Richard Lischer: Pentecost
“I will not leave you desolate.”
—John 14:15–20
From Richard Lischer, Just Tell the Truth, Eerdmans (2022)
What most of us know about Pentecost comes from its founding story in the second chapter of the book of Acts. As described there, it is a spectacular, if somewhat chaotic, event replete with tongues of flame and the sound of rushing wind. The Holy Spirit descends on the apostles, and they begin testifying in languages other than their own. This draws a crowd of Jewish pilgrims, and now each of them is hearing about God’s “deeds of power” in his or her own language.
This is a wonder.
But let’s not go there. There is a prequel to all this excitement, and it’s found in Jesus’s Farewell Discourse, covering nearly four chapters in the Gospel of John. There we discover that Pentecost does not begin in excitement but in loneliness. And before it is miraculous testimony, it is a promise given in the dark.
It’s a quieter, more subdued scene. Jesus is presiding over his last meal with his disciples. The air is heavy with a sense of doom. He has just given the morsel to Judas, identifying him as the one who will betray him, and Judas has bolted from the room to be swallowed by the night. Inside, imagine Jesus seated at the head of the table, his face illumined by candlelight. He is speaking to his friends with great solemnity and at some length. It is his Long Goodbye. Tomorrow he must die, and his friends will be alone.
Someone has said that the world lives by only a few great speeches, that is, by words spoken in the right place, to the right people, and at the right time. The world is filled with mistimed, misplaced speeches. We long for what the philosopher calls “right speech.” One thinks of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural at the close of the Civil War, or Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial. The night before a crucifixion is not the time to say, “Everything will be all right.” It’s not the occasion for a lecture or the giving of a law. What is the right word for the Lord’s last night?
It is a promise.
“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. I will not leave you desolate. . . . On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”
A promise can be given at any time. Your mother is ill, old, and worried. She is feeling alone. What will become of me? she asks. It falls to you to say, “Mom, we will always care for you, no matter what. I promise you.” The child is afraid of the dark. And why shouldn’t she be? There’s a monster living under her bed. It falls to you to say, “There is not a monster under your bed. I promise you.”
This is not the same as saying about a young artist, “She shows great promise.” That means we already see the signs of greatness about her. No, the promises we need occur in the dark, in the absence of signs or evidences of success. In these situations, the promise is everything. There are no other grab bars. The promise is only as good as the one who makes it.
Our life in this church is rich with both kinds of promise. There are detectable signs of the Holy Spirit among us. How could we say otherwise as we gaze upon a table, laden with silver vessels brimming with God’s gifts, the company of believers gathered around it?
But“church” also happens where the indicators are not so hopeful. Several years ago, the Diocese of North Carolina assigned a priest to initiate a ministry to the Latino community in the eastern part of the state where many were working in agriculture or the chicken-processing plants. How to begin? A feasibility study? An advertising blitz? Here’s what he does: he takes a card table, a hand-woven blanket, and some bread and a cruet of wine to the local laundromat, and there he sets up shop. Within weeks, Pentecost happens and a congregation materializes. Soon the patrons are crossing themselves and waiting for a break in the Mass to switch their clothing from washers to dryers. The “Laundromat Priest,” as he is known, intones the Great Thanksgiving during the spin cycle. A newspaper reports, “They stand respectfully toward the rear of the washerette, as if occupying holy ground.”
About this church you could say, it doesn’t have much promise. On the other hand, all it has is the promise (and it has proved to be more than enough): “I will not leave you desolate.”
The whole world needs the promise of Pentecost, because desolation is everywhere. I read with interest that earlier this year the British government appointed a cabinet-level official to tackle the epidemic of loneliness in Great Britain. The minister of loneliness. Look at all the lonely people, another Brit sang, where do they all come from? First, we think of the elderly, but loneliness has many faces: the bullied, the closeted, the housebound, the mentally ill, the chronically ill, those with failing memories, the grieving, the incarcerated, and, of course, the different, who often find themselves alone in a crowd.
In our great cities millions of people live what the poet called “lives of quiet desperation.” In New York City, an enterprising fellow has created a network of lonely strangers, now numbering in the thousands, who gather virtually on a weekly basis—to do what? To talk to one another. It is an intervention desperately needed. What once interhuman transactions are routinely conducted impersonally between and among invisible strangers. Online banking, online education, online shopping—all such transactions have one thing in common: no one will occupy your life-space to smile at you and say, “It’s good to be with you again. How’ve you been?”
Now it is also possible to go online and confess your sins and receive absolution. It works like this: first, select the appropriate sin from a drop-down menu of sins, then, after a few intermediate steps, click on Forgiveness, and you’re done. No altar, no candles, no passing the peace, no off-key singing, no crying babies, no cold coffee in the narthex. Nothing of what we once meant by “community.” Only you. The miracle is that your heart can select the proper response and be forgiven this way. But it is a lonelier way to go.
Consider the worst traffic jam you’ve ever seen. Think of it as a metaphor for what life has become for many. Millions of anonymous people trapped in their cars, cells, apartments, rooms, or hospital beds with no one to say, “I love you,” or to inquire about their well-being. And at the end of life, a caring nurse, to be sure, but no one to anoint them with oil, to make the sign of the cross, or to speak a blessing.
In the darkness of his room, which is known to us as the Upper Room, Jesus has a vision of the profound loneliness on this our lonely planet. And so, he makes a promise that goes something like this: “I will send a Helper to cut through the occlusions and scar tissue of your world. I will make a way out of no way. I will send you a Helper who will open a channel through the loneliness of this life. He will make me available to you.”
The many translations of that one little word, “helper”—Paraclete— that is, one who is called to the side of another, show how hard it is to define the Holy Spirit: advocate, helper, comforter, counselor, Spirit of Truth. Strange for a preacher to say, but it’s hard to talk about the Holy Spirit because when it comes to divine things, we are all children, and children need pictures. But there are none. No pictures, only effects. Because of this, for many Christians the Holy Spirit remains the Unknown God.
The most common misconception of the Holy Spirit is that the Spirit’s purpose is to give us more of us. As if the Spirit’s job is to give me more of me, much in the way a five-hour energy drink provides a boost: Is your church small? The Spirit will make it big. Are you
having trouble paying your bills? The Spirit will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams! Do you sometimes feel like a loser? Is the whole cosmos kicking sand in your face? The Spirit will make you a winner. Do you sometimes struggle in your faith, even entertain a doubt or two? The Spirit will erase your bad mind and fill you with boundless enthusiasm.
To be fair, toward the end of his letter to the Galatians, Paul does list some human behaviors that he associates with the Holy Spirit. But they aren’t the muscular claims we hear so much about. They are accurate reflections of God’s presence in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control.
Further, in writing to the Corinthians, Paul claims that no one can speak this three-word sentence apart from the Holy Spirit: “Jesus is Lord.” Which means that we can’t even share a word about Jesus or recite the Apostles’ Creed without the Spirit’s help. If this is true, how much more, then, is the Spirit needed outside the walls of the sanctuary? Who but the Holy Spirit is helping those who are trying to follow Jesus in supposedly “secular” venues—in cancer wards, classrooms, courtrooms, kitchens, shelters, jails, war zones, and refugee camps around the world? Who is it but the Holy Spirit who “sets the solitary into families”?
The Greek word for “desolate” is orphanos—from which we derive the English word “orphaned.” About twenty-five years ago that translation came home to some of us in a moving way. It was a baptism performed very near to where I am standing. Some of you may remember it, as I do, for the tragic circumstances that surrounded it. The baptism of the child followed exactly one day after the funeral for the child’s mother. Funeral on Saturday afternoon, baptism on Sunday morning. Never was the Holy Spirit more needed—or present— than in our church that day.
I also remember it for the sermon our pastor delivered. Pastor Prehn normally stood stolidly in the pulpit and preached from a manuscript. But on that morning something took hold of him, and of course we all knew what it was. With the child cradled in his
arms, and with tears in his eyes, he preached his sermon while walking— no, pacing—up and down, up and down, the center aisle of the sanctuary. I don’t remember the particulars of his message, but I do remember what it was about. It was about promise making: the promise the triune God was making to this child at its baptism, and the promises we make to support and love one another.
It was not a perfect sermon, only the right sermon for us and for our time and place. It seemed to me then, as it does all these years later, that Jesus is always promising us, “I will not leave you orphanos.” “On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”
In the Gospel of John, that day is not judgment day or the last day of history, but today. That day is the scary day in which we feel alone and abandoned in the world. Who knows the hour? The doors of our lives open onto that day. Each of us goes straight from this place into the heart of that day.
On that day—today—“I will not leave you desolate.”