falter when we try to rely on the familiar to describe something indescribable; we falter when we try to rely on the expectations and priorities of this world to tell us the path we should be taking, to tell us when we fail and when we succeed. We falter because it’s easier to rely on what we know, rather than thinking outside the box and relying faith or vision. Faith and vision—this is how we are guided by the Holy Spirit, this truly indescribable entity that is our pathway to God, that is our pathway to doing what Jesus calls us to do.
As we’ve talked about so much before, this is a world that measures success by material things. It measures success by money, by land, by wealth, by possessions, by how easy or effortless our lives may look to outsiders—all things that Jesus preached against, all things that the Holy Spirit guides us away from. Right now, this broken world is measuring success with new get-rich-quick-schemes— things like cryptocurrency, other pyramid schemes, ways of exploiting the environment or other people in order it get money and feign success; it’s a world that assumes if you struggle then you’re not doing it right. It’s a world that assumes if you’re poor, you’ve failed, or if you’ve experienced setbacks they’re your own doing and you just didn’t try hard enough.
Because that is the attitude this present-day world teaches. This world claims to reward hard work and bootstrapping, but it really just rewards schemers and people who take the easy to way to some shallow definition of happiness and wealth. And so when we experienced a hardship or a setback that is something out of our control, we can feel like a failure, we can feel broken by this broken world’s standards, because it’s so easy to fall prey to the sinful priorities and amoral measures of success of this broken world.
Since my loss in December, I’ve had to try really, really hard to have that trust, and have that faith and vision—because this world is a harsh one where mental health isn’t prioritized, where we often aren’t given the time we really need to grieve and process. So in the midst of grief and anger, I’ve worked really hard to have that trust that I now see I should have had back when I thought I was behind before I finally got ordained; I’ve worked really hard to have that trust that sometimes you have to be losing to get to the place you’re meant to be on time. That sometimes, when we feel a pain so deep, or sometimes when we have an experience so confounding, we can’t fall back on what this world expects of us—we can’t blame ourselves for failures, we can’t rely on this world’s priorities to measure success; because if we do rely on this world that prioritizes exponential growth and wealth and perfection, we are doomed to fail. And so we have to think differently. We have to use faith and vision, something that is so lacking in today’s world.
The Holy Trinity is a mystery. The Holy Spirit that guides us through life is a mystery, and it can sometimes to be confusing or tragic and it can sometimes guide us down paths that we would rather not take. And we might not be ready for some of what it will eventually reveal to us, though we might swear that we are. But we have to trust in this mystery, we have to have patience with this mystery. We have to trust that the Holy Spirit is guiding us to lead with faith and vision in what could be, rather than the priorities and expectations of this world that is. We have to trust that we are being guided towards this ultimate truth, coming from Jesus, come from God, through the Holy Spirit. And we have to trust that by abandoning the familiar, and rather by using faith and vision, we will get to where we each need to be on time. Amen.
[i] John Darnielle, Devil House (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), page 180.
