- Sermon - Mickey Anders

Text: John 14:23-29

I have in my hands two books - a dictionary and a novel. Which one do you prefer?

In a dictionary, you can find words like constellation, dreadnought, iridaceous, phantasmagorial, or wappentake. A dictionary has good words; in fact, it has all the good words. Somebody once defined a dictionary as a book with an excellent vocabulary, but whose plot leaves something to be desired.

A novel is different, although it is a book of words too. In a novel, the words are carefully selected and arranged to weave a tale. This particular novel is entitled ¬A Light in the Window by Jan Karon. The back cover describes the plot this way:

"Welcome back to Mitford, the little town with the big heart. His attractive neighbor is tugging at his heartstrings. A wealthy widow is pursuing him with hot casseroles. And his red-haired Cousin Meg has moved into the rectory, uninvited. As you can see, Mitford's rector and lifelong bachelor, Father Tim, is in need of divine intervention."

We were shopping in a bookstore last week with my nephew and his wife. I commented to his wife that I didn't particularly like reading fiction because I knew the stories were not true. But she observed, "Oh but it fuels your imagination." Of course, she was right. Sometimes a fictional story can have more truth in it than a factual one.

In the hands of a skilled author, a novel can keep you up into the early hours of the morning. Like a dictionary, a novel is a book of words. But its words have a purpose and a goal.

What makes the difference? How is it that one book has words crafted into a grand scheme and the other is merely a collection of good words? The difference lies in the author. The words of a dictionary need an author to fashion them into a novel, to give them a purpose, a plot and creativity. In the same way, the experiences of life need an author if they are going to be more than a jumble of loosely connected events.

Do you ever get the strange feeling that your life is actually living out a novel? Perhaps our life is an adventure tale, a romantic story or a comedy, or perhaps it is a horror story. I get that feeling all the time. Every day I wish for the time to just write down all of my daily experiences as a pastor. It would be a much better story than those homey Mitford books. The characters in Mitford aren't nearly as interesting as the people in my church.

Here's a third book - the Bible. Some people say this is just a loose jumble of events and stories. But this is a book with an author. People of faith say that God is the ultimate author of this book. God shapes these stories and events into a saga of redemption and life. In them God is intimate, real and involved.

Some people use the Bible like a dictionary. If they want to know the meaning of love, they turn to 1 Corinthians 13. If they want to know the definition of faith, they turn to Hebrews 11:1 which says, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." I mentioned in last week's sermon that some people cherry pick verses from the Bible to support their preconceived notions. I think they make the mistake of using the Bible like a dictionary.

But some of us view the Bible as a novel. It is a story with an author, not just an accumulation of topical verses. And like any good novel, the meaning comes from appreciating the whole thing. The story evokes a response in us.

In the first church I served as pastor, one of the highly educated women in the church loved to tell me that one has to be able to appreciate poetry to appreciate the Bible. I suspect that she is right because the Bible is not a dictionary. There is a grand purpose behind the carefully selected words. The words are crafted intentionally to produce the result of faith in us.

Someone has said that history is really God's Story. Today I ask you, "What moves God's story from history to my story?" Our text for today answers that question.

This is one of the critical passages that describe the part of God called the Holy Spirit. Classic Christian theology says that God is a trinity - three in one. Three persons; one substance. The creator God is called the Father, the redeemer God is called Jesus, and the sustaining God is called the Holy Spirit.

The first Sunday of next month will be Trinity Sunday, and I will address the sermon to a discussion about the Trinity. As I said last week, I don't understand it completely, but I still affirm the doctrine of the Trinity.

But today we focus on the Holy Spirit. The power that makes those stories in the Bible become our story is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit takes the stories of the Bible and burns them on our hearts, so that they're no longer quaint tales from long ago but stories that live in us and guide us.

God is through writing the Bible. The canon is closed; there will be no more books added to the Bible. But if we let the Holy Spirit into our lives, God rewrites that story of redemption and life into the events of our daily lives.

These verses fall in the unit of John's gospel generally marked from chapters 14 through 17. This section is often called the farewell discourse of Jesus because it directly precedes John's account of the passion and crucifixion. We see Jesus comforting the disciples and assuring them that the presence of God that they had known in him would not depart with his coming death and resurrection.

The passage we read earlier actually begins in the middle of a dialogue between Jesus and a disciple named Judas, but not Judas Iscariot. In verse 22, Judas asks, "Lord, how is that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?" This question picks up on one of the most common themes in John - the question of seeing God in Jesus. Some people did; some people didn't.

In the gospel, John tells about several people like Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman who believe they know who God is and how God is revealed. But when they encounter Jesus, they do not immediately recognize him as God.

Each of these events reminds us of John's prologue where he says, "The true light that enlightens every person was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his people received him not."

But one by one, people did come to see God in Jesus. Some see more quickly than others. And now Jesus is telling the disciples that people for all time will be able to see, really see, because of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus said, the Holy Spirit will "teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you."

You see, it is the Holy Spirit that brings Jesus into our hearts and minds today. Because of the Spirit, Jesus becomes a part of us, inside us.

Many of us are surprised that Jesus told the disciples they would be better off because he was going away. That doesn't make sense to us, and probably didn't to them. But, in fact, the disciples were better off once Jesus left them.

While Jesus was with them, the disciples never really caught on to who he was and what he meant for their lives. It was not until after he left them that they really began to understand. As our text says in verse 26, "But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you."

The Holy Spirit is the power of God working in us to guide us in the way of Jesus It's what makes Jesus' love and wisdom our own. It's what makes faith more than a mastery of facts.

The role of the Spirit reminds us that the great Author of life did not finish the divine work when the last page of the Bible was written. God still writes and weaves the stories of redemption and life, but now the Spirit writes in our lives.

One reason we need the Holy Spirit is that Jesus didn't specifically address every situation we encounter in our lives. It's the Holy Spirit at work in us today that makes Christianity something that's current and alive.

The word of God is not static, but dynamic. It is not locked away in dusty volumes that deal only with archaic values and peculiar customs. The Holy Spirit makes God's word sharper than a two-edged sword and alive in our lives today.

It's what gives the Church authority to address situations that the Gospel writers never dreamed of. It's what makes faith a way of life, always ready to meet new situations, to bring the Scriptures to bear on what happens from day to day.

Which one is your life like? Life can be like a dictionary. Each event, each phase of life, standing on its own. That may have its interest, but most of us want life to be more than just a random collection of experiences.

Life can be like a novel. That's when our lives seem to have a plot, to be moving toward a goal that's larger than ourselves. That's when we understand how our stories fit into the grand scheme of life as we know it. Most of us want our lives to be more like a novel than like a dictionary.

One of the reasons we come to church is we want the Author of the Bible to make sense of the jumble of our lives. We want that Author to write again and fill our lives with God's presence like the stories of Moses, Sarah, Job and Esther. We want those old stories to come alive again in the stories of our lives. We want to see in our stories the same God who is intimate, real and involved.

And the Holy Spirit makes of our lives a novel, not a dictionary. The Spirit shows us how we have a part in the story of the whole creation. It keeps us from thinking that our own individual stories are disconnected from the story of God. The Spirit keeps reminding us that we're part of the whole story of God's creative work in the world. The Holy Spirit is the author who is writing the novel of our lives.

So which one do you want your life to be like - a dictionary or a novel? If you will let God be the One who writes and directs your life, you will find it to be a story with meaning and purpose. Your life can become a page-burner kind of novel in the hands of God. Your story will be a part of God's story.

(I am indebted to Stephens G. Lytch, The Ministers Manual for 1999, p. 265-266 for the idea behind this sermon.)