Have You Still No Faith?

3rd Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 4:35-41

You may remember from last week’s sermon that I spoke a little about context. That was actually a not so veiled attempt at doing a little pastoral teaching about the way in which we ought to approach the scriptures when we study. If you would allow me this morning, I want to approach this sermon in two parts: in the first part, I want to again illustrate a point about how we ought to study the scriptures; and in the second part, I want to take off on a particular tangent from the little phrase from our lesson this morning that I think speaks to our lives. Okay?? Here we go!!

Eight years ago today was my last Sunday across town at First Baptist Church. It happened that it became my last Sunday in two actions – First Baptist decided that they did not want me to be their future pastor, and Cornerstone decided that they did want me as their pastor. I do not regret at any level the events which led to the beginnings of this congregation. However, the events which led to the decision by First Baptist occasionally give me cause for contemplation and some measure of sadness. In analyzing why that church did not vote to bring me on as pastor (after what can only be characterized as an extremely successful interim pastorate of some nine months), I have long ago come to the conclusion that there were two reasons – I was seen as the man who wanted to relocate the church, and I was considered by some to be a liberal. The latter was believed by some in that congregation at least in part because I refused to use the word “inerrant” to describe my theological position regarding the truth and efficacy of the scriptures. I still will not – I think the word “inerrant” is a weak word – if you enter into a discussion regarding the word as applied to scripture, you inevitably spend no less than thirty minutes defining the term, and in my book, that makes it a weak word, and thus rather ineffective as a descriptor. I much prefer the term “authoritative” – a word that has immediate implication for our lives.

I want to go a step further with this. Inerrant is a weak term at the root of its definition because the very definition always says that “the scriptures are inerrant “in the original manuscripts.” That may very well be true. However, the problem is that we don’t possess any of the original manuscripts. The copy of the scriptures that you hold in your hand this morning is the result of an ongoing process. The closest we can come to the original manuscripts is somewhere between four and six rather close copies of those earliest manuscripts, and the problem lies in that they don’t always agree with each other.

This morning’s Gospel passage points out the truth of that last statement. I actually had the title for my sermon posted on the marquee early Monday morning. I looked at the scriptures that morning, and rather immediately saw something in that phrase “have you still no faith” which jumped out at me in a big way. So I posted the title, and started my week of work and study. I had a direction.

On Friday when it came time to write, I did two things. I compared Mark’s statement to that of Matthew and Luke – they all tell the same story, more or less. But in the version of the scripture in which I looked this up, it didn’t read the same as the version I looked at earlier in the week. So I looked the same passage up in each copy of the scriptures which I own. I found that there are three variants of the passage – I suppose that these three variants have history in three variant translations down the years.

Let me be more specific. When I first looked at the scripture this week, I looked at it from the New Revised Standard version, which reads in the last part of verse 40, “Have you still no faith?” It was that word “still” that had jumped out at me – I thought it a little unfair of Mark to use it, so early in the story. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Then when I looked it up later in the week, the first translation I ran into said simply, “How is it that you have no faith?” It reads differently, doesn’t it?

So, let me read it to you out of eight different translations, and then out of the Greek, as I translate it. I group these for you, according to the three variant thoughts.

The RSV (Revised Standard Version) translates this verse the most simply – “Have you no faith?” Interestingly enough, in the RSV, Matthew and Luke say pretty much the same thing, with pretty much the same inflection of thought. This is really the only translation that translates this phrase rather “bare bones.”

The second variation of thought always throws in that little word “still, or something akin to it.” I found it in four translations.

NEB – “Have you no faith even now?”
NIV – “Do you still have no faith?”
NRSV – “Have you still no faith?”
NLT – “Do you still not have faith in me?”

By the way, I have something of a different problem with this last “translation,” because it suggests an object of their faith – that their faith should be in Jesus. While we believe that to be true, it is not necessarily the intent of this phrase. In this translation, there is a sense of impatience on the part of Jesus when He asks this question of the disciples. “Haven’t you found your faith yet?” The translation suggests something in its interpretation, doesn’t it? It suggests that Jesus experiences an impatience with us when we do not exhibit faith in a timely manner.

Then there is a third group of translations. I personally think they agree more with the Greek. I found this variant in three different translations.

KJV – “How is it that ye have no faith?”
NASV – exactly the same – “How is it that ye have not faith?” Again, by the way – it is unusual that the New American Standard and the King James agree so closely.
Peterson – “Don’t you have any faith at all?”
And then the fourth of the last group would be the Dunn translation of the Greek – “How not that you have faith?”

In this last group of translations, I hear more surprise than anything in the voice of Jesus. Do you hear the same thing? It’s almost as though He’s saying, “I find it hard to believe that you have trouble with faith.” I have no answers for my reaction to that “translation,” but if that is the case, His surprise surprises me!!

Here’s the point I want to make of all of that – we read the scriptures, you and I, for a lot of different reasons. Mostly, we read them to change our lives. Part of that change comes from trying to align our lives with God’s desires and wishes for us, and we discover some of that by studying the way Jesus says something. I would suggest to us that this passage suggests that Jesus expects faith from us – and perhaps that He is indeed surprised when we fail to exhibit faith. But at the same time, I see God as a patient God – One Who would not condemn us for being human as we learn to practice a life of faith.

I would also suggest to us that when we study, and find some truth around which we think we should shape our lives, that we must take the time to sincerely check out the point we are about to apply to our lives, to make sure that what we think it says is really what it says.

Which leads me to the application of this verse to our lives this week. I need to tell you a little story – first person, personal. A little over a week ago, they called us from OKC to tell us that Travis was “unresponsive, and throwing up.” We immediately left to meet them at Deaconness hospital. On my way home to pick up Lynn, I made several phone calls to ask people to pray for Travis. One of those phone calls was to my sister Tracy. I was nearing frantic, and she attempted to calm me. She used her calm “counselor” voice, and asked a couple of perfunctory questions, and then she said, “It’ll be alright. He’s in God’s hands.”

My response to her was less than stellar. I was in no mood for that kind of talk – once again our lives were in upheaval because of Travis. Once again this child with lifelong physical and mental handicaps was the focus of our worry and grief, and once again, I felt the hand of God very far away. My exact words to her – “Yes, and that’s always been the problem, hasn’t it!!”

I didn’t have time to process my response to her that week. Too much worry – too much anger. But she processed it for me. Last week in her sermon, she used my words as a point of teaching for her congregation, and I am grateful for her analysis. She said, “You see, we’ve had to place Travis in God’s hands since the moment he was born. Difficult delivery, significant post-birth problems, numerous surgeries, neurological damage, a child and now a man with very special needs – from the moment he arrived and even before, Travis has been out of our hands. This is the awful truth they do not tell parents – if they did, we’d never sign-up for the game. No, we discover that truth later; earlier for some than others, there comes a moment when we are slapped in the face with the realization that it is not in our hands. The oft-preached message about being the one solely responsible for the care of your child – it’s all hogwash. It’s not in your hands – frankly, it never was to begin with.”

Still Tracy speaking - “And, as Richard says, “That’s always been the problem.” For when something goes wrong with your child, you are full to the brim with worry for the child. But there, crowded amidst your concern for your offspring, is your own incredible and overwhelming sense of failure. “I’m her mother – I should have been able to protect her!” “I’m his father – I should be able to fix this!” And you didn’t protect – because you couldn’t. And you can’t fix – because, well, you just can’t. It’s not yours to fix – it never was. It’s another one of those things over which we have absolutely no control – and that’s always been the problem.

You see, you and I, we still believe we’re in control. It doesn’t matter how many times we’re reminded otherwise – we forget. And moments like this come along and it’s like learning new information all over again. When will we quit being surprised? When will it stop hitting us like a ton of bricks?”[1]


Friends, I wish I knew exactly what Jesus meant when He said, “Have you no faith?” I wish I could see the look in His eyes, focused on mine. I wish I could know how He meant those words – for me. In the context of the lives of those twelve disciples, they were experienced fishermen who knew the Sea of Galilee like the back of their hands. This wasn’t the first storm they had been in. They were used to this. And they were good at their craft – they knew how to control a boat in waters that would sink the common man. Then they cried out to Jesus, almost as if this was something else they could do, or perhaps they thought there was something He could do. And I wonder if His response to them suggested that they stop trying so hard at what they knew to do, and start to learn something that they didn’t know how to do.

The part of last week’s experience in my life that I find somewhat embarrassing is that at age 49, raised in the church, introduced to the life of faith repeatedly throughout my years, schooled in the seminary, and serving God’s people as a leader all these years – all of that describing context in my life – that I still exhibit so very little faith when it comes to too many of life’s experiences. Like Paul, who said, “in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger” – like Paul, I have my own laundry list of troubles which have plagued me.

And Jesus gently calms the rough and churning seas of my life, and lovingly looks at me and says, “Have you thought about trying the life of faith, my brother?”

He says that to each of us. I know your lives. I walk with you, and you share your real and private griefs with me. Trouble comes your way in waves, and you do what you know to do when it comes.

Can you hear Jesus as He says, “Have you thought about trying the life of faith again, my friend?”

Richard W. Dunn, PhD.

[1] Tracy Dunn-Noland, The Secret Seed of Trust, http://fobsermons.blogspot.com/.

Mystery Seeds

2nd Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 4:26-34

The Kingdom of God is to us a mystery. Not a mystery in the sense that you and I have come to know mysteries. We watch a mystery unfold on the television, and we come to know the explanation for the mystery in 60 minutes, time taken away for commercials (which are a mystery in themselves, aren’t they). No, the Kingdom of God is a mystery that really can’t be comprehended fully, and that becomes something of a problem.

You and I want to have things explained to us? We need to have things explained to us. And then Jesus comes along, and we have questions about this Kingdom of God that He keeps talking about, and His explanation is in the form of parables. In fact, Mark says that He didn’t teach anything that wasn’t in the form of a parable.

You and I don’t encounter parables enough to really know what to do with them. In seminary, I took a course in the book of Luke under Dr. Lacoste Munn. I actually took two courses under Dr. Munn – one was New Testament survey (which we called “Fun with Munn” – I think it’s because he was known to be the easiest of the professors for that particular class), and the second was this little survey of the book of Luke. I’ll tell you a rather humorous anecdote about Dr. Munn and his course. It seems that several of us had his final and two other finals on the same day. So, we collaborated and decided to approach Dr. Munn with our dilemma. We said, “Dr. Munn, several of us have your final and two other finals on the same day, and we were wondering if we could schedule your final for another day, just to help us out?” He replied to us, “Well, let me tell you my philosophy on that sort of thing – that’s just kinda the way life is – some days you have three finals, and other days you don’t have any.” I can tell you - the day of finals in that class wasn’t “fun with Munn.”

Anyway, back to my original story. Dr. Munn had one “important point” that he wanted to make with us about parables. His one important point was that parables had one central point – we might see more than one, but the parable teller usually only had one point that he was trying to get across.

As illustration, let’s take the second of our parables first this morning – the parable of the mustard seed. It really just has the one point – that the Kingdom of God, small in its inception, will experience incredible growth. That’s it – that’s the entire point that Jesus was trying to make with the parable. But we take off from there into uncharted territory, developing themes and theologies and alternate theologies, until we could write a book just about the alternate ways one could interpret this parable.

I’ve done it myself. When I was younger, just out of seminary and starting to get my feet wet in church work, I heard someone say that 40 percent of what Jesus taught, He taught in the form of parables, and that 40 percent of what He did He did in the form of miracles – and that if we could get our mental arms around the parables and the miracles, then we’d have a grasp of 80 percent of what Jesus was about. I generally like playing the percentages, and so this philosophy appealed to me. I started studying parables – with a passion. I must have bought a dozen books in those first five or six years on parables alone. All of them said the same thing about this particular parable – whether you take it from Mark or from Matthew or Luke – that the Kingdom would experience magnificent growth, and that it would be so large that it would encompass even the birds of the air, which they went on to describe as the “gentile” nations – you and me. Notice how they already went beyond the main point to a “secondary” point.

Then a few years later, I stumbled across my friend, author Robert Capon, and he had three books on parables. I immediately bought all three – Parables of Grace, Parables of the Kingdom, and Parables of Judgment. I devoured them – he did things in explaining the parables that were so different – in some cases so diametrically opposed to what others had done with them, that I was enamored. But he made the same glaring faux pas as others did – he insisted on taking the simple explanation and expounding beyond it. He advocated that the growth of the mustard plant was so beyond the imagination that Jesus must have intended to indicate that it represented abnormal “structural” growth of the church, and then he made note of the fact that in Matthew’s gospel, this parable is in proximity to other parables in which birds represent evil workers – so, the conclusion he reached was that Jesus was telling us that the church would grow abnormally large, to the point that even Satan’s workers could find a place of safe harbor within its branches. I was stunned at his analysis, but I was working with deacons at that point in time, and so some of what he had to say made sense to me.

If we take Mark’s first parable for today’s lesson, we might very well do the same thing. The rather obvious point of this parable is that the Kingdom of God will grow - out of its nature – just like seeds sprout, grow, and eventually produce fruit. That’s the point. But we could very easily do so much more with this parable. We could take note of the fact that the sower sowed the seed, and we could take off on a series of summer sermons on evangelism in our world today. We could talk about the need for Christians to take witnessing classes and to develop a plan for working out a plan of concentric circles of influence among friends and neighbors and co-workers, so as to present a witness to persons in each of those categories. We could develop a theology about planting and cultivating and harvesting, and we could seek to salve our consciences by defining ourselves as the kind of church that doesn’t do much harvesting, but is really great at cultivating. All of those ideas are noble, and have value in and of themselves – but they aren’t the point of the parable. This parable intends to remind us that the Kingdom of God will grow – out of its nature – and not so much out of the work that we put into it.

There – we did it again. I added something to the point – that line about “not so much out of the work that we put into it.” That makes it sound like you and I aren’t important to the growth of the kingdom. If we believed that, we could develop a theology that suggests that we need not do much in the way of evangelism because things have already been predetermined as to what will happen in the end. Oh, wait – that’s already been done. I think they call it Calvinism. The point of the parable is that the kingdom will grow – it’s in its nature to grow.

There’s a larger point about the kingdom of God this day for us to comprehend. Jesus said - and three different guys wrote it down – the Kingdom of God is like – well, a mystery. Except it’s not the kind of mystery that you’re necessarily going to see played out in this lifetime. I know that’s hard to take – we like explanations to our mysteries. We like to see how it all comes out in the end.

I want to say a word about context. I’ve decided that in some ways, it’s harder to be a Christian in this country, in this time, than any previous place and time. Jesus spoke this parable the first time to a group of people, and in the context of their lives, His words had merit and specific meaning. We can’t put our mental fingers on the exact nature of the context in which they lived, but we have a couple of clues. This was spoken to 1st century Jews who were looking for a Messiah. They were looking for someone who had been promised for generations, and this Jesus looked like He just might be the One they’d been waiting for all those years. Then, roughly 30 years later, Mark penned these words for some followers of Jesus who were living in a slightly different context. These followers had now committed their lives to following Jesus, and they were experiencing rather intense persecution as a result.

You and I live in a different context as we read these words today. We live in perhaps the most affluent society to ever exist. By virtually any standard you and I might apply, we have more wealth than 80 percent of the rest of the world. I started thinking about all the things I own – and at this particular point in my life, much of the stuff I own is broken. It’s a good thing I took a year off from Habitat – I seem to be “habitating” at the Dunn house this summer. Everything I am a steward over is in need of repair and maintenance. The pool is broken, I’m cutting the yard twice a week, the boat broke the other day, and don’t even get me started on the state of my garden. And then the house needs painting, the back yard fence needs mending, and the dog pens need repair. The context in which I personally encounter Jesus’ stories about the Kingdom of God is sobering affluence, to say the least – much more so than most of the people in our world enjoy, and certainly more than in the world in which these words were first spoken.

I’ve been thinking about the context in which I encounter these parables this week. I am preoccupied with stuff. Now, don’t fuss at me – you are preoccupied with stuff, too. And add to all the stuff the other various distractions – ball games and dance lessons and second jobs and extended family responsibilities – and you and I come to realize that the context in which we encounter these stories about the kingdom produces for us a warning. We mustn’t get so preoccupied with life that we miss out on the mystery of the kingdom of God. It is a mystery, and we simply must take time to observe if we are going to participate in the mystery of this Kingdom of God.

I can offer to us this morning something of a synopsis of the point of these parables, and it comes in the form of a little parable itself. It is the parable of “Amy the puppy.” You know that I picked up a new pointer puppy just a couple of weeks ago. I can say two things about her. She is growing – it is in her nature to do so. And secondly, she started out as something quite small – she actually was the runt of the litter – but she will become something significantly larger, in so many ways, than she was when she was born.

Whether we can see it or not, the Kingdom of God is alive and well in this world. It will take root, grow and produce everywhere it is sown – it must – it is in its nature to do so. And the smallest of things related to the kingdom will grow into something quite magnificent.

It occurs to me - you and I ought to keep our eye on this Kingdom – it is growing, and we want to be a part of what God.

Richard W. Dunn, PhD.

Between Knowing and Believing

Trinity Sunday

John 3:1-17

My pastor from College, Ron Durham, tells the story of a little girl who went with her family on vacation to see the Grand Canyon. After a long drive through rather dull scenery, suddenly they pulled into a parking area, piled out of the car, and stood before the breathtaking grandeur of the South Rim. "Wow!" said the little girl. "How did they do that?"[i]

After I preached last week, I pulled out my “Pentecost” sermons from the past 7 years, just to compare them. I wasn’t very impressed – frankly, I wouldn’t give any one of them any better than a B-. Pentecost is a difficult subject, especially when we’re trying to define the work and role of the Holy Spirit. Today is Trinity Sunday, and we multiply last week’s problem by 3. But strangely enough, I pulled out my sermons from this Sunday over the last 7 years, and they’re a little better. I discovered something in looking at them – in those sermons, I discovered that I lived somewhere between knowing and believing.

We live there, don’t we – somewhere between knowing and believing. We’d like to think that we understand God, in all of God’s expressions. But we know that to suggest such a thing is to be just a little less than completely intellectually honest. We don’t know much about God, when it comes down to it. And we know even less about this concept of the Trinity. In fact, the word “trinity” isn’t even used in the scriptures. And yet, we see three expressions of God - God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit – and so we speak of this “Trinitarian” concept – almost as though we understand it.

I’ll have to admit to you – from time to time it frustrates me. People look to their pastors to explain God, and the actions of God. Most of the time we try, but if we were perfectly honest with you, we’d say “I have no idea what God is up to on this one.” I think of one experience about 6 years ago when I was called to the hospital to minister to a young couple. The mother had left the father in charge of watching the children. He did what they’d done a hundred times before – he left the child to sleep for a while on the bed. But this time, in his sleep the child scooted to the end of the bed, slid between the mattress and the head rail, and suffocated. I held my arms around this couple as the doctor disconnected the respirator on their little baby, and watched with them as she breathed her last breath. They wanted answers. I had no idea. They wanted God to explain. So did I. It gets pretty frustrating sometimes.

When you look at our scriptures for today, we discover that Isaiah and Nicodemus had much of the same situation. Isaiah had a dream. In his dream, Isaiah encountered God, and responded like any of us with any sense would respond – “Woe is me! Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” If you and I truly had the vision that Isaiah experienced, we’d say the same thing – “Woe is me!!!”

Nicodemus had an encounter with God – in the flesh. He came to Jesus by night – I suspect out of fear. Fear that he would be found out to be irrelevant as a minister, and fear that his fellow ministers would shun him for having anything at all to do with Jesus. He was duly humble in his approach to Jesus, and his opening statement revealed a need to know. “I know that you are God. Now explain yourself to me!! Isn’t that what we all want to know? “Jesus, we don’t understand. Explain yourself. Explain God to us. We want to know. We have to know.” We live somewhere between knowing and believing, and it’s not always a comfortable land in which we live.

Larry Bethune had a great line in his Trinity Sunday sermon two years ago. He said, “To use Augustine’s famous dictum: "Faith seeks understanding." Faith comes first, then reason seeks to make sense of God. But reason is limited, because in truth none of the classical arguments for God from reason are conclusive. Even if they were, none of them comes close to defining the personal Christian God who is revealed to us in the Bible. The point is, what we know of God is only what God has told us and shown us, through the scripture and in our lives.”[ii]

He hit the nail on the head with that last little bit there – what we know of God, God told us. I spoke with someone not long ago who got to the root of the problem for most people who are searching for God. We start with the scriptures. We make the assumption that the scriptures are true, and that we can trust them. But to be intellectually honest with ourselves, we have to ask that question, “How do I know I can trust the scriptures? How can I know they are true?” It is the right question to ask.

And the answer is something less than satisfactory. The answer takes us back to our premise for today – that we live someplace between knowledge and belief. Somewhere between knowing and believing.

Larry Bethune had a second paragraph that I liked. He was talking about how some people view themselves as having all knowledge about God, and he said, “That’s my other discomfort with the experts on God. They keep telling us what God thinks and who God is, but they do not listen to our own experiences of the living God. We do well to teach what we know from scripture and seek to understand the God who meets us there. But God is not just an historical figure of the past. God is, and God is now. God is, and God is here. God is, and God is with us. This God-seeking community and the lives we live out there in the world are the laboratory of our encounter with God. We need to listen to our lives, to share our stories, to seek together an encounter with the living God. We need not just to talk about God, but to seek God, each of us on our own and all of us together, that we might also experience the awe of the psalmist who saw traces of the majestic glory of God in the starry sky.”[iii]

I quoted Bethune again because he said exactly what I’d been thinking all week. We trust the scriptures – even the part we don’t yet understand. We also trust our experiences. The only person I can really speak for is myself, but I can tell you that I trust my experiences. I trust the experience I had with Jesus when I was a nine year old boy. I trust the times that God has held me in God’s presence, and I trust the times that the Spirit of God has spoken to me words of comfort, discipline, and direction. I trust those experiences. There are those who would tell us that we can’t trust anything but the scriptures, but I have to say that I live somewhere between knowing and believing, and in that strange place, experience has something to do with my faith.

I have to find the balance. We must discover and then live in the balance. Too much experience, and we start to live in the land of syncretistic theology – a land where “whatever you believe” is the key to salvation. We know that we can’t live there. We know that there are common points of belief, and that God is not divided in God’s expressions of Godself. On the other hand, our different experiences produce different points of view. We’re a little like the three blindfolded guys who were given the task of describing an elephant. One was put at the head, another in the middle, and a third at the tail. One saw the elephant only from the perspective of the trunk. The second man saw the elephant only from the mass of wrinkled skin in the middle. And the third man thought the elephant was a tiny animal, judging from the tail. Our perspectives are singular in orientation, and we do well as believers in a common God to listen to one another, even as we listen to the voice of scripture.

“So, pastor?? After we’ve listened, what do we say of God? How do we explain God to those who ask?” It’s a fair question. I’m coming up with a more consistent answer with each week that I’m in the pulpit. We tell what we know and what we believe. We tell honestly what is ours – what we have that comes from that strange and wonderful land between knowing and believing. In my own life, I try to start with the scriptures, and then confirm what truth I think I know from the experiences I have had. To be sure – there are scriptural statements for which I have no personal experience. Conversely, there are personal experiences for which I have yet to discover scriptural support.

Ultimately, I must sometimes share the paradox that I am coming to understand. Belief and knowledge are sometimes in opposition to one another. There are things that I can think that I know. There are things in which I believe – in which I trust. Strangely, in my life, the two are not always the same.

I told the Wednesday night group that I’m pretty dogmatic about the way I attempt to use one particular phrase in my life. I know some things. I believe some things. But I “believe in” only one thing, and that is my Friend and Savior, Jesus Christ. Years ago, when we were trying to get Chelsea into a certain school in town, the people who were interviewing me asked if I believed in dinosaurs. I said, “NO, I believe in Jesus, but we’ve got bones.” When it comes to who I ultimately trust, I have to say that Jesus is the one I trust for my salvation. Not my good deeds – there’s not enough of them. Not my ability to live up to the morals of scripture – I fall short way too much. Not my pedigree, or my educational attainments, or my church associations – those are things that just don’t count. I’m counting on Jesus. Period.

Much of the time, I feel like Isaiah and Nicodemus. I am caught between knowing and believing. I’d like to know more, and along the way, I seem to discover some things. Sometimes, I trust those things. But I trust “in” Jesus. I heard about Him in the scriptures. Others told me His story as well. And then I met Him. August 14, 1966. Nine years old. Over the years, He’s proven to be a friend to me. I trust Him. I trust “in” Him.

And that’s all the explaining about God I can really do.

Richard W. Dunn, PhD.

[i] http://www.ubcaustin.org/sermons/20040606.htm
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.

When the Advocate Comes . . .

Pentecost

John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

To say that we don’t understand the work and role of the Holy Spirit in our lives would be a significant understatement. Baptists may be just a little less informed than some other denominations – I’m not sure why. As I watched and learned from ecclesiastical leaders through my youth and young adult years, I observed that my Baptist leaders were slightly less afraid of Pentecostals and other Charismatics than they were of Catholics. Some 20 years later, I am even more confounded by those fears that directed so very much of their teaching and leadership.

I’ll tell you why I’m confounded – 8 years ago when we began as a congregation, there was no small controversy surrounding our beginnings. There’s no less indicting way to say it – we were a split from another church. Splits are always suspicious, and we were no exception to that rule. To this day, it was the rare Baptist who stopped by to see how I was doing in our new venture. But that first week, and then at least once a month for the next two years, the pastor of one of the local Assembly of God churches would stop in just to check on me, and to have prayer. We became friends, and I came to trust his counsel and wisdom. Then, as our church began to get our legs under us, we determined that we wanted to have more of a social/benevolent/personal ministry in our community than in our previous church experiences. We began to look for examples and opportunities, and we discovered that the Episcopalians and Catholics in our community were doing more to help people with physical kinds of needs than many other groups, and so, through our relationships founded through Habitat for Humanity and Our Daily Bread, we became ministerial companions with the parishioners of St. Matthews and St. Francis. Twenty years ago, to put in the vernacular, “Who’d a thunk it???”

Today is Pentecost – the birthday of the church. This is the day that the church of Jesus Christ came out of hiding from the shadows and the upper rooms and began to accomplish her world-wide mission. This is the day that more than 3000 were saved in one place, igniting the beginning of Christianity. This is the day that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, reigned down on the people of God and indwelt their lives, and subsequently, ours. This is that day.

The Holy Spirit has many names – we refer almost interchangeably to the Holy Spirit and to the Spirit of God. The Spirit is also known as our Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Teacher, and our Friend. In our gospel passage for today, John quotes Jesus, who refers to the Spirit as “the Advocate.” I want us to focus our attention this morning on that name, and on this role that the Spirit plays in our lives. And then I want us to look at our response to the Spirit of God.

Advocate. It is a legal term in origin. We refer to defense attorneys as Advocates. If we take that analogy to the Nth degree, we see the work of the Spirit in our lives as legal defense support – one who advocates on our behalf. But as I said before, the Holy Spirit is known by many names. Other translations of the word “paraclete” – the word which is translated in this case – include Helper, Friend, and Comforter. We really do an injustice to the work and personality of the Spirit when we attempt to use any one word to describe Him.

To get at the sense of the name, we have to look at concepts. The word “advocate” helps – we understand that concept of stepping up on someone’s behalf. But another way of looking at the work of the Spirit indicates that the Helper – the Comforter – “walks alongside” us as we learn and serve.

The more I thought about it, the more I started to think we need a more contemporary term to help us. Do you remember the Academy Award winning movie from 2004 – “Million Dollar Baby” was the story of Maggie Fitzgerald (played by Hilary Swank), who was a poor, thirty-one year old waitress coming out of a tremendously dysfunctional family. She decides to make her mark in the boxing ring. She convinces the experienced hardened boxing trainer Frankie Dunn (played by Clint Eastwood) to coach her and be her manager, with the support of his old partner Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris (played by Morgan Freeman). Frankie has a problem in his estranged relationship with his daughter, and although he initially resists taking Maggie on as a project, he ultimately more or less adopts Maggie while he helps her along with her career[1]. When I think of the role of the Spirit of God in our lives, this idea of a boxing coach/trainer/manager comes to mind as a willing example.

You and I have seen coaches our entire lives. They serve multiple functions within that larger role. They are something of the teacher – the coach teaches the players. There is a line in “Million-Dollar Baby” where Morgan Freeman’s character is narrating, and he says, “To make a fighter you gotta strip them down to bare wood: you can't just tell 'em to forget everything they know; you gotta make 'em forget even to their bones... make 'em so tired they only listen to you, only hear your voice, only do what you say and nothing else... show 'em how to keep their balance and take it away from the other guy... how to generate momentum off their right toe and how to flex your knees when you fire a jab... how to fight backin' up so that the other guy doesn't want to come after you. Then you gotta show 'em all over again. Over and over and over... till they think they're born that way.”[2] That’s what a coach does in the teaching role – they teach, but they teach things the right way – or at least we hope.

I picked up a new pup yesterday. Amy is a lemon pointer (I may bring her to volleyball tonight), and over the coming months and years, I will be something of a coach to her. They tell me that most dog trainers teach their dogs as many bad habits as good habits. Most of these pointers do what they do instinctively, and we trainers/owners simply try to teach them a few things about how to find and retrieve the game. Most of my dogs I’ve taught a few bad habits along the way as well – not on purpose, mind you, but bad habits nonetheless.


The Advocate – our Coach – takes on something of the role of encourager – head cheerleader. The better coaches in our lives encourage us to do our best, to learn from our mistakes, and to give greater effort than we can summon from ourselves.

And then Coaches are something truly like an Advocate. I was watching the replay of one of the Astros games the other night, and their manager, Phil Garner, came out of the dugout to dispute a call (when they played it back on instant replay, it turns out that Garner had good cause to dispute the call). We’ve seen it a hundred times. The manager goes out and takes off his cap and scratches his head while he is shaking it. Then he puts his cap back on, and looks the umpire straight in the eye, and then starts pointing at the base where the disputed call took place. Then they get into a little heated argument, the manager kicks dirt on the umpire, and then the ump throws him out of the game. It happened to Phil Garner the other night. The Holy Spirit does something like that on our behalf – not getting thrown out of the game, but standing up for his “player.” He advocates on our behalf – states our case – carries the torch for us.

The more I think about it, it makes me wonder why we shy away from knowing more about the Holy Spirit.

I do know that, not only do we not understand the role of the Holy Spirit very well – what we do know, much of it we have wrong. I’ll give you one prime example. In this country, and rather pointedly in this part of the country, we take that American spirit of individuality, and when we translate it toward our spiritual lives, we actually tend to believe that as we age, we ought to “have to rely” on the Holy Spirit less. We feel that “Christian maturity” is an expression that insists on a greater independence from the Spirit of God as we gracefully age. To continue with the sports analogy, we move from being “player” into the role of “player/coach.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. In the world of sports, the role of “player/coach” is quite rare – mainly because it’s so hard to pull it off. Nearly every example of someone becoming a “player/coach” has been short lived – either the player retires, or they move full time into coaching.

In our relationship with this indwelling Spirit of God, we never “graduate” into the role of coach. We never sever the relationship. True Christian maturity, rather than moving toward independence, moves toward an ever increasing practice of greater dependence. We don’t become less dependent on the Holy Spirit – we become more dependent. We learn better how to listen. We learn better how to obey. We learn to incline ourselves toward the Spirit. We learn to trust with greater confidence. We learn to rely – every increasingly, we learn to rely more and more on the influence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

I want to comment on one other portion of the Romans passage from today. Paul said, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” Paul makes that point that one of our greatest weaknesses comes at the point of prayer. I resonate with that statement. I do not know how to pray as I would like, and I suspect that may be the reason that my life lacks the breadth and depth of prayer that I should desire. When we think of our congregation, I think all of us would agree that prayer is a weakness in our collective experience. We pray, but sometimes we pray almost as though we feel that we don’t know what we’re doing. I have a word for us in this – if this is truly the case in our corporate experience, we must not lessen or abandon our efforts at prayer - rather we must intensify them, while we trust the Spirit of Truth to enunciate our thoughts in a manner that proves wholly effective.

Jesus did not leave us alone. When He ascended to His Father, and our Father, He did not leave us as players on a team without a coach. He sent the Holy Spirit. This Spirit of God came into our lives at Pentecost, and you and I know Him. We know Him, and as we mature, we do well to listen ever more intently to the promptings of the Spirit in our lives.

Richard W. Dunn, PhD.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405159/plotsummary
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405159/quotes