BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 18 FEBRUARY 2024 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH
Good morning, everybody. Today, we are continuing in our series on the second half of the Gospel of John, and as you can see by the series graphic behind me, it doesn’t have a catchy name. We’re calling it The Gospel of John because… well, when I was putting the artwork together, I didn’t have any better ideas. But this week, I think I came up with an option that could also work: God’s Big Problem.
I didn’t design another graphic for this because, even though I like to be a little provocative, I don’t like it that much! Still, if we talk about it, I think this title can be illuminating. So, what is God’s problem?
In a word, God’s problem is us. More specifically, God’s problem is that we are afraid of him… but his love for us, as the people he made and the children he cherishes, makes it impossible for him to let us go.
This morning, I want us to try and think about the story of the Bible from God’s perspective… if we can. This might feel unusual, but there’s a contingent of thought in the world that this is exactly what the Bible has always existed to do. What we see when we read it is that God is a Creator, and the most beloved of all the things he has ever created are human beings. He loves us because, of all the amazing things in the world, we are most like him. We are the fruit of his desire to reveal how love works in the Universe… and love, the Bible says, is what makes God God.
But, as the story goes, we are prone to fear what we don’t fully understand, and because we are not gods ourselves, we can’t fully understand our Maker. So, we pull away from him and do our best to raise ourselves… which, as it turns out, is a hard, and a frightening, and a fatal way to live. There is much to fear in the world when we are on our own! But this isn’t a Sunday for worrying about our problems… our topic is God’s problem. And, at this point, his problem reveals itself: how can God convince people who are afraid of his world that they don’t need to be afraid of him? How can he repair what fear has broken in us without driving us further away?
Think back to your own childhood for a moment: did you ever skin your elbow or your knee? Do you remember how that felt? Did a doctor or a school nurse or a parent ever try to help you? If they did, I want you to remember them kneeling down and looking for where you were hurt. Where are your hands, in this memory? They’re clutched around the wound, aren’t they? The adult is saying, “let me see, let me see”… and, even though you know you need them, you don’t want to unfold your fingers! Doing that means a scratchy paper towel, peroxide, ointment… you won’t feel safe again until you get the Bandaid on and things are covered back up. My point is that nothing gets fixed until you stop hiding yourself… but that’s not easy to do. All the fears and blame comes out: “where were you?!” “You’re going to make it worse!” “Don’t touch me!”
In the Bible’s version of this story, God has tried a lot of things to solve his problem. He’s tried showing people special attention. He’s tried delivering them from physical bondage so they might trust him with their spiritual problems. He’s tried giving them Laws and commandments so they can have a clearer sense of what’s really at stake, and this is like a parent trying to rationally explain to their hurt and crying child what needs to be done and why it is important– “it will get infected if you keep touching it!” He’s tried letting them sort things out for themselves for a while. But there is always a distance between him and the people he loves, and the people are the ones who fight hardest to maintain it: “thanks for the rulebook,” they seem to say; “we’ll take it from here. We’ll obey you and respect you and work hard to keep you happy. You just keep food in our bellies and a roof over our head.” But honor isn’t what God is after! Intimacy is: a love that heals and keeps safe.
This brings us, finally, to the greatest of God’s plans to resolve his problem: to draw nearer to us as one of us. To even skin his own knee. To live out intimacy in an unmissably personal way. The first 13 chapters of John’s Gospel tell that story by revealing God, in the Person of Jesus, living and eating and laughing and traveling with his friends. Healing others so those closest to him might trust him with their own wounds. Feeding others so his friends might believe they, too, can be fed. And, as we saw last week, serving his friends in the lowliest of ways–by washing their feet–just so they can finally believe that more than the kind of “honor” that keeps him at arm’s length, their God wants them to allow him to love them.
But for all the effectiveness of God’s plan to solve God’s problem up to this point, a major issue remains. Do you sense it around the corner? “It’s all fine and good for Jesus to have earned the trust of his closest friends… but I’m not one of them. If the God of the Universe had befriended me, I would trust him. I would believe in him. I would surely unclench my fingers from around my knee!” How can the intimacy of the living Jesus become intimacy to me?
In that last meal with his friends, this is the dance we see behind Jesus’s words: “what I’m doing for you is personal to you… and it is a promise to others. What I’m doing won’t make sense to you, at least for a little while. But I will help you understand in time. Please continue to trust me.” Nine times between chapter 14 and chapter 18, Jesus tells his friends not to be afraid. He does this because he knows that he will die… and what he is begging the disciples to do is to not give up on who they have discovered him to be: the plan to bring God near isn’t about to fail. It is about to expand.
In chapter 14, a conversation with Philip reminds everyone of the goal.
Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “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 us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”
John 14:8-10
Jesus isn’t a substitute for intimacy with God, he is a path to intimacy with God. If you have “seen him,” if he has personally connected with you, the miracle is already done: you know his Father. But what about those of us who don’t know him as personally? The power of the Jesus miracle is his physicality: his words are heard by human ears, his body felt by human hands. You and I, 2000 years later, don’t have that same kind of access. So, what is God going to do?
It takes a while in these chapters–which are referred to as “The Last Supper Discourse”–for the plan to unfurl itself. The first sign is later in that conversation with Philip. Jesus says,
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
John 14:15-17
This is the first time Jesus has spoken about “the Advocate,” who is also often called the Holy Spirit. It’s tempting for us to “get in the weeds” when we think about the Holy Spirit from our perspective: we can get tied up in knots around important ideas like the Trinity, or the Oneness of God. But since today isn’t about our perspective but about God’s perspective, I want to stick to what Jesus says with as much plainness as possible: the Advocate is an emissary, sent by God, to abide within those who trust Jesus. Furthermore, the Advocate is a “Spirit of truth,” which means he has the same goal as God, and as Jesus, which is that we would discover and trust God’s healing love for us.
In the John story, the disciples don’t really pick up on what Jesus is saying. Instead, they perseverate on what is more immediately important to them: they have “touched God” in the person of Jesus, they have rebuilt vibrant relationships… and Jesus says he is leaving them. Their worry takes up most of chapter 15. And then, in chapter 16, Jesus tries again to connect what is about to happen to the bigger plan. He says,
They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me.
John 16:2-3
Hardships are coming, and they will come from leaders in your religion! But that’s because they’re still trying to keep God at arm’s length by trusting the rulebook over and above me. They think it’s a bad thing for God to be too close–they are still afraid of him!
But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them. I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you. But now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you. And when he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because [it is] the ruler of this world [who] has been condemned.
John 16:4-11
At the beginning here, Jesus says that he didn’t tell his friends that danger was still in front of them because he was there with them… and intimacy, relationship with God is where safety and comfort can actually be found! But the bridge that needs to be crossed–from the touchable intimacy these twelve men can find in Jesus to the abiding intimacy that all people can find in the Holy Spirit–requires a handoff to occur that will feel like a loss to them instead of a gain. This is the heartbreaking center of the Last Supper Discourse: victory is going to seem like defeat. Deeper healing is going to require initial vulnerability. The hands have to come off the wound.
Jesus goes on to say,
“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.”
John 16:12-15
There is so much beauty in what Jesus says here! Moreso than perhaps any other passage in John’s gospel, this is a moment when Jesus is breaking the “fourth wall” (if you remember theater class in school): he’s talking to his friends and he is talking to us, all these centuries later. What does he say? First, he says that there is more to discover about God: he has “many things” still to share. Second, he says that this Advocate, this Spirit, will keep talking: he will continue guiding those who love Jesus into deeper Truth. Third, he says that anything you hear from the Spirit is still Jesus speaking: “he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” And lastly, Jesus is saying that it’s all God: in the same way that Jesus is God the Father drawing near to us, becoming tangible to us, the Holy Spirit is Jesus coming even closer to us and abiding in us. It’s the intimacy plan, fully completed. It’s the solution to God’s problem, fully incarnated. The people who fear him, who keep him at arm’s length, have been loved so dearly and pursued so faithfully that the help they need has first become physical, so they might trust, and will soon become spiritual, so that it might extend that nearness to everyone, everywhere, all at once.
So, so often when we try to cover this belief in church, it becomes terribly abstract and alien: “the Spirit of God lives in us?” It’s hard to understand… and, tragically and ironically, this ends up leading us in the exact opposite direction from where we’re being invited to go. The Holy Spirit isn’t the least clear way of knowing God, he’s supposed to be the most clear. To be able to speak anytime, anywhere, and even without words to our Creator… and trust that he hears us… is a wonder! To be able to hear God, not just with our faulty and inconsistent ears, but in our hearts is to have God closer to us than any other person or voice we might listen to! To have the experience of the love of God available to us not just through the nation-sized blessings of Israel, or even the human-sized person of Jesus, but through direct feelings in our souls is the most profound miracle the world has ever seen! It is no slight to Jesus or to God to discover that the intimacy of the Holy Spirit is the final answer to what we’ve been searching for. To ever feel like the Holy Spirit is “not enough” because our preference would be to see and touch Jesus is exactly the same kind of mistake the religious leaders of Jesus’s day made when they decided that he “wasn’t enough” because they preferred the God they knew only through priests, sacrifices, and rituals.
So why do we miss this? We miss it because we forget the goal all along has been intimacy. I’ve been repeating this word all morning, but what does it mean? What do you think? What does it mean to you? Is there a relationship where you experience it?
It’s sometimes said that “love” is the most widely and easily experienced human emotion. It can be stirred up by a look, a smile, a word, a memory. It can swell in your heart with the sunshine. It can make you smile when you see an act of kindness, or reach down to pet a friendly dog. It’s easy to love. But love is not intimacy. Intimacy happens when those feelings of love that rise up in you are safely and completely poured out. Intimacy is when you are able to tell a friend, frankly and without an ironic tone, “I love you.” Intimacy is when you discover (or rediscover) that your partner accepts your weaknesses as much as your strengths. Intimacy requires an emotional nakedness that can be terrifying… which is a reminder that the enemy of intimacy is always, always fear. Fear leads to insecurity. Fear leads to secrecy. Fear leads us to withdraw.
It’s the whole story of the world.
So, if God is really there… and if God is really love… isn’t this the only place he could have ever been heading? Isn’t intimacy–over judgment, over reverence, over obedience–what he would most want with us? When our fears drive us away, what could possibly be more important to him than drawing us close again? When we are tempted to hide our own nakedness, what could ever be a more serious problem for him to solve?
Jesus lives a life we can trust so that God’s Spirit is something we might accept. This is the core of John’s Gospel: the intimacy plan of God is to do everything to ease our fears, reassure us with his presence, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is God and he is good… all so we might unclench our fingers from around our wounds and allow him to heal them. Allow him to love us. Allow him to fully reassure us with his intimate presence in our very hearts. Because if we do this, he knows we can finally understand what we were created to be: his children.
Can we really learn to believe this? To accept it? Every good thing–every character trait we wish for, every act of generosity we admire, every honest confession we hold back–could flow freely from this discovery. Jesus leads us to the Father, and the Father offers us the Spirit. This is love.
This is intimacy. I’ll pray for us.
Revolution Words 