Tag Archives: Paraclete

Love is his meaning: A Sermon for Easter 6A, 2026

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May 10, 2026

         Today is the twentieth anniversary of my ordination as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Remarkably, nearly 17 of those years have occurred here, as Rector of Grace Church. Looking back, I am enormously grateful for all those who have accompanied me on this journey, to Corrie especially, to all of those clergy and laypeople who encouraged me as I was discerning my call and preparing for my ordination, and all those who have supported and prayed for me, and those who have been ministers alongside me, clergy and laity alike.

         It was the culmination of a long process. I had sensed a call to ministry during my college years but it became apparent that ordained ministry in the religious tradition in which I was raised would not be possible. Soon after joining the Episcopal Church in my early 30s I began exploring ordination but the bishops of two different dioceses seemed unwilling to work with my unique situation. So by my 40s, although I had a strong sense of call, it seemed the church wasn’t hearing that call as I did. I joke that I finally found a bishop who didn’t think I needed to go back to seminary in order to become a priest, since I had a doctorate and had even taught for a year at an Episcopal seminary. Even so, the ordination process took five years to complete, which was frustrating and demoralizing. The process, which is meant to ensure that well-qualified candidates are ordained by the church is fallible and can be dehumanizing. 

         Still, it’s all been worthwhile as well as challenging, intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. I’ve found myself growing in ways and directions that have been surprising. Just this week, for example, I’ve worked with our new partners in ministry: Catalyst for Change, as they have moved into our basement space and begun to take over the work of Off the Square Club. I’ve met with the team from Historic Window and Door who are about to begin the repair work on the stained glass windows on the Carroll St. side of the nave; and I’ve met with someone from another denomination whose daughter is about to be confirmed in the Episcopal Church and he wanted to learn more about the Anglican tradition and how it differs from his own. 

         Among all that, and everything else, I found myself taking a bit of time to revisit my academic past. Friday was the commemoration of Julian of Norwich in our liturgical calendar and in preparation for the midweek Eucharist I refreshed my memory concerning her life, writings, and theology. I pulled out the volume of her writings that I’ve had since grad school. It’s a paperback, so it’s falling apart now. Its pages are full of notes and underlinings from successive readings for class as a student and as a professor; something of an archaeology of my own history with the text, as a scholar and as a Christian. We’ll come back to that later.

         Today, on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, we heard again from the 14th chapter of John, part of Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples, set at the Last Supper, as he prepares them for his imminent departure them and for his continuing presence among them in different modes. In Jesus’ words, and in the beautiful phrases of the collect for the day, our attention is directed to God’s love and all the ways in which our love of God is grounded in God’s love for us. 

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good
things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such
love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above
all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we
can desire; 

         The collect reminds us that the love we have for God is itself a gift from God, and made possible by God’s love for us. A similar note is struck in Jesus’ words here: 

 They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

The same theme is expressed in the words of the gospel hymn we just sang; written by Bianco da Siena in the 14th century: “Come down, O love divine, seek thou this soul of mine.” We love, because God first loved us.

         That love is also made manifest in the Holy Spirit. Here, Jesus uses the word Advocate in our translation. It’s an attempt to render in English the Greek word “Paraclete” which means someone who is called to be alongside another, often as a legal representative; so in that sense, “Advocate” is a perfectly acceptable rendering. But there are other nuances in the term. One of them is “Comforter” which was the word used in the King James version here, and connects the gospel to our gospel hymn again: “O comforter, draw near…” we sang. Jesus assures the disciples that the Paraclete, the Advocate “abides in them” striking that other dominant theme of John’s gospel, of abiding, but now, it is the Advocate abiding with the disciples in the absence of the bodily Jesus. 

         As I reflect on my twenty years of priestly ministry, I am deeply moved by all those among whom and to whom I have ministered—the babies and adults I’ve baptized; the couples I’ve married, the faithful Christians I have buried. I reflect on the outstretched hands of all those to whom I have said “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven” as I have distributed Christ’s body; the people I’ve prayed with and for.

         I think also of all those who have accompanied me along this journey; members of altar guilds, vestries, acolytes, musicians, staff members. I consider all the ways God’s love has been present along the way, even when it seemed profoundly absent.

         Our journeys are curious, surprising things. The encounters we have; the circumstances in which we suddenly find ourselves from time to time; the changes and challenges of a culture that is experiencing rapid and disorienting transformation. Sometimes I wonder whether I bear any resemblance to the person I was forty or fifty years ago; sometimes I wonder whether I’ve changed at all.

         At the outset, I mentioned spending some time with Julian of Norwich this week. Julian was a 14th century anchoress and mystic      who experienced a series of visions when she was around thirty years old and spent the rest of her life reflecting on and trying to make sense of those visions. These reflections culminated in what is one of the greatest and most profound works of Christian mysticism of all time. And as she pondered and reflected on what it all meant, Jesus spoke to her words that encapsulate the good news, for the 14th century and today:

         What, do you wish to know the Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end.

I will not leave you orphaned: A homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, 2020

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May God take our minds and think through them. 
May God take our lips and speak through them. 
May God take our hands and work through them. 
May God take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.

 

“We are in unprecedented times.” How often have you heard or read that or a similar phrase over the last two months? We are living through something none of us could have imagined a year ago, an economic collapse deeper than the Great Depression, a disease that is devastating in its effects, with no cure or vaccination. For us as Christians, we are not able to worship together, to celebrate or receive the Eucharist.

But I’m a historian, a historian of Christianity, and when someone says something like “we are living in unprecedented times” I want to examine that. Indeed, many have reached back to the past in search of parallels to the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, or to the Black Plague of the 14th century. Certainly as we think about the future of Christianity, the future of the church, the future of the Diocese of Milwaukee, we might think about how Christians have responded to techtonic cultural shifts like the fall of the Roman empire in the West, or the Protestant Reformation. We sense that the things have shifted dramatically, perhaps even permanently, and the roadmap into the future isn’t clear at all.

As I’ve thought about our situation in these months of COVID-19, I find myself returning to the story of Japan’s hidden Christians. You may be familiar with part of it. During the sixteenth century, as Spanish and Portuguese explorers sailed across the globe, Christian missionaries sailed with them and followed in their paths. Jesuit missionaries like St. Francis Xavier who first went to the Portuguese colony of Goa in India, then to the Philippines and Japan. He died there while preparing for a trip to China. In Japan, Jesuit and Franciscan priests converted thousands before Christianity was outlawed around the end of the sixteenth century. The story of the martyrdom of some of those priests is powerfully told in Japanese author Shusaku Endo’s Silence, which Martin Scorsesemade into a film a few years ago. If you know the story, that’s probably where it ends.

But the story didn’t end there for Japanese Christians. The faithful went underground. They maintained their faith in secret for the next 250 years. Over the centuries of isolation, they developed and adapted Christian rituals to their situation. With no priests, no Eucharist, they continued to practice their faith as best they could. After Japan was opened by Western traders in the 19th century, and Christian missionaries returned, Catholic priests were shocked when native Christians came out of hiding; there were perhaps as many as 30,000. Their faith, their persistence against great odds and at great risk to their lives, remains a powerful witness to us.

As I think about our situation, all of the fear and uncertainty, the challenges that face us, and as I think about all of the challenges faced by Christians seeking to be faithful to God over the last two thousand years, the words of today’s gospel reading provide comfort, encouragement, and admonition. We are again, still, reading from the lengthy farewell discourse in John’s gospel, still at the Last Supper with the disciples and Jesus. Jesus is preparing his beloved friends for his departure—for his crucifixion and resurrection.

“I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever.” Jesus and the gospel writer are talking about the Holy Spirit here. They use a word here that is unique to this gospel and significantly deepens our understanding of the Holy Spirit—the word in its Anglicized form is “Paraclete,” literally the one who comes alongside us—and advocate in the sense of the one who pleads our case, takes our side, is perhaps the best translation possible. There are other English words that have been used: Comforter, Encourager.

When we think of “advocate” we are apt to think of a court of law, the advocate who pleads our case before a judge. And so when we hear the word used hear, we might think that the Spirit is the Advocate on our behalf before God. There’s no doubt some truth in this—the Holy Spirit as the one who pleads on our behalf to God when we have fallen short, when we have failed to love Christ and keep his commandments as the first verse in our reading tells us.

But there are other ways to think of the Spirit as Advocate. Sometimes, the Spirit comes alongside us and pleads God’s case to us, reminding us who we are as disciples of Jesus, beloved by God and by Jesus, as followers of Jesus called to love him, each other, and the world. It’s easy when there are so many other messages being sent in our world, when the language of fear and despair and hate dominates our world and burrows into our minds, to lose hope and to lose sight of the one who has called us into new life and relationship, the one who has called us to love. Especially now, the Spirit, the Advocate may strengthen us and guide us on the perilous journey that lies ahead.

We can be sure that comes what may, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, will be with us, guiding us, leading us, comforting us. We needn’t lose heart, or lose our way. We may wish we could go back, we may long for the past, but the Advocate is leading us forward into the future.

There’s another chapter to the story of Japan’s Hidden Christians. When the Christian missionaries came in the 1850s most of the underground Christians came out and embraced the opportunity to worship freely, to receive the sacraments, to learn about the faith they and their ancestors had sought to follow without leadership for 250 years. But some of those indigenous Christians, as they encountered this new and strange Catholic Christianity, became afraid and went back to their villages and homes, turned their backs on the foreigners’ faith and church and instead continued to follow the traditions and rituals that had developed. Fear conquered them; they preferred a familiar past to a new and different future. I encountered this story via a documentary by Chrystal Whelan: Otaiua: Japan’s Hidden Christians.

We are living in the midst of a crisis and we know that there is no map for the journey that lies ahead. Nonetheless we are not alone. The Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Guide is walking with us, leading us into the future, assuring us of God’s presence and the love of Christ. Thanks be to God.

 

Pentecost and the power of love: A Sermon for Pentecost, 2018

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“Come, Holy Spirit, descend upon this place and upon us, and fill us with the fire of your love.” Amen.

Today we celebrate Pentecost—the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples, and the spread of the Spirit’s power and love throughout the world. We are also marking the end of our program year, and our young people are participating in the service, reading lessons and prayers, among other things. And then there are two baptisms as well. Such a celebratory feeling seems like a respite from our world. To rejoice, to come together as the body of Christ across all of the generations takes away from the distress and despair in the world around us. Continue reading →