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Foundry United Rev. |
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Spirit of Truth Sunday, June 4, 2006 |
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John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15
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I would
like to mention that next Sunday is Peace with Justice Sunday. Rev. It is
the one Sunday within the Methodist calendar when there is a focus on advocacy
and social change. We have many Sundays when we focus on ministries of mercy
and service. But this is the one
Sunday when United Methodists nationally recognize the importance of not only
helping people in trouble but also changing the circumstances in our world
that cause people to be in trouble in the first place. So I encourage both your support of that
service and of the special offering which will be received next Sunday. Today
is the Holy Spirit’s day and the few words I have to say this morning
following confirmation and before communion are really for the confirmands. These words are for you and they are words
about truth. In the
gospel lesson that Matt read for us, he quotes Jesus as saying: “When the Spirit
of truth comes, this Spirit will lead you into all truth.” It is an
outstanding, an astonishing thing, actually, for Jesus to have said when you
think about it. It’s pretty hard to believe, actually, this promise that the Spirit
of Truth, the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth because the Christian
Church, like all other religions, has so often been wrong about things. Throughout the years we thought we knew
things that turned out not to be true at all.
There
was a time when Christians insisted that the world was flat. The church
actually threw people out and excommunicated them because they had learned
through science that the earth was round.
So there are a lot of times and a lot of things that we have been
wrong about, that we have not had truth.
But the
promise of Jesus is that the Holy Spirit, God’s presence with us and in our
world, would lead us to not only truth but to all truth. I think there is only one way to understand
what Jesus was trying to tell us. There
is a difference between particular things that are true and all truth. There
are things that we can say that we believe are true. We can say that God is, or we can say that
life is better than death, or that love is better than hate. These are things
that we believe are true. But there
are things that we thought were true that turn out that we have been wrong
about. We have passed on to you through the confirmation process things that
we thought were true that may turn out not to be true. One of
the reasons I love confirmation is because it’s a reminder to me that we need
to be faithful only for our own lifetime.
We need to discover only the truth that we can discover in our own
lifetime. There were those who went before us who passed the faith onto us,
who taught it to us, and they knew the truth that they had for their
lifetime. But there was still more truth to be learned, that we learned. There
is still more truth to be learned that you will learn. I don’t need to know every thing, because
long after I’m gone you will still be learning and you will discover new
truths that I haven’t been able to know in my lifetime. There will be people
who will come after you that you will pass the faith onto. They will learn new truth about the faith
that you won’t know in your lifetime. It is a relief to me that I don’t have
to do all the good that could possibly be done for all eternity in my
lifetime. I can trust it to you that
you will do even better things in your time than we have done. But I
think what Jesus is saying here is not that we told you everything that is
absolutely true, but that it is possible for you to know all of the truth
that really matters. There’s a
difference between things that are true and all truth that Jesus was talking
about. All
truth is really not about facts and it’s not about theories that may be true
or false. All truth is about the meaning
and the significance of life. It’s about the way we live our life. All truth is not something that we
discovered that Jesus said; it’s something that the Holy Spirit guides us
into, directs us into. It’s not about what
we know, but about the way we live. You can know about the way to live. And the way we know how to live is the way
that Jesus showed us to live by the way he lived. When
Jesus was trying to teach his disciples all truth, the only important truth
that you and I really need to know, what Jesus did was to sit at a meal with
his disciples and to take some bread and to break it. What he said to his disciples is that God’s
heart is broken for you the way this bread is broken. God wants your heart to
be broken for others when they are in need. Then Jesus took a cup and he poured
wine into it and he said that all you really need to know, the really
important truth, is that God’s love is poured out for us like this wine is poured
into a cup. God wants us to pour out our life and love for one another and
for the world around us. This is
all truth. Everything else is facts and theories. They may be important. But
all truth is simply this: God’s heart breaks for us, and our hearts should
break for one another. God’s love is poured out like wine into a cup. Our
love and life should be poured out for one another. This is all the truth you
need to live as disciples of Jesus Christ and as children of God. May we know it even if we can’t put it into
words as we celebrate together this holy meal. www.foundryumc.org |
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