From the Pulpit:

There is an old instruction to preachers that we must preach with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. Smothering you all in the fantastic stories of the Bible is little more than spiritual entertainment if what we learn from it doesn’t relate to the reality we deal with in our down the hill worldly lives, if it doesn’t somehow help us interpret the conflicting news with which we are bombarded by the media.

This is a week in which the news we bring with us to church is unusually weighty. There are absolutely no words to express the horrors of the tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tuscaloosa, and hundreds of little towns, for each of whom the loss of a single life to a storm is utterly devastating. There are the floods that continue as the Mississippi and its tributaries drown farmlands and have swallowed entire towns. This kind of physical damage is not repaired in a matter of weeks or months. Grief takes even longer.

We rightly ask where God’s hand is in all this.

But add to it that today is a day of celebration for us – the sending of our new deacon and her husband off to their first parish, the blessing of high school and college graduates, and the recognition of the mentors and prayer partners who have given many hours of their lives and great chunks of their hearts to the little children at Menchaca Elementary School – well, this has got to be a brief sermon that does a lot of heavy lifting.

Our Gospel reading is once more from Jesus’ soliloquy at the dinner table, poised between the washing of the disciples’ feet and the sharing with them his body and his blood, and his stepping out into the garden to be arrested and killed. It is a moment that hangs in the balance between life and death, and the disciples are wide open and utterly vulnerable as they hear his words: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever I will not leave you orphaned.”

Now it sounds as if he is really leaving. If he hadn’t kept talking, I’m sure there would have been a solid, stunned silence in the room.

What did he mean, an advocate? In no uncertain terms, Jesus was referring to the legal model, someone who pleads another’s case. But the thrust of the image is more, that we do not have to be adequate to the issue of the moment on our own. Nor will Jesus, even when he disappears bodily, leave us abandoned.

In two weeks we will celebrate the Feast of the Pentecost, which is the arrival of the Holy Spirit experienced by the apostles as wind and fire, and by the community as impassioned speech and the urgent desire to be baptized. Jesus will have left the face of the earth on the Day of Ascension, leaving the apostles staring into the vacant sky and waiting for something, not knowing what that something would be. I wonder if we don’t find ourselves feeling like that when the ground seems to disappear from under our feet.

We know we are inadequate to deal with grief, loss, disaster, betrayal, and we long for someone to come and deal with it on our behalf. It is not the role of the Holy Spirit to eradicate pain from our lives. It is the role of the Holy Spirit to sustain us until we regain strength, to give us courage from out of nowhere, to hold us together until we can hold ourselves up. To accompany us, step by baby step, through our agony until we can once more appreciate the beauty of a sunrise and we can be glad that we have awakened to a new day.

I don’t mean this to be a facile answer. Life is hard, and the Holy Spirit has that irritating habit of being more or less invisible. I think we usually recognize its presence in hindsight, when we look back and see that someone was there to hold us as we wept, that someone we barely knew bothered to send us a card or donate to the Red Cross, that someone saw that our children got to school or got new shoes or got a proper burial.

The Holy Spirit may have appeared at first as a wind that blew around people and tongues of fire that danced over their heads, but it didn’t stay there for long. Within minutes it was inside Peter, enabling the tongue-tied erratic disciple to become the most eloquent and convincing of preachers. And, in the mass baptisms that followed, the Holy Spirit entered into the community and empowered them, one at a time, to take on the injustices of the Roman Empire, to lift up one life after another until in time the Empire was defeated. Defeated by something that could not be seen or heard or felt.

There was something else in the news this week, and if you didn’t hear about it, well, I don’t know where you were. Oprah Winfrey retired after twenty-five years. I’m a huge Oprah fan, but I’ll admit that some of her shows were a bit prurient. Some of them were quirky or sentimental or self-indulgent, but I don’t know of another media superstar of our day who has, with what appears to me to be a pure heart, modeled for all of us, five days a week, the joy of sharing her resources for the sake of making others’ lives better. Yes, she may have given away a lot of cars and taken three hundred people to Australia. But, as we saw in the spectacular tribute to her last week, she had a special heart for education.

In what was for me the most moving moment of the show, Tyler Perry reminded the audience that almost 500 black men had received a college education because of Winfrey scholarships to Morehead College. A few of them appeared in a video montage saying that she had changed their lives, that they were military officers, doctors, supreme court justices, college professors, and all because of her. Kristen Chenoweth came forward and began to sing,

I've heard it said
That people come into our lives for a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led
To those who help us most to grow
If we let them
And we help them in return.

It’s the finale from the musical Wicked. And then, in the darkened studio, began the procession of 300 of the Morehouse graduates dressed in suits and carrying candles, the incarnation of Oprah’s ministry of blessing the world with education from the bounty of her own success. She was stunned and her tears flowed freely as Chenoweth continued to sing:

So much of me
Is made of what I learned from you.
You'll be with me
Like a handprint on my heart.

I think that will be my new image for the Holy Spirit, a handprint on my heart. It will be Jesus’ loving heart beating in my own chest, and I can feel it, and you can feel it, and I can see it in the ministries you all do. Not many of us are going to be able to send a stranger to college, but, mentors, what you do for your first and second graders is enough to change the course of their lives. When they have grandchildren, they will be telling them about the friend who came every week to their school to draw pictures and read books with them. Graduates, what you do with the knowledge and confidence you have acquired is not ultimately for you, because how you shape your lives will shape other lives. And Paula, you have been ordained to Holy Orders now, and your very special gifts will bless people far beyond the walls of the precious parish who eagerly await your arrival.

We do not very often get to see the fruits of our ministries, but it doesn’t matter because the Holy Spirit is in it all. The spirit that blows as freely and invisibly as the wind and rests gently on our hearts. I thank you all. And this is how the song ends:

I do believe I’ve been changed for the better,
and because I knew you, because we knew you,
we have been changed for good.

Amen.