This Sunday is Pentecost; the recounting of the event in Scripture is succinct, the effect everlasting.
It began with Jesus making a promise to His followers, conditioned on not being of the world:
If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And 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.
– John 14:15-17
Interestingly, but not surprising, as Jesus says, the world does not see, know, nor can it receive the Spirit of truth. What is your source for knowing the truth? CNN, Fox News, Twitter? We are told that Jesus’ followers know the Spirit, and He will abide, i.e. dwell, within them because they know the truth – the way, the truth, and the life for that matter.
I do not know exactly how to put it into words, but in my ministry work I have witnessed the presence and the absence of the Spirit of truth abiding within someone, believer and non-believer; perhaps a story will help to clarify my experience:
Meet Tristan, a 43-year-old single man, never married, living in northern California. He has a history of a progressively worsening heart condition first diagnosed when he was in his twenties. He is in the hospital awaiting heart surgery to replace two valves while he fights pericarditis (inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart). Over the last year he has lost more than fifty pounds. He was not a big man to begin with, looking gaunt, feeling very weak and depressed.
When meeting the Chaplain (me), he shared that he was experiencing a terrible feeling of dread and despair; not of being cut open or any aspect of the upcoming surgery, but a terrible feeling of emptiness, otherwise indescribable. It has gotten so bad that Tristan says he has contemplated suicide, except that his 78-year-old mother, who lives in Arizona and is now staying with Tristan to help him through his current ordeal, would be devastated by such a thought. She, as Tristan puts it frankly, is his only reason to live. When asked if there was a faith or sense of spirituality that he looked to for meaning and strength in times like this, Tristan quickly made known that he was agnostic: “Since we can never know God for certain does exist, let alone play any role in our life, why bother.”
Meet Dillon, a 58-year-old single man, never married, living in northern California. He has a history of lung disorders that seem to run in his family as his older sister had died twelve years earlier from complications due to emphysema. Two years ago, Dillon was diagnosed with a terminal lung illness, pulmonary fibrosis and was told that he would have two to three years to live. He is in the hospital currently fighting pneumonia on top of his other lung ailments. Dillon exudes peace and joy in his attitude and demeanor. He expresses that each day now is a gift, that God has been very good to him, and he is ready whenever God calls him home.
His story is an incredible testimony to faith; fifteen years ago, his sister, who could not have children of her own, adopted a 3-year-old child from Korea named Grace. Three years later his sister passed away. Dillon had promised her that he would raise and care for Grace. For ten years Dillon did exactly that, until she was sixteen, when he received the news of his own terminal illness. Dillon, a lifelong Catholic, said his response to that grave news was to pray like he never prayed before. He prayed for God to please give him two years – to give him the time until Grace turned eighteen so he could fulfill his promise to his sister.
Several months back Grace turned eighteen, she enlisted in the Navy and was recently assigned to the control center of an aircraft carrier. Dillon laughed when he said he has now “given Grace back to God knowing He would protect her. And where did God put Grace – in the command center at the heart of a naval battle group of the largest superpower on Earth; God is good!” Dillon says his faith, and the peace that goes with it, have never been stronger; he is ready to meet his God and frankly, he said, he cannot wait.
We are told that Jesus’ followers know the Spirit, and He will abide, i.e. dwell, within them because they know the truth – the way, the truth, and the life for that matter.
As I reflect on these visits, having met many Tristans and not enough Dillons, I recall something Viktor Frankl said in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, recounting his survival in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz: “Man has many potentialities within himself, the one that is actualized depends on choices and decisions and not on conditions or circumstances.”
There is a similar struggle for the Trappist monks martyred in Algeria in the movie Of Gods and Men, which I highly recommend. Recalling the character Brother Luc, the old doctor, resolute from the start saying, “Throughout my career I have met all sorts of different people, including Nazis, and even the devil. I’m not scared of terrorists, even less of the army. And I’m not scared of death. I’m a free man.”
My sense is that it is the search for “truth” that either gives us hope and binds us in relationship, in community, or when hope fails, drives us apart or to despair. As Ray Anderson, one of my Fuller Seminary professors put it, “All ministry is grounded in God’s ministry, and all theology is dependent on God’s continued ministry as a source of revealed truth.” In his book, The Shape of Practical Theology, Anderson’s teachings are both practical and theological: Christian ministry “seeks what is normative in Jesus Christ as the inspired source of the written Word and the objective reality of Christ as the praxis of the Holy Spirit in the context of ministry.” As such, we realize that living the Gospel through ministry precedes and determines the existence of the Church. We, the Church, are the continued ministry of Christ in whose presence we find the existence of God through the Holy Spirit as the revealer and reconciler of truth turned outward into the world.
Man has many potentialities within himself, the one that is actualized depends on choices and decisions and not on conditions or circumstances.
– Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
Enter the Holy Spirit. After Jesus’ Ascension, His disciples spent the next few days “constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus.” (Acts 1:14) During that time, they had selected Matthias to replace Judas bringing their total again to twelve, and then we read:
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
– Acts 2:1-4
The image at the top of this post is one of my favorites capturing this scene; the twelve disciples along with Mother Mary and another woman, likely Mary Magdalene, with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descending upon them. I first saw this rendering at Mundelein Seminary years ago when I was there for a retreat. We now have a framed copy at the entry to our guest room as our prayer that all who enter are blessed by the Holy Spirit.
Imagine being in that room, in that scene. The upper room, the place of the Last Supper. A small, cramped room, they were frightened, confused, sweaty, not sure how to proceed with their commission. Who was this Advocate of whom Jesus spoke, and where were they?
Then, right on cue, they hear and feel the Spirit before they see the tongues of fire. No longer frightened or confused, it all came together for them, and the Church, now born of the Spirit, was ready to be walked out into the world, which is precisely what they did:
So those who received his (Peter) word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayer.
– Acts 2:41-42
The Church is best explicated in Trinitarian terms: the Father’s ministry toward the world, the Son’s ministry to the Father on behalf of the world, and the contemporary work of the Holy Spirit empowering the ministry of the Church. This is what transforms the Spirit of truth into action.
We are called to discipleship grounded in the continuing ministry of Christ through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. This is manifested through human encounter, which allows for meeting God right where the one being ministered to is at, in their current situation and reality. Made in the image of God, we are the person of Christ empowered through the Holy Spirit to be His hands and His feet bringing the truth of the Gospel to a broken world.
If today you meet a Tristan, introduce him to Dillon.
As the Lord told Jeremiah:
For surely I know the plans I have for you, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.
– Jeremiah 29:11
Reflection questions:
- Imagine yourself in that dark, stuffy upper room, sequestered with the disciples that Pentecost Sunday. Suddenly, you hear a mighty sound, feel the wind, your eyes dazzled by the tongues of flame … and then enlightenment. What must that have been like for them? Have you ever experienced one of those Holy Spirit moments when something you have puzzled over is suddenly made clear in the light of truth?
- Think of the “Tristans” you know; is there anything you can say, anything you could do that might help bring them closer to the “Dillon” experience?
- Reflect on what this means to you: All practicing Christians are a living example of “God’s continued ministry as a source of revealed truth” and “living the Gospel through ministry precedes and determines the existence of the Church as the ministry of Christ.”
Scripture references
John 14:15-17 Acts 1:14, 2:1-4, 41-42 Jeremiah 29:11
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