May 20-22, Rev. Cara traveled to the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio to serve as chaplain for the Diocese of Ohio’s clergy retreat. This is the sermon she gave on Thursday.
The day I was ordained as a deacon, I was driving down Route 11 in Virginia toward Lexington and Grace Episcopal Church, formerly known as Robert E. Lee Memorial Church – a parish divided several years ago because of its decision to change back to its original name, instead of continuing to call itself by the name of the general who turned down an invitation from Abraham Lincoln and led the Confederate army instead. Virginia’s geography and history is a difficult and contradictory one, and it was powerful to be ordained in a church that has held and navigated that tension within its walls even into the 21st century.
On that particular drive down the valley, it was quiet, an early-ish morning. We often see deer along the roads, and this particular morning I saw a large shape emerge from the trees up ahead to the left, and it stepped into the road. I was far enough back that all I needed to do was slow down. It looked like a large dog, perhaps, but as I got closer I recognized it for what it was – a decent-sized black bear. I watched it lumber onto the blacktop, completely ignoring me, move across the two lanes of road and disappear into the trees on the other side, gone without a sound, without a backward glance, so brief and silent it was as if he had never been there. I had never crossed paths in that way with a bear before, and it was a bit of unexpected magic, a bit of quiet, powerful grace on that morning of a day that was full of magic and quiet, powerful grace.
A few months later, I told a priest friend of mine in Tennessee that I thought the bear was the Holy Spirit. He, ever the contrarian, said, “the Holy Spirit has always been more dove-like in my imagination.” And while I agree that the Holy Spirit is often thought of and portrayed as a dove, the Holy Spirit shows up in many forms, and sometimes – sometimes – is a bear.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is talking to his disciples the night before he knows he will die on the cross, after he has shocked them by kneeling and washing the dust of the road off their feet. They don’t know what is coming. And on an evening when he could have said more, could have asked them for comfort, he is giving them peace. Hours before he will be arrested, he is promising them that they will not be alone when the unthinkable happens – and in the Easter life to come. He will send an Advocate, he says, a companion, a guide along their continuing journey.
Because the Holy Spirit shows up not just in the mountaintop moments, in the days of our ordination, when our hearts are full of all of the joy and the celebration and the friendship and the laying on of hands and the vows – the Holy Spirit is there in all the uncomfortable places, the places where we are afraid, the places we are angry, the places where we are hurt, the places where we are tired, the places where we are walking with our communities when they are afraid and angry and hurt and tired.
How many of us have started a small group or staff meeting with a question along the lines of, “where have you seen the Holy Spirit at work this week?” – and found that sometimes, maybe often, that is a difficult question to answer. It is hard to hear the Holy Spirit in the middle of this work. It is hard to hear the Holy Spirit in budget meetings, or when the air conditioning goes out, when the fellowship hall floods, when your parishioners are lamenting, grieving, at odds with one another; when another parent or child is diagnosed with cancer, when the news is full of chaos and hurt and rumors of war. It is hard to see the Holy Spirit in parochial reports and background checks and another school shooting and the lingering trauma of pandemic.
But this morning’s gospel reminds us that the Holy Spirit shows up, especially, when life and ministry are at their most difficult, and sometimes, the Holy Spirit is a dove, and sometimes, the Holy Spirit is a bear. Sometimes the Holy Spirit is the peace we need in the whirl of the moment, and sometimes the Holy Spirit troubles the waters.
And we see echoes, or harbingers, of the Holy Spirit in all of this morning’s readings, not just in Jesus’ words to Judas (not Iscariot) and the rest of his friends gathered in that upper room. In Acts, the Holy Spirit shows up in Paul’s dreams, the Holy Spirit calls the apostles to Macedonia (not Ohio) – the Holy Spirit is in Philippi – it is in the home and heart of a certain woman – a woman – named Lydia – in Revelation, the Spirit carries John to a high mountain and shows him the City of God, full of light and life and God’s glory.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus says the Spirit will dwell with us, just as I have dwelled with you, living among you in all your pain and your joys and your complicated, challenging, ever surprising lives. The Spirit will dwell in the beautiful imperfectness of this world, because you are beloved. And the Psalm calls upon the Creator, the love that the Spirit teaches us, asking for God’s dwelling with us in this imperfect, beautiful world:
May God be merciful to us and bless us, *
show us the light of his countenance and come to us.
For me, there are three anchor points in this Gospel. We’ve touched on two of them.
“We will come to them and make our home with them.” Those words of promise. The Spirit will be among us, in all of the things.
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.” Those words of comfort. The Spirit, flying on the wings of a dove.
And there’s a third.“Keep my word.” Those words of reminder. The Spirit, on our journeys, a guide, a teacher. Maybe the bear (but a kind bear).
Paraclete, parakletos, the word which these texts name the Holy Spirit, broken down translates as something like “called alongside.” The Holy Spirit is there to remind us of why we do this work, and to help us, when we need it, step out of the weeds of the vestry meetings and the parochial reports, and to hold together, and to help us carry, the heartbreak of our present time and the simultaneous hope of it. Keep my word. That word that dwells among us still, that distills down to the greatest commandment – love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. Love God. Love your neighbor. That is the constant.
Theologian Karoline Lewis writes that “Having to keep Jesus’ words means giving witness in ways that might get us thrown out of the center, that might get us kicked out to the margins.”[1] We don’t know where the Spirit will meet us, and we don’t know where the Spirit will move us.
We all have our call stories, and they are so often those unexpected moments, moments when the Spirit says, ok, you thought your life was going to be one thing, but guess what…
Mine was in the midst of a crowded hospital hallway during lunch hour, the only spot where I could find cell service. It happened in the summer of 2014, when I was doing some work with Carilion, one of our big health systems in southwestern Virginia, and I was on the phone with a young women who was dying of cancer, making plans to meet with her so she could tell her story and leave it, in words and pictures and memories, for her eleven-year-old son. And she told me about the healing work of hospice, about the art therapists she had met with and about her chaplain. “She helped me dye my hair purple!” she told me, and then she said, “and I asked her, would she stay with me when I go? and she said yes.” In that moment, I knew what kind of work this was. Sometimes the world moves us, or we move ourselves, so far away from our beginnings – remembering our call – why were we moved to dive into this work and this life of intense, intentional faith in the first place? – brings us back, re-grounds us.
We walk with our people. We help them dye their hair purple. We are present with them when they enter this world, and when they leave it. We listen, and we love. In the crowded hospital hallway, on the road to be ordained in a hurting church, in the vestry meeting, in the protest march, in the Bible study, in the political turmoil, in the soup kitchen, in the Eucharist, in a bear crossing the road on the way to ordination, in a room on the shores of a lake on a cold and windy week, moving over the face of those deep waters. Let’s wade in those waters. Amen.
[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/dear-working-preacher/keep-my-words
