John 14.25-31
For nearly as long as I have been a preacher, the church has sent out mass mailings to promote key events on the liturgical calendar: candlelight communion on Christmas, Easter services, Vacation Bible School. The postal program, called Every Door Direct Mail, is like crop dusting. Rather than sending postcards to specific names and addresses, the church would target every mailbox in whole neighborhoods or along certain routes. Unless they responded to the invitation, attended worship, and entrusted us with their identifying information, the recipients remained anonymous to us.
Usually.
Almost a decade ago, the church’s mass mailings provoked a militant, response from one of its recipients. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the church’s postcard came back with “Return to Sender” scrawled in angry black sharpie over the entirety of the image of God’s Mother holding her belly below a star-filled sky. On the other side of the postcard, in the little white-space available, the recipient had written in cursive, “You know it’s a myth, right??!!! Fools! Fools! Fools!” And then in the bottom corner of the card, the recipient had added, “Happy Holidays!”
I was sitting at my desk, looking over the liturgy, when my assistant handed me the postcard.
“Bless their heart,” I muttered.
And then I stuck the postcard inside a book where it reminds to this day.
I thought no more of it until Holy Week of that year. I came to church in the evening on Good Friday for the Tenebrae service. On my desk I found the Easter mailing. Scrawled over the postcard’s black ink cross and red resurrection script was the same script, “Return to Sender.” On the other side of the card, beside the list of services for the Triduum— the Great Three Days, once again in cursive, the recipient had offered an edit to the church’s Easter alleluia.
It read, “Christ is NOT risen! Christ is NOT Risen! Indeed.”
On my way to the sanctuary to observe the death of God, I stuck the postcard inside the second volume of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.
I did not think of it again until Advent. This time the postcard did not come back labeled, “Return to Sender.” It was instead folded lengthwise into thirds and stuffed into an envelope, which he had marked with his return address. His name was Robert and he lived near Mount Vernon. Included in the envelope was an article he had carefully cut out of the pages of USA Today. The story reported a father in Iowa charged with murder. His four-month old son Sterling had been found dead in a motorized swing. Weighing less than five pounds, the baby had been left there for over a week. The details of the crime were such that I can still fetch them from my memory.
Robert had stuck a post-it note to the article.
The same cursive handwriting posed the question, “Do your fairy tales have anything to say about the gone-wrongness of the world?!”
I slid the article and Robert’s note into a commentary on the Fourth Gospel by Raymond Brown, and since then I have never stopped thinking about it.
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After John baptizes him in the Jordan River, the Holy Spirit flings the Son into the wilderness. Over forty days and forty nights, Jesus engages the Adversary. Where Jesus had gone down into the Jordan and where the Spirit had come down from heaven, the Devil’s temptations are a series of escalating ascensions— first from the desert rocks, then up to the top of the temple, and finally “to a very high mountain.” The Devil takes Jesus up to cruising altitude, high enough that “all the nations of the world and their glory” are visible beneath them, made small like toys.
From up there, the Adversary makes his third proffer. “Fall down and worship me,” the Devil reasons, “I will give to you all the governments of the world.” Just bend your waist a few degrees and mutter some words, and you will be able to solve all the world’s problems with a snap of your fingers. The Gospels do not report how long it took Mary’s boy to refuse the offer or how many of the forty days he spent up there considering it. Finally, Jesus answers him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the LORD your God and him only shall you serve.””
Their combat having reached a detente, Luke reports that the Devil departed from Jesus “until an opportune time.”
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“All these I will gift you, if you will fall down and worship me.”
Which is to say, the governments of the world are the Devil’s possession.
They are his to give.
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In the Upper Room, after he has washed the feet of his friends and announced that soon he would ascend his cross, Jesus reveals that the Adversary’s opportune time finally has arrived, “I will no longer talk much with you, for the Ruler of this World is coming.” Upon his triumphant entry into Jerusalem four days earlier, Jesus had called him “the Prince of this World.” Meanwhile the apostle Paul makes him synonymous with “the rulers and authorities” and to the Corinthians declares Satan to be “the god of this world.”
Just before he announces the arrival of the Devil’s long-awaited opportune time, Jesus pledges the concurrent coming of the Holy Spirit. Notice the entire Trinity is embedded in the single half-sentence of Christ’s promise, “The Advocate,” Jesus pledges “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you everything you ever need to know, and he will do that by reminding you of everything I ever said to you.” In other words, we only know Jesus— we can only follow Jesus— if we receive his Holy Spirit.
We keep his words, we abide in obedience, by listening to the Spirit recall his teaching to us. The Holy Spirit is the agent who makes faithfulness possible. Indeed we may know Christ has given us commands he intends for us to keep because he sends us his Holy Spirit so that we may do so. We learn everything we ever need to know now by being reminded of everything Jesus ever said then. The Holy Spirit is Jesus saying now to you, “As I was saying…” As Saint Augustine preached on this passage, “The Son speaks. The Spirit teaches.” That is, we teach and preach the words and works of Jesus because this is how his Spirit gives us Christ to us. And this is why he follows his promise of the Spirit with the pledge of his peace, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” This peace— he is not bequeathing us serenity. He is not bestowing upon us a lack of anxiety. Nor is he gifting us an absence of strife. The scriptures elsewhere put it plainly, “Christ himself is our peace.” The person and work and words of Jesus, they are our peace.
What the Spirit will give us is nothing other than what Christ leaves to us.
Himself.
“The Holy Spirit will teach you everything you need to know,” Jesus promises us, “and he will do that by reminding you of everything I have said to you.” That is, there is nothing we need to know in order to be faithful that the Spirit will not show us. The New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner describes this promise as “the two great evangelical everythings.” True as that is, they could more accurately be called the two great apocalyptic everythings, for Jesus pledges the peace that is himself— he promises the Spirit that is himself— so that we will not be left alone to the Adversary.
That the Ruler of this World is coming for him is but proof the world already belongs to him. As John the Evangelist puts it in his first epistle, “The whole world lies in the power of the Evil One.” Therefore, Christ’s Farewell Discourse is an opportune time for Jesus to promise his Holy Spirit— a promise that is, as Robert Jenson calls it, “a conspiracy on behalf of the world’s future.”
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Robert did not wait for the church to send out a mass mailing for the next church-wide study or Lenten series. He did not wait for a postcard to send back marked, “Return to Sender.” Instead, a few weeks later, I found another USA Today article neatly excised and stuffed into an envelope. After detailing the infestation that had beset the neglected baby Sterling, the story reported how his parents, Zachary and Cheyenne, were addicted to— rather, they were enslaved by— methamphetamine. Once clean, they felt sure the public would understand their plight and pardon their trespass.
“How does THIS happen?” he wrote in his cursive script across the article.
He put “this” in all caps just as he did “your.”
“How does THIS happen if YOUR Jesus has the whole world in his hands?”
And then in the white space at the bottom of scrap, he wrote: “P.S. — I wonder, do you preach a message adequate to account for a world with such a story in it?”
Envelope and all, his note remains stuck inside a book on the crucifixion, in a chapter entitled “The Apocalyptic War.”
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Several years ago, my mentor Fleming Rutledge bemoaned the moralism she heard preached in pulpits across the mainline church. In the face of it, Fleming challenged me henceforth to avoid preaching from the Gospel stories themselves.
Instead she urged me:
“If you get at Jesus instead through the Old Testament or the Epistles, then your Christology will be sufficiently high that you will avoid turning Jesus into a mere teacher— or even worse, an example. Preach Christ from Paul or from the Old Testament and you will be far more likely to reckon with sin, salvation, and the living, acting, shaping, intervening God.”
Not long after our conversation, Fleming followed up with a text message.
She wrote:
“Dearest Jason,
I fear I was too hasty in my exhortation to you. I should have added that Satan belongs to that same discipline. Here is my test, crude perhaps but I think reliable. Sermons that regularly name the Devil will be sermons that necessarily attend to sin and evil, the principalities and powers, atonement and redemption. A church that no longer speaks of the Devil likely also fails to make God the subject of its verbs. This is not a coincidence. A church that loses its vocabulary for Evil Personified is a church that believes less and less in the delivering God. We cannot adequately preach the gospel if we have cut a character from its dramatis personae.
There is a Power at work in the world who is not God.
The LORD did not condescend to Mary’s womb in order to improve us.
In Jesus Christ, God invades territory held by an enemy in order to engage a cosmic conflict and rescue us. This is not at all an abstraction but a captivity felt by a great many sufferers and confirmed every day in the newspaper.
— Fleming
And then, next to the emoji of the shrugging woman— you know the one, I mean— Fleming added a post script.
“P.S.” she typed, “If you preach the Devil, you can be sure that your sermons will in no way be therapeutic or even useful; nevertheless, they will proclaim— they will not be able to avoid it— the Living God who makes a way out of no way and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
A kissing emoji followed.
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“The Ruler of this World is coming.”
In bequeathing us the peace that is himself, Jesus makes the intended contrast explicit, “Not as the world gives do I give.” In other words, what comes from God is contrary to that which comes from the world because the world, as the Book of James says, is an enemy of God. Or rather, the world is in the grip of God’s Enemy. This is why John the Evangelist writes elsewhere that “the reason the Son of God appeared in the world was to destroy the Devil’s work.”
The Son of God incarnates in the world to defeat the Devil’s work. This is not simply a plot summary of the scriptures; it is our mission statement. After all, Christ’s Farewell Discourse makes it clear: there is no presence of the Son of God in the world that does not include you! In Jesus Christ, God does not simply come in order to go to the cross. Christ comes and incorporates you into himself; such that, Jesus is not Jesus without his body.
Without you!
And you!
And me!
Notice, after he announces the approach of the Enemy (taking the form of Judas’ posse), Jesus summons them, “Rise, let us go from here.” Jesus does not say, “I must go from here.” Instead of me, he states it as a we. Thereby Jesus makes himself identifiable as us. “You are Jesus’ body,” the scriptures bear witness, “and individually you are members of Jesus’ body.” Just so, the reason the body of Christ is present in the world is to destroy the Devil’s work.
Jesus could turn stones into bread. Jesus could leap off the pinnacle of the temple, shake the dust off his feet, and walk away unscathed. Jesus could have taken possession of our politics with a single bow, with just a slight bend of the knees. For that matter, presumably, the LORD could— right now— fix all the gone wrongness of the world with just a snap of God’s fingers.
Instead, Jesus opts for a longer, slower work.
He chooses you. He gives you his peace, which is himself. And he gives you his Holy Spirit, who teaches you everything you need to know by reminding you of everything he says. Everything, as we confess at the baptismal font— everything you require in order to resist “the Devil and all his pomps.”
Resist not for your own sake.
But for the sake of the world.
Or as Robert Jenson writes:
“The Holy Spirit abides with the church precisely in that the church is not an event but an institution. Because there is a Subjectivity that despises the world and so possesses it, God has not arranged for the gospel to be sounded only sometimes.”
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If the world is indeed in the Enemy’s grip, we need the gospel to be sounded always.
Last spring, Bill Harrod, a member of the congregation, joined the final gathering of the Iowa Preachers Project in Charlottesville. A former FBI agent, Bill led the investigation of the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, which included a childcare center. Other gruesome acts, kidnappings and murders, haunt his memory. As one of the only lay people among two dozen preachers, someone asked Bill why he cared so much about hearing the gospel proclaimed. That is, they asked him why he needed to receive the two everythings the Holy Spirit gives.
Bill thought on it for a beat. He nodded his head. And then he answered, “I need to hear the gospel because I have encountered real evil in the world.”
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A year after he sent me the news clippings about the baby Sterling, Robert once again marked the church’s Christmas postcard, “Return to Sender.” In the white space on the back, his cursive handwriting demanded to know, “Why does he bother to come at Christmas if his world still is the way it is?”
I set the card on my desk. And I stood up and I walked to my shelves and I pulled the book where I had stuck his last letter. Having retrieved his mailing address, I wrote it on an envelope. And I folded the postcard into thirds. But first I typed a note and printed it out. It’s still saved on my desktop.
I wrote:
“Robert, you may not like me saying so, but your rage at the gone-wrongness of the world is righteous. I do not know why, but God does not give us an explanation for why the world still belongs to his Enemy. God does not give the world an explanation. God gives the world the church. And God gives the church his Holy Spirit so that, as Jesus’ body, we have everything we need to resist. Therefore, if you want something to be done about the Ruler of this World, then stop ignoring all these invitations and get your ass to church.
Blessings,
Reverend Jason Micheli”
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Robert introduced himself to me the following Sunday.
After worship.
His presence with us, the scriptures would have me believe, was a small victory in a cosmic battle.
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“I never thought I’d find myself here,” Robert said, shaking my hand.
“Take it up with Jesus,” I replied, “It’s not how I would choose to save the world either. But it is what the LORD is doing.”
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The world wants you to believe that prayer and sacrament and study of the scriptures do nothing at all against the evil of the world.
The world wants you to believe that.
Or rather, the Ruler of this World wants you to believe it.
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He spoke the world into existence. Presumably, just as instantaneously, he could speak its gone-wrongness out of existence. But instead of turning stones into bread, he turns bread into his body and wine into his blood. He makes human words into his Word. He makes good on his promise in the Upper Room and, in this room, he gives us himself. He appears here in the world because this is how he has elected to destroy the Devil’s work.
Certainly this is a longer work than the one we would ask of him. And a stranger, more frustrating one. Rather than fix the world from a distance, he gives himself into it. And he gives us to each other as his body, his conspiracy on behalf of the world’s future.
So come to the table.
Not because the Devil no longer prowls our world like a roaring lion, as Peter says, but because the LORD answers him. The LORD does so not with a snap of the fingers but with word and water and wine and bread.
And through them, you.
So come to the table.
And let us not live in the Enemy’s world as if we are outmatched.
We are not.
We have everything we need.
