When? Now.

No longer orphans . . . But How?

John 14:15-21

Pastoral Prayer: Gracious Father, we live with endless speculation about what Heaven will be like. This day give us Your word that Heaven, a way of describing where You are, is Yourself who came down when Your love filled our soul.

We had not been at Snow Hill but a few weeks when Al stopped by. He and his wife Wanda had told me they voted “No” when the church cast the vote to call us as Pastor and Family. “No one deserves a 100% vote,” they said. Al and Wanda were the two who made sure that their own maxim held. We laughed, not sure what else to do.

Al stopped, and we chatted about lots of things. It was a “get to know you” conversation. Al made sure I knew that he really liked Charles Stanley. Stanley was his favorite preacher. All those years ago, Charles Stanley was pastor at the First Baptist Church, Atlanta. He had developed his own ministry resources under the banner In Touch Ministries. You could find his content on television, radio, and publishing that carried his name well beyond Atlanta. I told Al that Frank, a good friend, and I often listened to Stanley’s sermons on cassette tapes and talked about them while we were in college. Some of you will need to Google cassette tapes.

Seven years later, or some twenty-five years ago, I sent out a weekly email. Back then I was able to personalize those emails. Rather than beginning with "Dear Church Family," as those emails do these days, you would have opened an email that read more personally, like "Dear Glenn and Jeanene." I had not sent out an email for a few months as I was recovering from surgery. In that email, I attempted to express how valuable it is when, after you have missed time at church, someone simply says, “We have missed you.” Not, “Where’ve you been?” “What happened to you?” Or, “Well, stranger, good to see you again.”

That introductory bit, about how valuable it is when someone says they missed you, was received by Al and Wanda as though I were being critical of them, as if I were calling them out for not telling me they missed me. Al stopped by again. This time he reported that I had been offensive. I tried to explain. I sent the same email to everyone. Eventually I sat down with them and one of our deacons and presented them with a copy of the exact email with a header that read Dear Aaron. I sought to explain what I meant by the words I used. There was no intent to call anyone out. I was unsuccessful.

And sad.

Jesus’s words troubled the disciples. While he was not attempting to thank those who had reached out to say he had been missed, Jesus’s words informed the disciples they would miss him. That is, he would only be with them a little while longer. He added that you will see me and then you will not see me. More words from Jesus only left the disciples puzzled, confused. Our passage this morning lengthens Jesus’s response to Philip, who kept the back and forth going between the disciples and Jesus with,

Show us the Father, and it is enough.

When we reach our Scriptures for today, Jesus has told the disciples to believe in Him, and if that proved too difficult, then they should believe the works they have witnessed him do. And the works Jesus did and does are the Good News for the salvation of sinners, the restoration of the world, and the rescue of all things from the Powers of Sin and Death. That is, remember, Jesus’s claim that he will do anything they ask is not everything they ask. And the anything they ask in line with the aim of the Gospel is the anything he will do.

And now he turns to them, having believed into him or in the works he has done, he tells them.

If you love me, you will keep my commands.

“If.”

Iffy that they love Jesus?

John opens what we call chapter 13 by remarking that Jesus loved the disciples to the end. From there John references the supper they share together, but rather than give the details of the supper like Luke, for example, John describes Jesus taking up a towel and wash basin with which he washes the disciples' feet - an act of self-giving love.

When Jesus comes to Peter, you may recall, he protests. Rather than grasp this as an act of self-giving love to another, Peter took it for an act beneath his Teacher. When Jesus turned the tables and told Peter that his refusal of self-giving love meant there would be no place for him, Peter overcompensated and requested more than just foot-washing. After the expression of self-giving love to his disciples, Jesus told them to express their self-giving love to one another.

Frederick Dale Bruner, commenting on John 14, calls back to John 13 and understands the first command Jesus gives as Jesus’s first special command to the disciples. Receive love. Receiving love enables them to know how to love.

If it helps, Peter would be a solid illustration of the way some of us were given the faith. There was not much talk about loving Jesus. It was more about being obedient. Our progress in the faith was not described as rooted in love but in keeping the right rules, even rigidly. Our pieties, those as elementary as reading Scripture, prayer, and worship, were not described as motivated by loving God but by owing God our best performance of the faith.

Bruner’s point is one that lands hard for those of us who are recovering legalists, fundamentalists. The preparation to obedience, to faithfulness, is love. Not just any love, but receiving the self-giving love of God in Jesus Christ.

Translating verse 15 with If, warms a legalist’s heart. How might we compel others to faithfulness? We tell them if they don’t obey, then they don’t love. Some of us learned later in life that God’s determination to be God not without us was rooted in his self-giving, other-directed love found in one of our earliest and easiest to memorize verses,

God first loved us.

God loves us first.

When I investigated the email mishap with Al and Wanda, I learned the confusion was complicated by a technical matter. Like my Nan, Al and Wanda had a MailStation. For people without a computer, this allowed them to send and receive emails. My grandmother used one mostly to keep up with my Uncle in St. Louis. She too received my weekly emails. Sometimes when reading an email via a MailStation, the header information, giving needed context, could be missed or missing. Technology happens. And sometimes better translation decisions could be made.

Here in verse 15, the clause contains signals that make the better translation,

When you love me, you will keep my commandments.

Not if but when. What Bruner calls a grace translation. Love drives obedience. Love commits to faithfulness. Obedience, faithfulness, indicates that love shows up, no matter what.

Jesus is giving these final words on his way to the Cross. He will face the cup in Gethsemane, and in love He shows up obedient, faithful, when surrounded by enemies. He finishes his work, commits Himself to the Father, and is raised from the dead. Jesus is for us the Faithful One, the Obedient One, the One who is Faithful to us and for us. Obedient for us and in us. He is so because the Triune God, Father-Son-Spirit, determined not to be God without us. Despite and in spite of our resistance, our sin, Jesus drank the cup and gave Himself for us all. And because the Promise is central, that is Jesus is Promise and the Promised One, Jesus pledges,

I will come and take you to myself.

Jesus’s Promises are not condition-al. Jesus’s Promise conditions the disciples’ future, and ours. Jesus, the Promised One, is not condition-al but He conditions our future. That is, Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection set the conditions of our future. There is no “if” with Jesus. Jesus ties believe with love. And in his Farewell Discourse, he connects love with obedience.

Not if but when.

When you love me, you will keep my commandments.

When calls attention to our need. That is, there are times our whens are far apart. Thus, what is conditional is not Jesus’s love but ours. There are the times we demonstrate, or illustrate, not only our love but the love that conditions our present by bringing the Promised future into our current reality. Given the Promise of our future with Jesus, we give ourselves to love one another, to love others. When Jesus tells the disciples, and so us, with

I will take you to myself,

He adds to it here,

I will not leave you as orphans.

Jesus not only conditions our future, but brings into the present the future that he describes,

When you love me, you will keep my commandments.

And our whens are brought closer all the time because,

I will ask the Father and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever.

Another. Not just any other. But another just like Jesus. The word another is distinguishing the nature of the other. Koine Greek, New Testament Greek, has two words for another. One emphasizes difference - this one is another unlike that one. One points to likeness - this one is another same as that one. Jesus uses sameness here. The Father will send you another just like me. How would the disciples experience the presence of Jesus, how do we? The Father gives us another just like Jesus.

Various translations emphasize the possibilities. The word is Paraclete - one who comes alongside to help. Bruner takes up the possibilities for the word and makes the case of the Spirit of truth to be a True-Friend.

Called alongside to help. Especially in critical situations, such as appearances in court where one especially needs someone to stand alongside oneself and to give true, helpful, and encouraging testimony and support.

A True-Friend who encourages us in our whens and admonishes us when the distance between our whens is great. Put in a more common way, a true-friend who encourages our faithfulness and calls us out when we are not. Bruner likens the Spirit to our Defender and our Prosecutor. We like the first. Not so much the latter. But with the Spirit, our True-Friend, we have both. And we need both.

But this True-Friend is not on the sidelines, not ever. Jesus tells the disciples that this True-Friend will remain with you and in you. The True-Friend is the never-gone-Presence of the Son with us.

This sounds like Jesus’s words at the end of Matthew’s Gospel,

I will never leave you or forsake you.

Here John gives us Jesus’s words as He tells the disciples, and so us, that this reality, the one that includes Jesus coming to take us to himself, is given to them and to us is the True-Friend given by the Father at the Son’s request. And here, lest there be any doubt about the Spirit, Jesus tells the disciples that the Spirit that will be in you is the Presence of the Son, who is in the Father, who is in them, in whom the Son is.

There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.

The Spirit does not just remain with us, but in us. And as such gives us the Presence of the Father and the Son so that the God Jesus called Father, the Jesus the Father called Son, Who lived by the Presence of the Spirit THIS God will be and now is with you and in you.

That is love.

The God we know by name - Father, Son, Spirit - gives Godself to us and by grace is now in us, brings love closer than it has ever been. And as such that love births within us as we receive the Love That Is God and we give ourselves in self-giving love for others.

Bruner makes this point vivid for the Church,

The Church cannot offer a visible Spirit, only a mutually loving community and a historically testable Gospel, that, together, evidence the Spirit.

We cannot say, look, there is the Spirit! Or, look, over there is the Spirit. But since the giving of the Spirit is for the community, it is the Spirit's work in the community that reveals Jesus to the world.

How?

Hearing.

When we hear the Good News of the self-giving, other-directed love of God revealed in Jesus Christ, we receive the Love That is God. And in response, in our first obedience, we are baptized. We do not baptize ourselves. The Church baptizes. Whether it is gathered near a river, a lake, a pool, or in a building made holy by the Presence of the Spirit, the Church baptizes. And the baptized become part of the Body of Christ. Not a fictional idea, but the only Body Christ has on earth today - the Church.

And the Church is given the Bread of Life as food for living. Thus, we take the Lord’s Supper, for we do not know how it happens, but we know that it does happen that in bread and cup, Jesus is Who we take in that by the Spirit together we may live out his special commands.

And we do this to remember.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the One who gave himself for us all.

Luke describes the Church as taking in the fellowship of the breaking of bread not just on Sundays but as often as they met together.

I was once asked why the Church meets so many times a week. I admit that at the time I did not understand the question as I should have. Competition for our time and attention had and has been growing. Minimizing our commitments to the Body was, and often still is, viewed as a checked-box event. But the Church, the Body of Christ, is well aware that without Christian community we become untethered to the ongoing reminder that we are loved, receive love, and that the Spirit in us empowers us to love as we have been loved.

We sing and dream of our future with God when He will be all and in all.

Here, Jesus tells the disciples that this future, the One Promised, is given us in the present by the Spirit - our True-Friend and that True-Friend who is the never-gone Presence of Jesus makes real the Love That is God so that the Love That Is God may be revealed in His Body, the Church.

Quite a few years after my visit with Al and Wanda, Wanda called. Al had since died. We talked as before, as if nothing had happened, as if all were well. And it was. For by God’s grace what we often only reserve for the future was given us in the present.

Still.