The Spirit Moves: Jesus Sends

Sermon from John 16:5-15

So...

This past week there was another school shooting.

How do you feel about that? Scared? Frustrated? Angry? Hurt? Numb?

I’m not asking you to tell me about your sense of the political debate, your perception of who should have done what, or your well-considered solutions.

I am just asking about how you feel about what has happened.

Why? Because when anyone dies in senseless tragedy, not only do broken parents and siblings, and families, and communities grieve, but God grieves too. Our sins of omission and commission are very clear to God.

And as a people who are to grieve, our own sin, and with those who grieve this incredible loss of life, we need to be people who are well acquainted with grief, well prepared to deal with grief, comfortably able to navigate our own grief.

Because if we wish to offer solace, if we want to be accepted in the community of those who grieve, if we want to at some point want to be able to offer help and hope, we must be the ones who before we try to offer solutions to a tragedy that cannot be undone, be willing to sit in silence with those who mourn.

In the Jewish tradition of sitting Shiva, one of the practices is to put a stone in your shoe and live with it during the time of grieving. Why? So that you as one who has not suffered the loss can feel some of the pain of those who have.

Before you speak, feel the pain, the loss, the anger, the desperation, and then maybe you can earn the opportunity to speak. Those who have not suffered, should be very slow to speak.

Each of us, I suspect, have thought about a way of ending these tragedies, a solution to the crisis in our world of angry, broken people destroying others in seconds, without warning. But for many of us, what we have not done adequately is grieved.

In John 16, Jesus is trying to explain to his disciples what will happen after he is arrested, tried, crucified, and buried. He talks of resurrection, an idea the disciples can’t wrap their heads around because quite frankly, they can’t get past the grief.

They cannot imagine Jesus dead. They cannot be comforted.

The other day I went to the supermarket and ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years. And I was totally surprised. She who had always looked so young and vibrant to me, looked old. I was completely taken aback.

I knew mentally that she must be 80 years old at this point. But as before she had always looked closer to the 45 years of age when I had first met her (and even younger perhaps) now she looked a bit frail.

And I thought, what the heck happened to her! That is until later that day when I looked in the mirror and saw a 61-year-old grandfather to be, staring back.

Please turn to the person in the pew nearest you and say, “you look fabulous for being so old”!

Life is the number one cause of death in the world. And death, well it is inconceivable. The disciples were lost and were crushed, much like all those in Parkland Florida.

How could Messiah die? How could Jesus, the incarnate presence of God, die? How could Jesus their friend, their brother, their master die? How could any of them, so young, so alive die?

And they grieved.

So, Jesus told them something truly remarkable, that when he was gone, he would send another, the Holy Spirit, to be with them, to be a counselor and a comfort for them, and that unless he left, the counselor wouldn’t come.

The counselor would help them understand the big picture of Jesus life and death, about the ravages of sin, about the hope for redemption, about how they were to live, and how they were to think, and that through the Spirit, how they could make this world a truly remarkable and wonderfully different place.

It was all possible. But it all starts with grief.

Seventeen lives were brutally stolen in Parkland Florida this week. The gruesomeness of their death’s is beyond description and understanding. I am so glad there are no pictures to see their broken bodies. In God’s presence may they live beyond the suffering and fear of those last moments.

And for all those who loved them, may God’s presence come as the counselor and give them the help they need to survive the nightmares and grief.

And for us, may we sit quiet in grief with them, stones in our shoes, mouths shut, ears open to listen until the Spirit speaks.

Yes, something must be done. Not another child or adult should suffer as they did. But arguing isn’t working. Maybe it is time to listen, to the Spirit, to the families, and then to each other.

Amen.