Sermon for Pentecost – John 15:26-27, 16:4b-19

FYI – You’ll hear me reading the gospel lesson in Greek!

So did you get all that? Now in case you didn’t know, the OT is written in Hebrew and the NT is written in Greek. But it’s not the same as modern Greek. If you visit Greece and speak this way. You’re going to get looks. Go around and quote Shakespeare and see what happens. Which makes me wonder why people still want to read the King James version of the Bible, but anyway… This Greek is older, it’s Koine, which means common. What does that mean? It’s the everyday Greek that regular folks like you and me spoke at the time. Not the old, proper, attic Greek of philosophers and historians. This is the Greek you used for conversation, and simpler for all the non-Greek speakers to understand. That’s why the NT is in Koine. So everyone could understand.

This is what ALWAYS happens with languages. They get simpler. You actually know this. Don’t you cringe when you hear young people speak? Like what happened to grammar? But you know, the English that people are going to be speaking 100 years from now won’t sound like the English we speak today, and you can hear it changing right now, not that you like it. But the truth is that we’re a melting pot. More and more people are coming and speaking English, so English has to get simpler, common, Koine for that to happen. It’s just the reality of people. Just like back then. But what if it’s also HOW we can have conversations with our neighbors from who knows where? And God knows if there’s one thing we need these days, it’s to talk WITH people, not AT them. Nobody ever made someone fall in love with Jesus by a lecture. Note to self… Fire and brimstone don’t work either, BTW, but we’ll save that for another day.

Now, this is Pentecost, so these are timely thoughts. Common, Koine, talking WITH people. We know the story of the gathered disciples and the Spirit descending upon them, and the tongues of fire above their heads, and immediately they all speak in different languages so that everyone around starts to hear the good news in their own language. Now, the crowd around them is all Jewish, but by this point a lot of Jews don’t know Hebrew anymore. They only know what the OT says, by rote. They can only TALK with the language of the country they’re from. I mean, you can try to pick and choose from those Hebrew words and put them together into a fake conversation, but that won’t get you to the bathrooom in Israel. Besides, this isn’t the OT. This is a new word. This is breaking news. This is the story of Jesus. This is huge! It’s just like Vatican II and the Catholic church starting to have mass in English, because most people aren’t going to Catholic school anymore and don’t know Latin. Just like Martin Luther translating the Bible into German, just so everyone could read and hear God’s word for themselves. Now, people don’t have to just take the word of church leaders who sometimes have their own agendas. Now you can know if they’re really telling the truth about God. But it’s more than that. We have to be able to talk about Jesus in our everyday language because it’s the only way we can talk about Jesus WITH other people.

We also call this testimony. Jesus says today, “When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.” Now, the Greek word for testimony is MARTUREIA. What word does that sound like? Martyr. What does martyrdom remind you of? Death? Don’t martyrs always die? That’s kind of provocative, isn’t it? It’s like saying that when we tell others about Jesus, we end up dying. How?

Well, one thing we do, we HOPE, is tell about repentance and Jesus’ forgiveness. We know that’s the most important thing we could say about Jesus. But it’s hard to talk about forgiveness if you’re perfect. No one will believe anything you say if you don’t clearly NEED it youorself. Yet, deep down, don’t we want to be perfect disciples? Oh, but we want to be humble too, right? So we hedge our bets. We want to be pretty good disciples. On a good day. But right there, we’re not comfortable with thinking about our repeated failures and sin. The stuff we can’t shake off. Yet, we can’t tell the truth about forgiveness without being confronted with all our own fooolishness. We always fight against repentance, and it’s so automatic that we usually don’t even realize we’re fighting it. So you might say that when we finally tell the truth about Jesus – the ALETHEIA, that Greek word is all over today’s reading – we will crucify ourselves.

But then, there’s the other thing we do, and it’s pretty insidious. We put strings on Jesus’ forgiveness. We judge who’s worth being forgiven. Or we say IF you change, THEN Jesus will forgive you. Oh, we mean well. We want justice in the world, because we don’t see it right now. We want to think that people’s problems are just self-inflicted, and if they just stop, better for everyone all around. Now, a lot of preachers will say we WANT to judge, but the subtext there is to guilt you into stopping. Does that work? No. This judging is so insidious that we don’t even realize when we’re doing it. Just like how we fight repentance. But others hear it, because our implicit biases and predjudices inevitably come out when we talk about what we most want from Jesus for others – to make them acceptable before God. What we think that means, and what God thinks that means, are two different things. We don’t tell the truth about God. We lie. And it kills us. If it wasn’t true, then Sunday morning wouldn’t be the most segregated time of the week.

But that’s exactly what Jesus takes head on, when he heads to the cross, to suffer and die for our sake. He never asked us whether we wanted him to, because we didn’t want him to. And all to take our sin, our unconscious judging and death-dealing biases upon himself, to rip their power away from us, because he knows how powerless we really are. And after three days he is risen from death, to show us that there will be forgiveness and redemption in his name, there will be eternal freedom from all this bondage, for us and for all those we’ve denied it to. It had to be the cross and death and resurrection, because they surpass anything we could even think to say. Because even our words have to finally die, so that the only thing we have left to do is to behold what Jesus has done.

Jesus says. “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” He knows our words only make things conditional and ambiguous, but there’s nothing conditional or ambiguous about the cross. Everything in heaven and earth has been accomplished for you and for me. That’s all there is to say. Regardless, we’ll still talk about Jesus. SO. MANY. WORDS. But who could keep silent about such love and hope? So what do we say when we’re so good at saying the wrong thing? Jesus answers, “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.”

Jesus sends us the Spirit of Pentecost, that we might know we have been forgiven. That everything we have faced, all our failures, all our suffering, everything has led us to this moment of truth. And this is the truth that the Spirit declares to you and me – we have been utterly transformed by all of that stuff. Only this truth can give us the ability to confess the whole of our lives to others. The words will tumble out of our mouths before we even realize it. And thank God for that, because it’s the only way anyone can know that no one is beyond Jesus’ forgiveness. It’s the only way that anyone can know there is life beyond the cross, and that will come out no matter what we say. They WILL understand. It’s what Jesus will keep doing to them and to us, even in a simple word, because he’s not done with any of us. God says “my Word will not come back to me empty, and it will accomplish the thing for which I purposed it.” Thanks be to Jesus for proving it. Amen.