Sermon - More to Follow

Preached on May 26, 2013, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Dedicated to the high school graduates of the congregation, whom we celebrated on this Sunday, and always to the glory of God.

Scripture: John 16:12-15

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Sermon

Jesus knows that his life is almost at an end as he shares this last meal with his disciples just before his arrest. In this most caring, poignant moment, he says that he still has many things to say to them, but they cannot bear them now.  He promises that the Spirit of truth will come to them, and that the Spirit will guide them into all truth. It is an important promise, for the disciples, that there is more to follow. What they have heard and seen and experienced so far, as amazing as it has been, is not all that there is. And it has become an important promise to each generation since. As amazing as our history and our lives have been, there is more to follow as the Spirit of God guides us into all truth.

My nephew, Abe, who is five years old, wants to live with his parents and his younger sister for his entire life. A few months ago, it seems, one of his conversations of curiosity in which he asks his mom or dad a never-ending series of questions eventually led around to the fact that they don't live with their parents anymore, and that when Abe grows up he can have his own home, too. Abe thought about this, and then he said “I think I'll just live here with you and Mom and Phoebe, and I'll work with you at your job.” My brother, being a great dad, said that that would be just fine.

Right now, Abe needs the security of his parents and the home that they have together. That's the amount of truth that he can bear right now. But we all know there is more to follow. The kind of parenting and support that he needs now is not what he will need when he is eighteen, or twenty-five, or forty. Thank God that he has parents who will give him what he needs at the appropriate ages, because what he needs later is not what he can bear now.

I'm sure you have gathered that I think this is, in a way, how God cares for us. Just as my nephew will need a different understanding of his life and a different kind of support from his family when he is an adult, so does God's spirit guide us into new ways of knowing God and knowing ourselves as we move out of childhood and into adulthood, and as the church grows from generation to generation in maturity and understanding to meet new challenges and to grapple with our growing knowledge of the world we live in.

This is an important theology that Jesus explains: there is more truth for us to receive by God’s Spirit, and that this truth will come directly from Christ because the Spirit and Christ exist together in the trinity of God.

There is more truth for us to receive. It is an important promise because, otherwise, we would be stuck with only what is in the oldest part of our tradition. We would be stuck with an understanding of the world held by people who lived in the age of the Roman empire, and we would never have received the insight of Saint Francis of Assisi or Julian of Norwich, or the breakthrough of Martin Luther and John Calvin in the Protestant Reformation, or the sacred music of Bach or Handel. We would never have translated the scriptures into the many languages of the world, and we would never have gotten to sing “Amazing Grace,” “How Great Thou Art,” or “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” If the truth of God was restricted to what Jesus was able to say in person to the disciples and what they were able to remember and understand, then I don't think the church would still be here today.

But Jesus promised more to follow. When they were ready. When they could bear it.

I wonder: why couldn’t the disciples bear it yet?

Maybe they weren’t ready in their own lives.

Maybe their society wasn’t ready for it yet. Maybe there was only so much about reality that they were ready to learn, and too much would have been a shock to their system. We must continually ask what new truth God's Spirit is revealing to us? What can we bear now that we couldn't bear earlier, in our own lives and in the life of the church?

As we celebrate our high school graduates today, as we affirm our relationship with you as members of our church family, we trust that God's gifts to you and God's gifts through your lives are still many more to follow. We have watched many of you grow from a young age, and we seen how you have matured and grown over the years, and so much even since your confirmation in this place just three years ago.

May God's Spirit continue to guide you into all truth. May your lives be filled with the compassion shown to us in the life of Jesus Christ, that you may find the places where your great passion meets with the great need of the world, which is how Frederick Buechner describes the place that each of us is called to. God calls you to the place where your great passion meets the great need of this world. Where will that be? What will it look like? Stay tuned; there's more to follow.

(I have paraphrased Buechner from Wishful Thinking, page 119.)

And the same is true for our congregation. Our history as a church in Tallmadge is 203 years old, and those years have seen change and maturity and growth. Our roots, as Congregationalists, go back to the Pilgrims who came on the Mayflower so many years ago. It was their minister, John Robinson, who said to the members of his congregation before they left England that “there is yet more truth and light to break forth from God's holy word.” And there it is again, that theology that Jesus explained to the disciples. “There is yet more truth and light to break forth from God's holy word.” There is more to follow.

This church has sought to be faithful in discerning the guidance of God's Spirit through many milestones of our history: the building of the New England style sanctuary on the circle when the town itself was so very young; the founding of a common school for every child and the first school for the deaf in Ohio; the embrace of the abolitionist cause in the decades prior to the civil war; the affirmation of women into positions of church leadership; the movement of the church to this new building 45 years ago and the atrium expansion just a few years past. The church grows and changes to meet the day’s needs, and we believe that there is more to follow.

Over the past few months, members of this congregation have been discerning the future of this congregation in order to make financial plans for the budget year that begins in July. For the first time, this year, the church budget will run from July to June in order to follow the church program year instead of the calendar year, and we’re all getting used to this change.

In their discernment and planning, these members have understood that the goal of this church has never been to keep things just the same. Of course, there is much of our heritage that we treasure for its constancy, but we are not meant to remain fixed as time and the world moves on around us. And so the leadership of this church has brought forth a vision of this congregation's future which calls for an increase in financial support from all who are able to give it.  Next Sunday we will invite people to pledge their giving of money over the next twelve months to the ministry that God calls us to be about. Pledging to the church is decision to be made with care by each one of us, and no one can declare what it should be for any person or any family.

I bring this up simply to recognize that our gifts to the church are fundamentally different from the bills we pay, which we expect to increase year by year as costs are adjusted. Our gifts to the church are an act of worship and an act of trust within a congregation in which we believe that God's Spirit is continuing to guide us, and these increase as our vision for the church grows. We trust that there is more to follow.  What God can do with this church in the year ahead will grow from where we are now.

The minister Thomas Troeger wrote about the time of his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, when he and his wife took down their wedding album from the shelf. “Looking at the naïve young couple that marched down the aisle and afterwards cut cake in the church parlor, we wondered if we ever knew them,” he remembered.  “As we came to the final picture, I jokingly asked:

‘Should we tell them what we know now?’

‘No. They'll find out soon enough.’

Of course, if we had told them what we knew twenty-five years later, it would not have made any sense.”

(from the website Good Preacher: www.goodpreacher.com/shareit/readreviews.php?cat=50)

If we had told you graduates at age five about the kinds of opportunities and new challenges that you would be ready for at this time, it would not have made any sense.  If we could somehow go back to those founders of our church in the 1820’s as they built the old sanctuary, and told them about the need for our new church building, with air conditioning, and phone and internet connections to be in touch with people … actually, I think that the parking lot alone would have baffled them.

Let us give thanks for all of the ways that we are spared from learning too soon the things that we cannot bear today.  And let us also give thanks for the great promise of our faith, that in the adventure of our discipleship to the way of Jesus Christ, there is more to follow. With God’s Spirit as our guide, we will be ready.