John 14:15-21 “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.
“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
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The writer Louise Erdrich is drawn to bird’s nests. In one of her books she described some of the nests in her collection. There are different sizes and shapes for different birds – she is curious about the ways various birds construct their nests. She notes the types of materials they use, how loosely or densely they pack these materials. But the one thing that most captured my imagination is that bird’s nests aren’t just made out of natural materials, like mud and grass. Birds gather up all kinds of detritus that humans leave behind. Bits of plastic Christmas tinsel, strands of brightly colored knitting yarn, shreds of discarded Kleenex. All these things woven in with the twigs and moss and flower stems.
One winter she saved up the loose strands from when she brushed her daughters’ hair. She scattered them outside for the birds to find. The next fall she found the nest, woven with middle daughter’s blond hairs, eldest daughters rich brown, and the fine pale strands of the baby’s hair.
She took the nest, the home no longer needed, and brought it inside. Thinking about how this nest woven with her babies’ hair had cradled the baby birds, just as her arms had cradled her babies. The way life holds life, over and over again.
We have borrowed the term “nesting” from birds and other animals, to talk about some of the things women do to prepare for new life. A woman in the last weeks of her pregnancy might get a burst of energy for preparing a home for her new baby. Cleaning, organizing, making all things ready. When a new baby comes into the world there is a need to make a place for the newness of him. Nesting – this beautiful construction that wraps around life, holding it and protecting it and nurturing it.
It’s a good image for the way we move through the world – everything is continuous. Endings lead right into new beginnings. Life is not linear – it is circular. It can almost make you dizzy.
That’s the way I feel sometimes when I read Jesus’ words here in John, where he says to his disciples, “I am in my Father, and you are in me – and I am in you.” You know, linearly, I don’t think that is possible. But life is not really linear.
There is another, he says, who will be with you when I am no longer with you – the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth. This Spirit will abide with you, will be in you. And I will be in you, as you are in me.
You begin to get the sense that there is no real separation between Jesus and this Spirit. Or the Father either, for that matter. They are one.
But not only are they one all together, we are one with them somehow, too. Yes, we are a part of this mysterious circle with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
As Jesus speaks these words, we might remember where and when this is happening. This is the evening before he will be arrested. It is an evening when his disciples began to feel the ground shifting from under their feet. Soon he will be leaving them.
It is a time when they need some words of comfort, which he gives them. I am not leaving you orphaned, he says. Another Advocate will be with you. And, in a way, we will all be together – right here. And perhaps he would have said, it is not for you to understand, but simply for you to know.
Well, we are creeping up on Trinity Sunday and you can hear it in our texts from last week and this week. Two weeks from now will be Pentecost Sunday, the day we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. The week after that is Trinity Sunday, when we pause to reflect on all the persons of the trinity – the Father, the Son, and the Spirit – and the complex, mysterious nature of our triune God.
Western, logical minds always want to take a linear approach to it. We want to line these personalities up – Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We want to assign duties, a sort of job description, to each one, and then assume we fully comprehend it. The trinity we have created as a Limited Liability Company.
But Eastern minds see it differently. The Eastern Orthodox Church has long had a different model for the trinity, called the Perichoresis. It comes from two Greek words, meaning around, and making room; imagine the three persons of the trinity in a dance together circling round and round. This is who they are, and it is not possible to separate them from one another.
That actually sounds like what Jesus is describing to his disciples at their last dinner together. But, even more, Jesus includes the disciples in this circle.
He draws a picture of a circular relationship – Father, Son, Holy Spirit, You, Me. We are all right here. It seems important for him to say these things to his disciples on that night of all nights. Because he will be leaving them soon.
When he leaves them they will all scatter – for various reasons. Guilt. Fear. Grief. Confusion. Loss of purpose. But they won’t go far from each other. They will come back together to recreate what they had before. Or, create something new with the Advocate – the Spirit.
It’s a concept that continues to be meaningful for the church – although in ordinary times we might forget why. When things are just cruising along on autopilot, we don’t need mystery. We don’t need complex imagery about a complex God and where we fit into all of it. We’ve got our notches cut out.
But when things fall apart, it’s different. When pandemic sends us all scattered, separated from one another, it’s different. When all the normal systems break down, we have to start figuring out again what it means to be the church. Who we are in relation to one another and God.
And we have to find out if we will come back together to recreate what we had –
Or to create something new.
I think that Jesus’ disciples wanted, more than anything else in the world, for Jesus to come back to them in that upper room and just resume normal activity. For them to continue being his disciples in the same way they always had. But that couldn’t happen, because it was time now to move on to the next step. You don’t go back to where you were before. But you take what’s needed from before and go forward.
In the best possible outcome, that is what we will do. We will come back together again. But it will not be just like it was before. We will be changed. And the church will be changed.
If we go back to the image of a nest – a sort of container – we can think that this room, our sanctuary, was the container that held us together as a community, the body of Christ. But then we scattered, and we have developed new containers – electronic, telephonic, technological nests, to hold us as the body of Christ. Weird, yes. But true.
In the course of doing weird new things we are learning things about ourselves and about our relationship to the world. I know how painful it is to feel like we are in limbo. It is frightening to wonder what will become of us. But let us trust that God is, indeed, at work in this COVID chaos, and let us watch closely for signs of the Spirit’s work, creating new nests, with pieces of the old as well as pieces of the new things.
Robert Cording, a poet, writes:
More than we imagined,
visible now that we can see
through the leafless branches –
nests, in the lilacs, near
the trunk of a weeping cherry,
on a maple branch horizon.
In them, the past
summer: dead grasses,
milkweed and dandelion
down, our lost cat’s
white fur, line I cut
from a fishing reel, bits
of scattered fingernail-
sized eggshells – a robin’s
pale blue …
Even as the bird gathers up and uses what others discarded, she leaves bits of herself behind in the nest she makes, for others to find and, perhaps, use. In so many ways, life is circular.
Let us watch closely for the work of the Spirit, gathering us up in a nest of familiar things and weird things and creating something new. This circling, gathering, triune God will never let us go. God is here and we are all right here, too.
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Photo: By Jerry Kiesewetter jerryinocmd – https://unsplash.com/photos/hgyjSUlEe40archive copy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62181987
