the reading:
“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.
“I have said these things to you to keep you from falling away. 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. 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.
the sermon:
Last week, we were in the upper room with Jesus on the night before his death, learning about prayer and open hands.
Today, on the Sunday after the Ascension, we’re standing outside, looking up at an empty sky. He’s gone. The Spirit hasn’t come yet. And the disciples are just… standing there.
That’s not an unfamiliar place for all of us today.
Most of us, at some time (maybe even right now), have stood in the gap between a promise we believe and a fulfillment we haven’t seen yet.
Between the diagnosis and the treatment.
Between the prayer and the answer.
Between the life we had and the life we’re heading towards.
It can be a really uncomfortable place to sit. And wait.
Last week, we talked about praying with open hands. Today, I want to talk about what we do while we wait.
the promise in the gap
So let’s go back to that upper room during the Last Supper. What we explored last week was Jesus’s final instruction in what’s called his Farewell Discourse. This week’s Gospel reading is part of that Farewell Discourse, and Jesus leans into a promise that will guide and sustain them after he is physically gone.
He starts by saying,
“When the Advocate comes,”
I’m going to stop right here for a moment. The word here is Paraklētos, which is sometimes translated into English as Advocate. It’s the one called alongside. In Jewish tradition, it’s your defense counsel.
St. Basil of Caesarea refers to the Spirit as constant companion… not the one you call when things get bad. But He’s the one who is already there, already alongside, already at work before you know you need Him.
It’s even better than Morgan & Morgan or Dan Newlin!
It’s a pretty good picture of who the Holy Spirit is, but by itself it’s still incomplete.
The other way that word is translated into English is Comforter. John Calvin talks about this in his Commentary on John, and he says that this title is important because Jesus knows that the disciples are about to face grief, loss, and persecution.
And he notes that comfort in Scripture never means the removal of difficulty, but the strengthening of the person within it. In Latin, he used the word fortis, which means strong, powerful, courageous. It’s the root of our English words like fortitude and effort.
The Comforter makes you strong enough to bear what you couldn’t bear alone.
Together, these two words Advocate and Comforter start painting a picture of the Holy Spirit. But then Jesus describes Him further by saying,
“The Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.”
This Spirit of truth isn’t bringing a new truth, but is bringing witness to truth already embodied in Jesus.
And as we also testify to this truth, we’re not doing it independently. We’re doing it alongside the Holy Spirit. When we speak faithfully about Christ, it’s not just a human act. We do it in full participation with God the Holy Spirit, our Comforter and Advocate.
And then Jesus does something that might surprise us. He follows that beautiful promise with a warning.
the warning they needed to hear
He says to them,
“I have said these things to you to keep you from falling away. 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.”
Here Jesus is pointing them to all the things that’ll happen in order to prepare them. The word in there for falling away or offended or stumble is skandalon, which translates best as a stumbling block, a trap, something that causes you to fall.
Jesus is pre-emptively removing the skandalon of the persecution by naming it before it happens. If they know it’s coming, they won’t trip over it when it arrives.
This is crazy! I get the picture in my head of Jesus calling his shots… like Babe Ruth pointing his bat towards the outfield after two strikes in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series just before he sends the ball deep into the center field bleachers for a massive home run.
For the disciples, Jesus naming the persecution like that would make His promises more credible. He knew it. He said so. Which means he also meant what he said about the Comforter.
Jesus even says specifically, “an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God.”
It makes me wonder what the disciples thought when they saw a man named Saul coming into town, present at the stoning of Stephen (the first deacon), giving his approval. The same Saul who would later have his own transformation experience on the road to Damascus, eventually writing a large portion of the New Testament.
I’m certain they would have remembered these words of Jesus while witnessing it happen right in front of their eyes.
In that moment, imagine the resolve that would have risen up inside of them. Imagine the confidence and strength that would have grown in their testimony.
And this is how the Spirit works, He advocates by forming people whose lives bear witness to the truth. It’s defense through transformation, not debate or superior argument. This completely reframes what it means to respond to a hostile world.
And then Jesus says something that holds all of this together.
remember
“I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them.”
Here, Jesus is giving them exactly what they need to return to when everything else feels like it’s falling apart.
St. Augustine explores this in his Confessions, saying that memory isn’t merely the storage of past events. It’s the place where God is encountered in the present. He says that the memory of Jesus’s words is a form of ongoing presence.
The Desert Fathers from around the 3rd century had a practice they called melete, which was a murmuring, a ruminating, and turning the text over until it became part of you. It was formation through repetition. So when a crisis hits, the remembered word is already in the body, already available as an anchor.
We encounter the same thing through the rhythms of the Book of Common Prayer. In it, Thomas Cranmer essentially built a memory-formation system. The same texts, the same prayers, the same rhythms, year after year, so they’re available when you need them.
Dr. Robert Crouse talks about the disciples during the post-Ascension time, saying that their standing around and gazing up into heaven isn’t wrong in their looking up. Rather, they were wrong to stay there.
He points out, as we see in our text today, that Jesus has already given them what they need to stop gazing and start living.
The memory of His words is the thing that moves them from the field back into the upper room, back into prayer, back into community.
So what does it look like to live in this gap? Peter has a pretty good answer for that from our New Testament Reading today.
the shape of the in-between
He starts by saying,
“The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers.”
As we explored last week, with open hands, we pray in His name with great confidence, “thy will be done, thy kingdom come…”
And when we pray in alignment with His will, with the Holy Spirit alongside us, we are free to pray and love and serve without the burden of securing our own future, as we are safely nestled in His presence.
Peter continues,
“Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaining.”
Some translations say it like this, “have fervent charity among yourselves.”
And that word fervent, means stretched out, strained, or at full extension. In other words, this isn’t casual affection. It’s not doing something because you’re already practically doing it anyway. It’s a love that actually costs something. It’s being a blessing to someone, even when you don’t feel like it.
It’s a sacrificial love, reminiscent of the sacrifice Christ made for us on the Cross.
And Peter says,
“Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.”
God’s manifold, or many-colored, or variegated grace… God’s grace comes in more varieties than we can catalog. Every gift in the community is a different color of the same grace.
And being good stewards of that grace means that we’re using what we’ve been given, not hoarding it or waiting until conditions are perfect.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together points out that these practices aren’t obligations imposed from the outside. They’re the natural expression, he says, of people who have genuinely internalized the Gospel.
Prayer, hospitality, the use of our gifts for one another… this is what the in-between community looks like when it’s functioning as Jesus intended.
conclusion
Last week I told you the victory was already won. The peace was already given. The Father was already leaning toward you.
Today I want to leave you with this.
You are not standing in an empty gap. The Paraclete is already alongside you — not waiting to be summoned, not arriving only in the crisis, but already there, already at work, already making you strong enough for what you couldn’t bear alone.
The memory of what Jesus said is your anchor. The prayers you’ve prayed in this place, the rhythms of this liturgy, the words you’ve spoken together year after year — they’re already in you. They’ll be there when you need them.
So don’t just stand there gazing up at the sky.
Pray. Love at full extension. Deploy the grace you’ve been given in every color it comes in.
The Spirit is already here.
Take heart.
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