John 14:8-17 and Romans 8:14-17
May 30, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
The words that are coming out of our almost 19 month old granddaughter Evi’s mouth are “Elmo,” “More,” “Dada and Mama,” and of course, “Yeh-yeh!” When those very first words are formed, the child stops being frustrated because she can communicate what she wants. We learn to talk.
Do you know what the first language that was ever spoken was? While we know that French, Italian, and Spanish all are believed to originate from Latin, most ancient languages are now long dead. But researchers at Stanford think that perhaps the oldest language was a “clicking” language, such as exists in parts of Africa even today. The sound “tsk-tsk” is about as close to clicking as you get in English. They concluded that this clicking language existed at least 100,000 years ago in southern Africa.
Imagine how difficult it is to talk to someone who speaks another language from your own. We at FCBC have that situation a lot by being a bilingual church where Cantonese and English are spoken. Here in California, 39% of people, the highest of any other state, speak another language other than English at home. After English, the most commonly spoken languages at home are Spanish (28.1 million) and Chinese (2.1 million).
Philip the Apostle
In the gospel lesson for today, we see Philip, the disciple that is listed in the fifth position when all of them are mentioned. Philip who came from the northern region of Galilee, the city of Bethsaida, makes the request, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Then Jesus responded by saying, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show me the Father’? You see, there’s a communication breakdown here.
Jesus tells him that the words that he’s been speaking to them were not his own but are actually his Father’s. Jesus and his Father are inseparable and so when Jesus is speaking, Philip is also hearing God.
Philip and the disciples were frustrated because they couldn’t understand that when they saw Jesus they have seen the Father; when they heard Jesus, they have heard from God. They were unsatisfied because they didn’t understand.
Nowadays, even though both people might be speaking English, communication does not necessarily take place. In a U.S. News & World Report recently, it was reported that certain groups use particular phrases that aren’t always understood by other people. For instance, a “traffic-calming road insertion” is a speed bump; “unacknowledged repetitions” is plagiarism; a “relationship manager” is a salesperson; and a “persistency specialist” is a bill collector. It’s like that. When I am flipping channels and I end up on MTV, I literally don’t know what these people are talking about! While Philip and the disciples have been with Jesus for awhile, they still were not satisfied with what Jesus was saying. “How can Jesus be the same as the Father and the Father is Jesus?” they asked.
Children of God
According to Romans 8, the Holy Spirit is a gift of God to individuals like Philip and us. Christians are those who are led by the Spirit of God. To be led by this Spirit is to be a child of God.
You know how children begin to take on the characteristics of their parents. They learn how to say, “Mama or Dada” from their parents. The Holy Spirit is that which comes from God and is God. Paul is telling us in Romans that as God’s gifted children; the Spirit is that which connects us to our divine parent. We are who we are, not on the basis of our individual achievements, but on the basis of this gift from God.
So as God’s children, we are in communication with our divine parent, God. We are to talk with God. We talk to God by learning how to pray.
With the gift of the Spirit, we communicate with God when we cry “Abba! Father!” the passionate cry of a child of God. As we know, “Abba” is “daddy.” When Jesus was praying in Gethsemane over the agony of his pending crucifixion, he cried out “Abba, Daddy, with you all things are possible; remove this cup from me.” When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we say, “Our Father, Abba in heaven.”
How does a child communicate intimately with the parent? The child speaks through the language that the parent has taught. How do we, as beloved children of God, communicate with God? We communicate through prayer.
How to Pray
For the most part, many of us are afraid to pray. We think we don’t know how.
I daresay that most people, if asked to define, “What is prayer?” might respond, “Prayer is when we ask God for things.” Yet, if you look at the sorts of prayer that we pray on a Sunday morning, prayer encompasses a wide range of acts: adoration, confession, doxology, thanksgiving, supplication. Asking God, petitioning God for things is only one kind of prayer.
When we consider what Jesus taught us about prayer, he gave us the Lord’s Prayer as a kind of model for prayer. Some have said that every prayer that we pray ought to end as Jesus ended his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. “Not my will but thine be done.”
To pray like Jesus makes prayer a difficult, risky task. Prayer, “in Jesus name,” means that prayer is not simply a means of getting what we want, but a means of getting what God wants. In prayer, we hope more closely to align our lives with the will of God.
As adopted children, we hope to be closely related to God’s will as our divine parent. When we learn how to talk to God in prayer, we want to be able to listen to God and for us to communicate to God as satisfactorily as possible.
There is a story of a very successful, very powerful captain of industry. Almost single handedly he had built a rather fragile, failing business into a great manufacturing empire. He was a man who spent his days making difficult decisions, motivating others to do the work, envisioning the future.
Yet one time when his pastor was in his office his telephone rang and he answered it. “It’s my mom,” he said to the pastor across the room. “I’ll just be on the phone a minute. Stay where you are.”
And across the room the pastor heard him in conversation with his mother: “Hi Mom. How are you doing? Well, not that well. I’ve had this headache for the last two days. And I’ve got a cold on top of that, so I’ve been feeling rather sick. Yes, Mom, I’ll drink lots of orange juice and take an aspirin. And I’ve been having trouble with some of the people in sales. Yes, Mom. They don’t always cooperate like they should…”
He went on like that for at least 10 minutes—whining, whimpering, complaining. His mother called and this 50-year old man reverted to the guise of a little boy!
Of course, who else will take that sort of whining except your mother? Your mother is that person who is always on your side. The child, at any age, is still free with the mother to be a child. Our mothers are the one person in the whole world who through it all, no matter what, was completely there for you.
Paul reminds us in the Romans passage that with the help of the Holy Spirit, we have this special relationship with God, the same intimate and special relationship that we have with our mothers. We are transformed from strangers with God who didn’t know how to talk to God into God’s beloved children who can call God, “Daddy.” We can talk to God as a child to a parent, and parent to child.
When we may have a weakness in prayer, the Holy Spirit helps us by interceding for us with sighs too deep for words. (Romans 8:26)
But it doesn’t end there. We not only learn to talk and pray to God but we learn with the power of the Holy Spirit to learn how to talk and communicate with each other as well as with the people in the world.
Holy Spirit Helps Us
Last Sunday, we learned from John’s Gospel that when Jesus departs from us, he will not leave us alone but would send us another, the Advocate—the Holy Spirit who would remind us of what Jesus taught. When we forget, the Holy Spirit will explain for us again that Jesus commands us to love one another because he first loved us.
Today we celebrate Pentecost, 50 days after the resurrection of the Lord when reported in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2 that the Holy Spirit descends on the church in Jerusalem. Without Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit the church would never have been born.
On Pentecost, from heaven there came a sound like a rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where the people were sitting. On their tongues were this fire and it gave them the ability to speak in other languages. There were people from all parts of that region but when the Galileans spoke about God’s deeds of power, the diverse people who knew other languages heard what they were saying in their own languages. They were all amazed and wondered what this all means.
On Pentecost, the apostles were given the gift of speaking and hearing. It was a day of Christian communication. I know that it’s safe for me to talk about Pentecost within our Christian parameters. It’s okay to say that we need to do a better job communicating more effectively with others who happen to be like us, Christians. But what do we have to say to people who are very different from us? In the present struggles that we are having in Iraq and in the rest of the Middle East when we have many disagreements and misunderstanding between Christians and Muslims, what do we have to say about that?
From Acts 2, I know that in the midst of these people who came from different places and spoke different languages that God performed a miracle that enabled them to communicate with each other and they understood one another. When we explore the meaning of Pentecost, we are able to understand a little better the diversity of the people in the world.
Our preference might very well be that life would be simpler if everyone were exactly the same. Or at a minimum, we might propose, life would be simpler if everyone at least shared the same religion. I came across this passage in the Muslim holy book that addresses this same issue of the diversity that we see in the world: “If God had so willed, He would have made all of you one community, but He has not done so that He may test you in what He has given you; so compete with one another in good works. To God you shall all return and He will tell you the truth about that which you have been disputing.” (Qur’an 5:48)
From the mighty power of the Holy Spirit that came like a rush of a violent wind, God gave us the ability to speak in other languages, to hear and understand other languages spoken and everything that was being spoken was about God’s deeds of power. Let us who have been blessed and empowered with the Holy Spirit not be afraid to communicate with those especially who are far different from us. If the disciples on that day of Pentecost were amazed on what God can do for them, imagine what God can do with us in today’s troubling world.
Joy and I went to a small Christian college near Boston named, Gordon College. It’s named after a Baptist minister, Adoniram Judson Gordon. He said, “Before Pentecost the disciples found it hard to do easy things; after Pentecost they found it easy to do hard things.” We can even do the hard work of understanding those whose share a religion that are different from our own. Contrary to what the media makes people out to be from the Arabic world, they are not all terrorists. With Pentecost, nothing is hard for us anymore. We have learned how to listen, communicate, and talk to each other.
We Have Seen God
When we receive the Holy Spirit, we become the children of God so that we might be sent out into the world to continue God’s mission of peace and love. When Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, Jesus said that when they know him, they also know the Father.
We too have seen the Father. We too have been taught to call God, “Abba—Daddy.” Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12) So when we are out in the world speaking and communicating God’s love in mission and service, we are doing the work of Christ. Our work would also be seen as greater because Jesus is now with the Father while we are now seen as his children.
Remember what Philip said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”? Today you have seen the Father because we have seen Jesus Christ in the many works that we perform in his name. So I want you to respond by saying, “We are satisfied.”
With the gifts of the Holy Spirit, every time when we are not sure how to describe God, we look to Jesus. When we are able to show God to the world by the way we live our lives, people would say, “We have seen God.”
Response: “We are satisfied.”
When we speak up against discrimination, prejudice, and violence upon people who are different from us, people would say, “We have seen God.”
Response: “We are satisfied.”
When we contribute a bag of canned goods to a food pantry or new socks to the homeless or knit soft hats for cancer patients or sponsor a child overseas out of our compassion, people would say, “We have seen God.”
Response: “We are satisfied.”
When we organize around a social issue that is unjust or attend a meeting to express our views of justice and equity or speak out on issues that perpetuate fear and ignorance, people would say, “We have seen God.”
Response: “We are satisfied.”
Now that we have learned how to pray and we take our gift of praying seriously and pray to God for thine will be done, people would say, “I have seen God.”
Response: “We are satisfied.”
As sons and daughters, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, let us glorify God in the power of the Holy Spirit to talk about our faith, to pray to God, and to communicate with God’s people in the world for the hope of peace and love.
Let us pray.
O great God of the universe, you have taught us how to pray to you and to relate with others in the world. When you are infinite and we are so small, you have shown us who you are through Jesus Christ, our Lord. With the power of the Holy Spirit, we pray that you will continue to speak to us so that we may be able to communicate with others to heal the world. As your cherished children, we pray, “Abba.” Amen.