Transcript
READ: --the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Jesus said, "I have told you all this while I am still here with you. But your advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in My name will teach you everything and will call to mind
all that I have told you," how much of your religion is memory? When we come to church, you know, we are surrounded by memories, past personalities, past events. We hear from the Bible stories that reach back to the beginnings of the Christian Church, like the one we heard this morning and stories
back beyond that to the very earliest memories of the Hebrew people. The music and the words of our hymns are loaded with memories, which is one reason why there is always resistance in a congregation to the introduction of new hymns. I remember -- and the older you get the more often you begin a sentence with that phrase -- I remember once
asking a group of very rugged Scottish soldiers in a prison camp, who didn't particularly want to come to a church service, but expressed the desire to sing some hymns, what hymns they wanted to sing and I expected to hear Fight the Good Fight, Onward Christian Soldiers, but to my surprise, the very toughest looking man there looked up and said, "Safe
in the Arms of Jesus," and immediately I realized that memory was at work. The memory perhaps of a mother at his bedside as a child. The memories are strong. Familiar prayers in church are loaded with memories and so are the familiar objects that we're accustomed to see in church. Our ears and our eyes are avenues for the evocation
of powerful memories, and there are other traditions in the church that [have also used the nose?], because I imagine that for a Roman Catholic, the smell of incense must immediately around memories of worship. Some Presbyterians claim, too, that they are reminded of their childhood's church, by the smell of polished pews and dusty hymnbooks. Great festivals
of the church like Easter and Christmas derive much of their power from the memories we bring, memories of other places and other times. And how much of our own religion gathers around some luminous moments in the past, when God was very real to us or when we made a great leap of Christian faith. Such memories matter.
I think we're realizing right now that a nation without the ballast of sacred memories can easily drift into moral anarchy. And the current epidemic of nostalgia may be perhaps partly escapism, but at the deeper level, doesn't it indicate the reaching back of a people today? Solid memories of things that cannot be shaken, for heritage,
faith, hope and the faster we move into the future, the greater is our need for the invigorating memories of what was known this in our past. And nowhere are memories more vital than in the Christian Church, because we are a community that lives by the recollection of the great acts of God, above all, the coming into our world of Jesus Christ, His life, His death,
His resurrection. Without these mighty memories, churches would soon wither into social clubs, pathetically trying to latch onto every passing bandwagon and echoing every contemporary tune. A church without real memories is doomed to die. That is why right here before our eyes is a holy table on which is written,
if you could see behind the cloth, this do in remembrance of Me. Memories matter. Great part of our religion is memory. But God forbid that it should be nothing else. I have a hunch, you know, that if one of the apostles was to arrive in our church one of these days and then was to write us an epistle, as was their
habit, I don't think he would chiefly fault us here for lack of memories. He would note that we have preserved and read the Holy Scriptures, that we've kept the memories enshrined in creeds and hymns. That we celebrate the sacraments by which these memories are publicly rehearsed. Then I think He would say to us something like this. But what about your faith now?
What about your present contact with God? What about your living trust in Jesus Christ? Your spontaneous joy in the things you say you believe, I don't see you, He might say, as all of people with a vivid sense of God's presence, an up-to-date experience of His grace, a daily delight in prayer and the Word of God. He would remind us
in no uncertain terms that the mighty memories that we all share are museum pieces, unless they come alive for us today and fill our lives with the energy and the dynamic of a living thing. He might indeed ask us the question that Paul once taught to the Christians of Ephesus. Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believe?
The point of that question, see, is that the Holy Spirit is the one who brings faith to life, who makes memories lift. That is what we learn about the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. And yet, strangely enough, until the recent charismatic revival, the Spirit was not very often mentioned in our church.
And the reply that the Ephesians gave to Paul might even be said by church members today. We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. Words like these are an epitaph, inscribed over think Christian community of any age, for which faith has become no more than a memory. We haven't even heard there's such a thing as Holy Spirit. Of course,
everybody has heard the words Holy Spirit and hymn, creed, occasional references. But that He is, that He is the power of God in action in our lives, know that He is the great awakener of faith and love, the Lord who arouses our memories and refreshes our prayers and our worship. Have we really heard that? In the fourth gospel from which we read this morning, Jesus speaks
explicitly of the Spirit as the one who will come after He has returned to the Father. I have told you all this while I am still here with you. But your advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you everything and will call to mind all that I have told you. Spirit is to make everything that Jesus said and did
alive again and keep, as it were, opening up for us things that we had not yet understood. Again, He said, "I will ask the Father and He will give you another to be your advocate, who will be with you forever," the spirit of truth and the story of Pentecost is just a fulfillment of that promise. Spirit came. What happened?
The disciples, who up to that point, since Easter, had been living precariously on the memories of Jesus, for whom even His resurrection was beginning to be a distant event, something to be looked back on with wonder and reverence, these apostles suddenly found themselves transformed, the Spirit came and they knew at once that God was no longer for them a remote Creator and Ruler,
but a living present power that Jesus was no longer just a memory, but actually alive within them and among them and that His resurrection was not just a fact to be celebrated, but an assurance of his daily companionship. The reality of the Spirit as the great refresher of our faith, the touch
of God by which memories spring to life, dead doctrines begin to sparkle with new meaning, listless worship is rejuvenated and our religion switches from being a burden to a delight -- this reality has been somehow obscured by our neglect of what the Bible tell us and our language and obfuscating habits of speech. Perhaps you know the words themselves have something
to do with this, Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, Spirit of God, Comforter. Somehow all these words seem to have gotten lodged in the vaguest and woolliest section of our private theology. And for years as an adolescent I used to associate the Spirit
chiefly with that rather mournful hymn that say, "Our blessed Redeemer, air He breathe, extend our last farewell, our Guide and Comforter bequeath with us to dwell, He came, sweet influence still in part," now the hymn has some good lines. But I think the editors of our present book were wise to draft it. It was years
before I understood that "sweet influence" is about the last expression to use to describe the riotous events of Pentecost or the dynamic [mission?] of Paul of Tarsus. Imagine Paul arriving in one of these towns and said, "I've come sweet influence to impart," the more I study the abundant references to the Spirit in the New Testament, the more I realize that far from being the vaguest and dreamiest
item in the Christian creed, it's the most vivid and dramatic, and the Nicene Creed hit the right note with the resounding words, I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life. Jesus had another name for the Holy Spirit. He called Him the Greek Paraclete. I don't think to use that Greek word would help to revive it's true meaning. The King James
translators use "Comforter," but that's had an unfortunate history. In the 16th century the word was sturdy one, with an emphasis on the thought, strength, a comforter was then a strengthener. Now it has a kind of cuddly sound associated with weakness and babyhood. The New English Bible, as you've heard, as "advocate," is accurate enough, but irresistibly reminds us of other things.
I take the risk of further wrong associations by suggesting this morning the word "refresher." Your Refresher, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, will teach you everything. The Father will give you another to be your Refresher, who will be with you forever. The Spirit of truth. Have you ever had the experience of finding an old book, an old piece of music, an old
painting -- suddenly being refreshed for you so that it came to mean more than it ever had before. Or have you ever known a time when an old friendship or an old love came alive again with a new richness and depth? Have you ever known a day when your familiar surroundings were suddenly invaded by a refreshing spirit? And you felt like that
converted poacher of John Masefield's Everlasting Mercy, which I printed recently in our bulletin, "O glory of the lighted mind. / How dead I've been, how down, how blind. / The station brook, to my new eyes / Was babbling out of Paradise, / The waters rushing from the rain / Were singing Christ has risen again." If you've had experiences like that, you will know how the Spirit can work within us, so that our
faith is refreshed, dead bones, our theology come together and come to life as a working creed and we know that our religion is something more than a memory. During most of this month I shall be in Princeton with the family, but I will be there conducting a class for ministers.
But I hope that the teacher will be among the talk, because the title I've given the course is Refreshing the Sermon. Preaching, like any other art, has got technical aspects. But I hope we won't there spend all our time on the techniques of the sermon. For the real refresher of the sermon, the real refresher of the sacrament, of the prayer, and of our hymnody, is the Holy Spirit.
He is the one who said, "Jesus will teach you everything," what a liberating word that is for anyone who thinks there's nothing more to be discovered about the gospel of Christ. "And He is the one," says Jesus, "who will call to mind all that I've told you," that calling to mind is something much more than just remembering. It means the kind of remembering implied by the words inscribed on this table.
Our refreshing of the events we celebrate, so that they become a living part of our experience now. And there's nothing I wish more for all of us in this church than a refreshing of the spirit. What we need for our worship, what we need for our program, it's what we need for our individual lives as Christians. Pentecost,
you know, makes a very fitting ending for the Christian year, which begins in advent. Because what Pentecost says to us is that Christmas, Lent, Good Friday, Easter are more than a memory. By the power of the Spirit whom we celebrate this day, they become part of our experience now. And so there is in the
end no more powerful prayer than that in which we open our minds and our hearts and our expectations to God and to one another and say in simple faith, come, Holy Spirit. Let us pray. With Christians throughout the world, we would
say this day, come, Holy Spirit, that our faith may be divine and Thy will be more truly done in us, in Thy church and in the world, for Christ's sake. Amen.