Sixth Sunday of Easter A; 05.10.26; Dr Matthew (Matteo) Carter, Seminary Intern
John 14:15-21
There’s a beloved professor at my seminary who likes to say, “The Jesus we encounter in the Gospel of John is so divine, his feet barely touch the ground.” In the Gospel of John there are no earthy parables, no teachings drawn from the nitty gritty of how people make a living. Instead there is a loftiness and an enigmatic quality to the way Jesus speaks in John, and today’s reading is no exception. What does the spirit of truth mean? What does the discourse on mutual indwelling mean, the father in him and he in the father, the father in us and we in him, Jesus in us and we in Jesus? It’s heady stuff, so heady that it fueled centuries of early Christian debate on the nature and substance of the Trinity, debates that led to the hammering out of the Nicene Creed we say every Sunday.
The Apostle Paul, on the other hand, in his own letters, can be so down-to-earth and quotidian that it makes us wince, striking the tone of a middle manager who begins by saying “per my last email” and identifying some key performance indicators that a local church should report on by end of quarter. Yet Paul is an oratorical shape-shifter, a code switcher, and knows his various audiences well enough to tweak and attune his messaging. So today in the Acts of the Apostles, we see the figure of Paul speaking in an oblique, philosophical way, because he is talking to an educated audience at Athens. He also quotes famous Greek poetry and I’m sure the crowd loved that part. It would be like a guest speaker being told that there are Beatles fans in the audience, and so making sure that they hear him humming the tune to Hey Jude. More grandly, though, Paul speaks of God as one who is deliberately concealed from us in some ways but wants to be found. In Paul’s memorable phrase, we are to “grope for” God, like a light switch in a dark room. We dream of a brand new start, but we dream in the dark for the most part.
In entering the Areopagus, Paul would have expected to encounter adherents of two broad philosophical schools, the Stoics and the Epicureans. The Epicureans thought that the gods dwelt immensely distant from our world and its affairs, that they were not spill speaking to us. The remedy for this absence was to weather the storms of life serenely, and seek pleasure with gusto. The Stoics were more oriented toward theism but held a version of the “priesthood of all believers.” They thought of divinity as a spark within each of us, an atom that can be discovered and harnessed, and a force that can shape our lives into ideals of rational (indeed, bookish) living. But the idea Paul is tousling with here is from neither of these schools but happens to be an idea common to Judaism, Christianity, and Greek thought here, and its most famous formulation is the first sentence of Aristotle’s metaphysics: All human beings, by their very nature, reach out for understanding. We might say, all human beings grope their way to understanding. What a huge compliment to the whole human family! There is hope yet for peace on Earth if we can agree that we are at least wired to understand each other, even if it seems impossible sometimes.
And speaking of hope–I regard the injunction in the epistle today–Peter’s instruction that we should be able to give an accounting for the hope that is in us–as one of the commandments that we should keep if we love Jesus. There is something immensely practical about hope in a certain sense. I’m not saying that whatever we aspire to is practical, but rather that hope–our individual reasons for hope, for getting out of bed, for putting one foot in front of the other, for getting through each day–are good in the eyes of God because God wants us to live and flourish like a crop having a very good year. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t very bad years. 2026 may be one. But in the largest view–the macro-timeline, the one where Jesus today tells us that the Advocate, the Comforter, will be with us forever–whatever leads us to keep on keepin’ on, to choose life–is in harmony with this plan for universal flourishing.
So, I would like to end by giving you my own accounting of my own hope. I am thinking of the beautiful verse from today’s Psalm, 66: 14: “14 Come and listen, all you who fear God, and I will tell you what he has done for me.” I am thinking of today’s beautiful Collect, assuring us that God’s promises exceed all that we can desire. And I’m thinking of the call and response that originated in the African church in the 1980s but you’ve maybe hear it here too in the Baptist tradition. One person proclaims “God is good” and another person responds “all the time!” It is the Comforter, the Holy Spirit sent so that we may not be abandoned, that allows us to say “All the time”.
I feel hope because of the spirit of Ecumenism and interfaith collaboration that we saw last week when Pope Leo XIV met with Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullaly. I feel hope that the Eastern and Western churches are closer to reunification than they’ve been for a thousand years. I feel hope that, even though the details are uncertain, the Episcopal Church and the Methodist Church are considering being in full communion, perhaps as soon as 2030.
And on a personal note, I feel hope because of art and music. I’m not saying just the big thing, although I believe it ardently, that art and music help us make sense of cruelty and suffering and futility. I’m saying that these days I am aware of artists and musicians around me who are living into their own Godly call to human flourishing by doing what the Spirit moves them to do, to create. If the central cause for hope in our faith is the resurrection, the idea that God’s love for us is stronger than death, I believe that the artist’s life is a resurrection life because is is noble and glorifying to God to create beauty that will outlive us. Today the choir will sing Thomas Tallis’ beautiful setting of our Gospel passage, in the King James translation where the Holy Spirit is a Comforter, not an Advocate. We sing it in four parts, soprano alto tenor bass, and the beautiful harmonies emerge whether the musical lines are moving in the same direction, or in different directions. We all sing every rhythm: all four parts get to sing whole notes, and half notes, and quarter notes, and eighth notes, and the final chord is not major or minor but something more open, more full of possibility unificatory. Unity, too, is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Unity and reconciliation of all peoples is the mission of the church. If you love me, Jesus says, you will keep my commandments. Not because rules are rules and that’s just the way it is–a parent intoning “Why? Because I said so!”--but because love begets love. If we spend our lives loving God and each other, we become not just pebbles in the stream of life but part of the current of that stream, whisked along by the same Holy Spirit that has been moving in human history ever since God breathed upon the face of the waters in Genesis 1. And that, most of all, gives me hope.
May it be so. Alleluia.
