Sermon delivered on Sunday, Easter 6C, May 5, 2013, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Columbus, OH.

Lectionary texts: Acts 16.6-15; Psalm 67.1-7; Revelation 21.10, 22-22.5; John 14.23-29.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s gospel lesson Jesus tells his fearful disciples to let not their hearts be troubled and be not afraid (did you know that this is the most common command in all the Bible?). At first blush we are tempted to wonder if Jesus is out of his mind because there is plenty in our world that troubles our hearts and makes us afraid. A quick look at our intercessory list with its awful litany of illness, hurt, and heartache, not to mention our own struggles that each of us face, is enough to confirm this. John also implicitly confirms this reality in our gospel lesson today because we realize that if Jesus’ disciples were not afraid, Jesus would not have felt the need to reassure them. Not only that, but surely Paul and his companions’ hearts were troubled when the Holy Spirit kept preventing them from going to various places to preach the gospel. They had to be wondering what that was all about. And so this is what I want us to look at briefly this morning. How can we take to heart Jesus’ command to us to let not our hearts be troubled and not be afraid in a world that often seems bent on making us feel just that way?

The key to appropriating Jesus command to fear not is to remember there is both a present and future dimension behind it and both are based on the fact that God raised Jesus from the dead and installed him as Lord and ruler of all creation. We note that Jesus’ disciples were afraid, in part, because they didn’t know what was going to happen to Jesus or themselves and they were afraid that whatever happened they would be left all alone to deal with it. There are not too many things that make us more afraid than the fear of the unknown and the fear that we must deal with life’s adversities and tragedies alone with no one to help or support us. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we fear the unknown because we are not confident that God really is in control of things and we are afraid of dealing with life’s adversities alone because deep down we know we really don’t have the ability or resources to cope adequately with things that are beyond our control, which is most things in life. We really have control over precious little in our lives.

But here we note that Jesus does not tell his fearful disciples to not be afraid until after he has promised them that he and the Father will come to them and make their home with them.  Earlier in the chapter, Jesus told his disciples that he was going to the Father to prepare a room for them in the Father’s house so that they could have a place in God (John 14.1-3). Here Jesus is telling them (and us) that he is going to make it possible for God to have a place in us right now. There is no waiting necessary. This will be possible, of course, when the disciples receive the Holy Spirit—the Advocate, Counselor, Teacher, Intercessor, Guide, Comforter, and Strengthener, an all-around helper and companion. Only then will Jesus’ followers be able to receive his peace, a peace that is far more encompassing than just an absence of conflict. It is a peace that involves our total health and well-being, a peace that nothing in this world can overcome. All this reminds us that Jesus is addressing two of the biggest sources of our fear—our fear of being left alone and our fear of the unknown. When we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, God is essentially telling us that we do not have to deal with our trials and tribulations all alone. God is with us in the Spirit. This reality is what is behind almost all of Paul’s teaching about the nature of the Church and the people God calls us to be. Without the Spirit, we really are alone and can never hope to be the truly human beings God calls us to be.

All this requires faith on our part, of course, because we cannot see or touch the Spirit who lives in us. And because the Spirit is so gentle and loving, it is often hard for us to detect his presence in us. This is why we have to look for the fruit of the Spirit to manifest itself in our behavior, which requires that we know what the fruit of the Spirit is in the first place—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control (cf. Galatians 5.22-25). As we look for the Spirit’s presence in our lives, it is important that we don’t see his presence as some kind of static thing that never changes. The Spirit interacts with us as we struggle to put to death our sinful nature with his help and the Spirit’s presence will gradually become more evident throughout our lives, albeit unevenly at times. But the point is, regardless of how often the fruit of the Spirit manifests itself, it is evidence of the Spirit’s presence with us and this reminds us that Jesus is good to his word to make it possible for God to be with us even in Jesus’ ostensible physical absence.

And because we are being changed by the Spirit into the very likeness of Jesus as evidenced by the fruit of his Spirit, and because we live in the “already-not yet,” the period of time between the inauguration of God’s promised new creation and its consummation when our Lord returns, we are bound to experience suffering in this world because as Jesus reminded his disciples, the world fundamentally hates him and so it will hate us as his followers. As we are transformed into Jesus’ likeness more and more by the Spirit, we will find ourselves to be increasingly out of place, like a fish out of water, and that is why Jesus tells us to rejoice at our sufferings for his sake (Matthew 5.10-12). We will be the oddballs who advocate for forgiveness and mercy instead of revenge and hatred. We will be the “unenlightened” folks who insist on biblical sexual ethics. We will be the pesky folks who advocate tirelessly for the least and the lost in our society, who will love all comers because all human beings bear the image of God, damaged as that image may be. And because we are this way (and much more), the world will hate us because we do not march to its beat or bow to its gods. But when that happens, we do not fear because it is further evidence that we have God’s Spirit in us to help us be the people he calls us to be.

We see a practical application of this dynamic of living in the power of the Spirit in today’s NT lesson. Put yourself in Paul’s shoes for a minute and think how you would feel without the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. Jesus has called you to preach the gospel but in this case you discover he is blocking your every move. What’s that all about? Surely our hearts would be troubled over this. But Luke is careful to tell us that it is the Holy Spirit himself who blocks Paul’s path so that Paul is forced to wait. This, of course, is where the rubber meets the road because most of us don’t like waiting for things to happen, especially when we firmly believe we have been called to a given line of work or mission as Paul surely did. And so it is not unreasonable for us to believe that the “Big Stall” taxed Paul’s patience and faith (two fruits of the Spirit, BTW). But part of what Luke wants us to see is that despite God’s running of his universe, God spent plenty of time and effort to direct Paul, Silas, Timothy, and Luke to where God needed them to go—to Philippi, where they found hearts waiting to be exposed to the word of God. To be certain, there was a good deal of uncertainty in all this, but Luke reminds us that things happened as God willed them and in God’s good sense of timing. No detail in our lives is too small for God to attend to and all this serves to remind us that we do not live as people of God alone or on our own power. Uncertainty and frustration will come, in part, because we are finite and live in a fallen world. But our story from Acts today reminds us that God is actively involved in our lives down to the smallest detail and we have every reason to trust God’s good timing.

Not only that, this story also reminds us that God is firmly in control of his world, even when it is not readily apparent to us. But as John the Evangelist reminds us in our epistle lesson, there will come a day when there will be no doubt that God is firmly in control and we must pay close attention here because this has great relevance to how firm is the foundation on which our hope is built. This is the future dimension that helps us take seriously Jesus’ command to us to not be afraid and let not our hearts be troubled because John’s description of the New Jerusalem reminds us that God, not evil, sin, and death, will emerge victorious. What we see in John’s vision is no less than the restoration of Eden before the Fall—heaven on earth!

The Spirit reminds John and us that in the new creation there is no more Temple because God and the Lamb live directly in the presence of his people. When the new creation comes in full, there will be no more ambiguity or doubt or frustration because we will see the face of God directly, an astonishing claim considering that elsewhere in Scripture we are consistently told that no one can look on the face of God and live (see, e.g., Exodus 33.20). But in the New Jerusalem that will not be the case because no trace of evil will be found and the curse will be lifted, having been purged by the blood of the Lamb, so that God will interact with his people as he did before the Fall. It is the ultimate manifestation of the Aaronic blessing found in our psalm today. Those of us who will live there get to do so not because of our own merit but because we are Jesus’ people who have had our sins covered by his precious blood shed for us. This is what John is talking about when he tells us that the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem have Jesus’ name on their foreheads. This cannot help but make us want to fall on our knees and offer our profound thanks to God for his his great mercy and tender love for his people. The hope of the New Jerusalem also reminds us that we as the Church are called to live our lives in ways that anticipate this hope as a prophetic witness to the world.

That evil no longer exists in the new creation is also seen in the fact that John tells us the city’s gates no longer need to be kept shut at night to keep the bad guys out and that the tree of life and its waters are for the healing of the nations. This reminds us that the new creation is not some localized or small-scale project. It is the very renewal of God’s good but fallen creation to its pristine state and there we will get to live our lives as God’s redeemed people who are rescued fully from evil, sin, and death. This is our hope and destiny and we will be perfectly equipped to live as citizens in the new creation precisely because we are learning how to do that right now in the power of the Spirit. Here then is the complete package needed for us to take seriously Jesus’ command to us to be not afraid or let our hearts be troubled. We need not fear the present because we are equipped by Jesus’ death and resurrection to have God be with us in the power of the Spirit. And we need not fear the future because the new creation that Jesus launched at his resurrection reminds us that our future is secured and life is our destiny, not evil and death.

I close with an additional brief story of how the Spirit manifests his presence in our lives in very practical ways to further encourage you. Recently I witnessed intercessory prayer for a friend of mine. One of the things the intercessors prayed for was that my friend might be protected from the enemy’s arrows, something that really resonated with my friend at the time. Later that week, my friend found himself in a hostile environment where he was being attacked from several quarters. So much for the effectiveness of the intercessors’ prayer, eh? Not so fast my friends. We live in a fallen world and the arrows are bound to come our way. To think otherwise is frankly naive on our part. But my friend reported that despite the attacks, he felt a great peace and remained unruffled by it all. The point is that while the arrows came, my friend was protected by the power of the Spirit and enjoyed the peace of Christ that he promised his disciples. Priceless.

So what can we do with this during the coming week? Three things come quickly to mind. First, ask the Spirit to help you recognize his presence in your life right now and to help you remember examples like I just shared with you. Second, commit Jesus’ promise to his disciples to memory. If you memorize a passage each week and work to recall them on a regular basis, you will be shocked at how much Scripture you retain. Don’t memorize Scripture for the sake of memorizing it. Memorize it to help you navigate through the stormy times of your life by recalling God’s promises to you in Jesus. You won’t be disappointed. Last, reread today’s story from Acts and muse on it. The Apostles were humans just like we are and experienced a lot of the same trials we have to deal with. Let this story remind you how active and intimately involved in your life and the life of the world God really is, especially when you hear voices shouting loudly that God isn’t real or isn’t really present in his world or cares about it or us. The best antidote to fear is to marshal the resources God gives us and the Big Three are Scripture, prayer, and the eucharistic sacraments. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you are big enough or capable enough to deal with the storms of life and the dark powers behind them by yourself. Rather, trust and rely on the resources God gives you in the Spirit. If you do, you will surely be reminded that you have Good News, now and for all eternity.

In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!