The Things That Are To Come

What do you do when the world is falling apart all around you? What do you do when all the things in which you had placed your trust become unreliable? What do you do when it seems like God has abandoned the field, abandoned your nation, abandoned you? What do you do when you are afraid of the things that are to come?

Patricius must have felt like that. At the age of sixteen his whole world was torn apart. It was the early 5th century in Britain. Rome, which had been ruling much of the land for almost 400 years, was beginning to crumble and to withdraw its forces to face threats closer to home. Before the century was over the empire would fall and all the lands that had adopted Roman culture and the new faith of the empire, Christianity, would be thrown into chaos.

Patricius was a child of the empire. His father was a deacon, his grandfather a priest in the church. But as the Roman garrisons were preparing to leave northern Britain, where Patricius lived, a terrible thing happened. The Irish came. Raiders attacked his town, took him from his family, and brought him to be a slave in Ireland, which was a wild, pagan land at the time that the Romans had never managed to conquer. Patricius found himself as a slave shepherd, watching sheep in a foreign land where he did not know the language and where slaves were treated cruelly.

It must have seemed like the end for Patricius. He was ripped from the world that he knew and that world was falling apart anyway. The future seemed to belong, not to Christ and to the Christian God, but to other gods and other powers. Was there anything new for God to say in the midst of this?

Six years Patricius served his pagan master. The boy grew into a young man. But a funny thing happened – he started to listen for God. He had never been very religious before. Didn’t really believe in God. Thought priests were foolish. But on those hillsides watching the sheep, he began to pray. “Tending flocks was my daily work,” he said, “and I would pray constantly during the daylight hours. The love of God and the fear of him surrounded me more and more—and faith grew and the Spirit was roused…I would wake and pray before daybreak—through snow, frost, rain—nor was there any sluggishness in me…because then the Spirit within me was ardent.”[i]

In a world where everything else seemed dead, the Spirit was still alive, still burning within him. Then he had a dream. One night he had a dream in which a voice called out to him, “Your hungers are rewarded; you are going home.” Patricius sat right up, wide awake. But the voice continued, “Look, your ship is ready.”[ii]

He left that night, traveling over two hundred miles to the coast. He didn’t know what ship was waiting, but he believed that there would be one. And there was. A group of sailors carrying a load of Irish wolfhounds was ready to set off to sea. They found him out as a runaway slave, but they accepted him on board anyway and sailed off for what is now France.

The sailors were not Christians. In fact, they were somewhat like the sailors that took on Jonah when he was running away from God. They questioned Patricius’ faith. When they landed on the continent they found that it had been devastated, probably by invading Germanic tribes. The whole civilized world was being burned up. And there was not even any food to eat. The sailors, traveling inland, began to get hungry.

“How about it, Christian?” the captain said to Patricius. “You say your god is great and all-powerful, so why can’t you pray for us? We’re starving to death, and there’s little chance of our ever seeing another living soul!”

Patricius had not lost his faith. “Trust in God,” he tells the captain. “Nothing is impossible for God. And today he will send you food for your journey until you are filled, for he has abundance everywhere.” When the sailors who traveled with Jonah discovered that he served the God of wind and waves, they prayed to that God and were delivered (after they chucked Jonah overboard as whale bait). When these sailors hear this runaway talk about the same God, they pray as well and as their heads are bowed a herd of pigs heads right toward them. Dinner had arrived.

Patricius eventually ends up back home in Britain where he is reunited with his family. It could have been the happy ending to his story, but the young man cannot rest. He knows God has something more for him to do. Then he has another vision. This time he hears many voices – Irish voices – calling him, “We beg you to come and walk among us once more.”[iii] Craziness. Why would he go back to the people who had enslaved him, who mocked his faith, who were living on the edge of the world?

But Patricius was convicted, compelled, catapulted back to Ireland. After studying to become a priest he was ordained as a missionary. And he went back to the Irish, adopted them as his own people, brought them a new message, the old gospel of Christ, and they listened. You know him now as Patrick, patron saint of Ireland.

That’s an old, old story. You might say, “What’s the point of it? What do we have to learn from Patrick?” But is his world really so much different from our own? The world is changing, shifting beneath our feet. It’s a world of new ideas, new hostilities, and many, many people who have either abandoned the god of their parents or who have not heard the word they need to hear.

Patrick’s story is really the story of every generation. What do we do with this old story of Jesus in a new world? Or to use the words that the people of Israel used when they were in exile in Babylon, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” [Psalm 137:4]

It’s something the disciples faced as they moved on from the crucifixion and the resurrection. With Jesus now no longer physically present among them, they started to ask a lot of questions: To whom shall we turn? Shall we go on? What are we to do? How would Jesus want us to behave, to act? What was it that Jesus said about this problem? This was the situation Jesus was preparing them for in the gospel passage we read this morning.

But we haven’t stopped asking this basic question. The church is continually struggling with this question. What’s new? What are we to do? Where are we going? Part of the searching we are doing as the small groups in our church have been reading this book, The Myth of the 200 Barrier, is that we are asking that question of Franktown Church. Who are we now? We have come a long, long way. We celebrate all that we’ve become. We give thanks for the community that we have become. For the mission work that is ongoing. For the youth who are so active and doing so many creative things. For the new members who are enriching our life and bring so many gifts. For the music ministry. Building on that we are optimistic about the future, but we also ask, “What would Jesus want us to do? Where would Jesus have us go? What is the new thing that we are being called to?”

In our personal lives we know that struggle as well, especially when things are difficult. When our old certainties are shaken because of a death or an illness…when our plans that we have so carefully crafted have to be thrown out of the window by a child in trouble or a job that ends…when our marriages struggle and sputter…when I’ve reached the end of my rope…the end of my faith…what now, God? What now, Jesus? Where do I go from here?

You remember Patrick sitting on the hillside, praying? The thing that stayed alive in him, which told him where to go, was that ardent flame of the Holy Spirit. This is what Jesus is talking about in this passage from John where he is trying to get the disciples to understand what their future life will be like. “I won’t be here,” he says, “but I am not leaving you alone. I will send the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. You won’t see me, but you will not be abandoned. The Spirit is my continuing presence with you. Just like you have known the God of the universe through me, so you will remember me through the work of the Holy Spirit.

“I can’t tell you all that you need to know right now. You couldn’t bear it. Just like a child would not be able to comprehend all that she needs to know about adulthood at the age of 9. You will get what you need at the time that you need it. The Spirit will lead you into truth. The Spirit will ground you in my presence. The Spirit will tell you all the things that are to come.”

What a wonderful vision. We might think of the Holy Spirit as a kind of spooky thing, especially if we grew up calling it the Holy Ghost. But the Spirit is not something to replace Jesus – its role is to sweep us up into the life of the Trinity, to make us part of God’s plans and intentions for the reconciliation of the world, to give us a fresh interpretation of the Word for a new time and place. The Spirit lets us sing in a strange land.

The main thing that the Spirit does is to remind us of the abundance and beauty of life and to make us truly alive. Remember that saying from Patrick to the sailors, “Pray and God will send you food for your journey until you are filled, for he has abundance everywhere.” There is not a place on the earth that is not filled with the presence of God. There is not a dark valley we can travel that has not already been traveled by Christ. There is not a situation we can face that is resistant to the workings of God’s Spirit.

The Irish poet Joseph Plunkett writes of this continuing presence of Christ in a beautiful poem:
I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice—and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.[iv]

That’s a very Celtic way of looking at the world – as filled with reminders of the central message of our faith. Everything gives testimony to what God has done in Christ and to what God is still doing with us.

So what about these visions? We have been talking about them for several weeks now in the aftermath of Easter. Peter has a vision in a sailcloth and the disciples understand that a wall between Jews and Gentiles has come down. Paul has a vision of a man in Macedonia asking him to come across the waters and the mission to Europe begins. Patrick has a vision of the Irish people calling to him and he drops his comfortable life to return to the land where he was enslaved. How do we know when a vision is from God?

We test it. We ask if it is faithful to the message that we know in Jesus Christ. We share it with the congregation of the faithful and ask if what we are hearing seems consistent with God is doing in Jesus. God did not stop speaking when Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead. All that needed to happen to ensure our salvation happened in that act, but it was not the end of the story. There is more for us to do and there is more for the Spirit to reveal to us. We are inheritors of the Pentecost promise that tells us that, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” [Acts 2:17] We’re going to have visions. We’re going to dream dreams. The Holy Spirit will come. The heavens will ring with the glory of God. The earth will shout forth its praise. The poor shall have good news proclaimed to them. The lowly will be lifted up and the rich sent empty away. The thirsty shall be satisfied and the hungry? Well, for them pigs will come stampeding toward them.

Brian McLaren tells the story of a zoo in Mombasa, Kenya. When the tsunami struck a couple of years ago, it affected places a long ways from Indonesia, where it did the most damage. In Kenya, it swept up a river and one of the things it did was to take a baby hippo and its mother and suck them out to sea. The mother hippo died but the baby survived and was found wandering around on the beach, far from its native habitat.

The people who found the baby hippo didn’t know what to do with it. After all, you don’t just take a baby hippo home with you. So they contacted the zoo and said, “Do you have space for a hippo?”

Well, the zoo didn’t have any good open space but they had a room with a big Seychelles Island tortoise in it. A 100-year-old tortoise. So they thought, “The tortoise doesn’t move around much, he won’t be bothered by the hippo.” And that’s where they put the hippo.

An interesting thing happened, though. The hippo bonded to the tortoise. It started treating it like its mother. The tortoise was not too happy about this. He didn’t really want to adopt a 300-lb baby hippo. But the hippo kept bounding over to the tortoise and the tortoise would run away at top speed. Which wasn’t very fast.

But eventually the hippo won out. The tortoise stopped running away and soon it was clear that the tortoise and the hippo both preferred the others company to being alone. You’d go by the room at the zoo where they lived and they’d be snuggled up together sleeping.

McLaren sees that as an image for the church and the world. The tortoise is like the church which has forgotten what it’s like to care for others and to be concerned about their welfare. The hippo is the orphaned world in which we live. There are so many ways that the world and the people in it are like orphaned children, looking for guidance and direction and love and willing to seek it if only we would turn to them.[v] There are a lot of orphans to care for. Children’s Hope Chest and the orphans we support through it in Russia are only some of them.

But here’s the good news: God is not going to let chaos and destruction have the last word. God is not going to let a dead end be the end of the road. God is not going to abandon you or the world. God is not going to leave you alone or the world alone. God has the ultimate “no child left behind” policy. God will pursue you like a baby hippo until you see the wonders prepared for you since the foundation of the world. But it’s best you see those on this side of the grave. Because this is the realm in which we are given the opportunity to respond to God’s love. This is the time and the space in which we are given the opportunity to act on God’s grace. This is the life that is meant to be life and not a preparation for eternal death. And what does this except the love of Jesus Christ? What allows us to live except the power of the Holy Spirit? What saves us except the God who is turning the world right side up?

I don’t know what your life looks like today. Maybe it looks like a dead end to you. Maybe you’ve lost touch with the things that give you happiness and strength and life. Maybe you’re in a difficult relationship or a hard spot. But God has not lost touch with you or with this church or with this world. The abundance we seek is all around us. And this bread and cup we are about to share is not just a memorial to what happened long ago. It is also a message, like the one given to us through the Holy Spirit, of the things that are to come. Thanks be to God.

John 16:12-15
There is still much I have to tell you, but you are not able to bear it right now. But when that one, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will lead you into all truth, for he will not speak from himself, but rather he will speak what he has heard and will announce to you the things that are to come. That One will glorify me because he will receive from me and announce it to you. All that the Father has is mine. Because of this I said, "He will receive from me and announce it to you."

[i] From St. Patrick’s Confession, recorded in Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, (Doubleday: New York, 1995), p. 102.
[ii] Ibid., pp. 102-3.
[iii] ibid., p. 105.
[iv] Ibid., pp. 132-33.
[v] Brian McLaren, “Hope and Obstacles,” The opening presentation from the Mainline Emergent Conference, January 30, 2007, Columbia Seminary, Atlanta, GA