Imagining Grace
Mike Moyers, Awake My Soul
John 14:15-21
“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.
“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
Sermon
There are a lot of ways to freak your parents out:
Face tattoos. Belly button piercings. Motorcycles. Going to Burning Man. Majoring in Clown Studies. Chain smoking. Marrying someone twice your age. Going to jail.
And for the parents in the room, there are SO many scary things you can imagine hurting your kids. Yes, things scarier than clown college that I don’t have to name.
Sometimes people will give a copy of Dr. Seuss’s “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” to students as a graduation gift. And for a number of students, that might be an unsettling prophecy. Oh, the places they’ll go… we’d better buckle up now.
It seems like we’re always better at imagining scary things than good things.
Today’s scripture arrives in the middle of lots of scary things and scary imaginations. It shows up in John’s gospel after the Last Supper—with prophecies of betrayal and fearful glances around the room—and it shows up before Jesus tells his disciples they will be hated by the world. We know, of course, that right around the corner from this text is humiliation and crucifixion.
It’s scary stuff.
But what does Jesus do by offering this teaching?
He gives his disciples the chance to imagine something good, something that might be wholly different than their predisposition to fear.
In this short passage, we hear no less than ten promises:
God will give us an Advocate, the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit will abide with us.
The Spirit will live within us.
Jesus will not leave us orphaned
Jesus will return to us again.
We will see Jesus, though the world will not
We will live in Jesus
Jesus will live in us
We are loved by God the Creator
Jesus loves us
Jesus reveals himself to us
Promise after promise after promise. Assurance after assurance after assurance. There is vision after vision of God’s goodness and grace to us. Love after love.
Jesus is shaping his disciples’ imaginations to be fixated on life, rather than death; to be fixated on resurrections rather than fear.
As we confirm nine students this morning, we celebrate a reaffirmation of the baptismal covenant. In this, we are orienting our imaginations around this goodness of God and remembering the same promises Jesus spoke in scripture. In celebrating this reaffirmation, we celebrate that even when evil rips our lives asunder, there is divine love holding us fast.
When parents find their imaginations wracked by fear and anxiety, they can remember that their children are held by the love of God. When parents pass away, their children will never be orphaned — they will always have a family whenever they walk through the doors of the tue church of Jesus Christ.
When confirmands find themselves feeling lonely, or forgotten, or broken, or lost, they will always have companions: the Holy Spirit, who lives inside them, and the fellowship of the Church. When they find themselves a long way from home, and a long way from who they know themselves to be, there is always love around the corner in the household of God.
We know that congregations like ours or any other church won’t always get it right. We won’t always be the family others need when they need it. But in reaffirming these baptisms, and in professing our own faith, we are reminded of God’s call to do our best: to love and serve others, to listen to these students’ opinions and ideas, and to be shepherded by them just as much as we shepherd them.
Most importantly, in reaffirming their baptisms, and in professing our own faith, we recommit to imaginations that are captive to love and not fear. We recommit to the hard work or reorienting our imaginations around resurrections and not death, hope and not despair.
We recommit The Holy Spirit, and grace, and this new household of God. And nothing—and no one—else.
With that, we turn to reaffirm the baptismal covenant.
