Author Archives: Greg Johnston

The Spirit, Fast and Slow

Posted on by

In 2011, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman published a book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which he distinguishes between two separate pathways in our minds. “System 1” is the fast path, in which the mind quickly synthesizes information and makes decisions without conscious input. With System 1, you can complete the phrase, “in sickness and in _____,” or drive on the route you’ve been taking home for decades. “System 2” is the slow path, in which your conscious processes of logic and calculation are engaged. With System 2, you can write a letter, or decide on the best way to drive from Charlestown to Braintree for an appointment at 4:00pm. (Trick question: No matter when you leave, you will be late.)

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a good book. And it’s a great title. The title came to mind for me this weekend, as I sat through the eighth hour of a special diocesan convention on the day before Pentecost, and saw two different sides of the Holy Spirit: Fast and Slow.

The Holy Spirit is, after all, the mind of the Church. Or at least, it’s the Person of the Trinity to whom we assign most of the processes of discernment and decision-making in the Church, the one for whose intervention we pray when we are in need of guidance.

In the modern Church, we often associate the Holy Spirit with the spontaneous and disruptive, the unexpected and miraculous. “Pentecostalism” is, after all, the tradition of speaking in tongues and miracle cures, whose adherents have believed in sudden outpourings of the Holy Spirit since the Azusa Street Revival and even before. When the Holy Spirit shows up, it’s with a sudden rush of wind and fires lit on people’s heads, with charismatic gifts and remarkable events. Most days, the Holy Spirit seems like a System 1 person of the Trinity.

But the Holy Spirit has a System 2, as well; the Spirit moves in more deliberate ways. Last week, I think, I wrote that the Holy Spirit shapes and guides the Church over generations, smoothing out our liturgies, refining our prayers into words that stand the test of time. It’s certainly true that the Spirit shapes us over the course of our lives; it’s no accident that “spiritual journey” has become such a common phrase, cliché as it may be. (When you’re facing the 93 South of life, where the future seems intractable, the Spirit is certainly there.)

And the Spirit moves in church conventions, too, even as they move at a comically glacial pace. Our election convention was already half an hour behind the agenda by the time the first vote was cast. (45 minutes, it turns out, was not enough time for a Eucharist with 500 people.) Each ballot took a few minutes to cast a vote, followed by twenty minutes of counting, then a few minutes to announce the results of that ballot, followed by another twenty minutes for the candidates to decide if they want to drop out before the next one, round after round of electronic voting, each of which was theoretically instant but which took forty-five minutes nevertheless.

But sometimes, the Spirit can’t do its work without some delays. Those forty-minute breaks were essential to the process. The hour we took for lunch between ballots 2 and 3 was absolutely necessary. Taking the time to reflect, and pray, and wait in a beautiful church between rounds of voting transformed what could’ve been a process of political scheming into a holy time of discernment. Sometimes, parliamentary procedure and Robert’s Rules can stifle the movement of the Holy Spirit—but sometimes all that structure and rigamarole slows things down just enough, gives just enough space, for the Spirit to help us work.

The Spirit can move fast, when it wants to, shattering our preconceptions and overturning the world in a matter of minutes. But mostly it moves slow, in our conventions and in our lives, gradually reshaping and redirecting us. The Spirit is not only fire, but wind; not only sudden transformation that burns down everything, but a gentle breeze that slowly takes us where we need to go.

Life in Translation

Posted on by

Sermon — The Day of Pentecost, May 19, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Imagine yourself in the middle of the scene. You’ve traveled nine hundred miles from your home in Pontus on the Black Sea coast of what’s now northern Turkey, all the way to Jerusalem, to celebrate a great feast. Today, it would be an eighteen-hour drive, but back then, the journey would have taken you 17 days at best. But the journey is worth it. You’ve come to celebrate one of the three great holy days of the year, the feast of Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. Just as they would on Passover or Rosh Hashanah, faithful Jews and monotheism-curious Gentiles have gathered in Jerusalem to worship God, to offer sacrifices in the Temple and celebrate the arrival of spring.

Your fellow-pilgrims come from all over the known world, from Parthia in the east to Libya in the west, from Pontus down to Egypt, from Judea and from Rome. Those from the further-flung regions wouldn’t make it to Jerusalem every year. This is a special day, and people are excited, but they’re tired. You’re in a crowded room, but the volume is low. Suddenly the rush of wind fills your ears, like a strong gale blowing through the walls; and fire appears all around you, in the shape of tongues, resting on people’s heads. The room erupts into a hubbub of excited speech.

The people around you are amazed and bewildered, and they express their astonishment at these miraculous events: “Wait, aren’t those guys from Galilee? I don’t speak Galilean. How come I understand?” They don’t comment on the fire that’s divided into tongues. Nobody says a word about the wind. The miracle of Pentecost, it seems, is not the extraordinary signs and wonders; or rather, it’s the greatest wonder of all: The idea that you could hear someone else speaking and actually understand.

At the heart of the miracle of Pentecost, at the heart of the work of the Holy Spirit of God, is the paradox of language. Language is the human gift from which all the rest flow, the thing that allows us to cooperate and collaborate, to learn from one another’s discoveries and to express our love; and yet language, in its messiness and imperfection, is the source of so much misunderstanding and pain.

The miracle of Pentecost is a reversal, in a way, of the curse of Babel. Do you know the old story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis? Linguists love it. In the generations after Noah’s family survived the Flood, the story goes, the whole world spoke one language. We could understand, and be understood, by everyone, and all the people lived together in a city. And in that city they decided to build a tower that would reach the heavens. God didn’t much like this idea. If they could build a tower that could reach the heavens, they might think that they could be like God. So God puts an end to the project. Not by destroying the tower—they would soon begin to build another—but by transforming their shared tongue into many different languages, so that they could no longer understand one another.

And then on Pentecost, God acts again. God gives them the gift of understanding, and of speaking, in other languages. It’s not that God undoes the scattering of Babel, restoring them all to one common tongue. God hears the diversity of their languages, and rather than erasing their differences, God helps overcome the misunderstandings.

The fruit of the Holy Spirit, you might say, isn’t homogeneity, but translation. And since that day, Christianity has always been a religion of translation. As the Yale history professor Lamin Sanneh wrote, who grew up in a Muslim family in Gambia before converting to Christianity, Christianity is almost uniquely a religion in translation. You can’t become a bar or bat mitzvah, a “son” or “daughter of the covenant,” without learning some Hebrew; the Quran isn’t the Quran if you translate it out of Arabic. But Christianity is not the religion of any one language, culture, or nation. The Galilean Aramaic of the apostles has no special status in our faith. From its earliest days, Christianity has been translated, again and again and again, and it belongs to none of our cultures any more than to any other.

This morning, St. Peter explained that the disciples could not be drunk, for it was only nine o’clock in the morning, and however decorous you may have been I think some of you laughed; and this is an extraordinary thing. That the voice of a man who died two thousand years ago and four thousand miles away can reach out to you across the millennia and make you laugh—surely, that is miracle in itself.

But this Pentecost miracle of translation is about more than just the past.

The Holy Spirit is always present in our work of translation in the present.

We experience this miracle anew whenever we can get over the ways that language and culture and history divide us, and connect with one another. Sometimes that happens in small ways within a much bigger picture; I think of the Jerusalem Peacebuilders camps run every summer by an Episcopal priest, that bring together Israeli, Palestinian, and American teenagers to spend time together, getting to know one another, speaking and listening and being heard. Sometimes it happens in big ways within a smaller picture. Language and history can divide us as much in individual relationships, with family or friends or partners, as they do in our collective life, and the miracle of Pentecost is there every bit as much when we really listen to the people we love, and the Holy Spirit helps us really understand what they’re saying. Every one of us speaks our own language, and translation can be hard, but every time we hear one another speaking in a language we can understand, the Holy Spirit’s work is there.

But God is not only with us when we listen. God is with us when we speak! And that’s the other side of the Pentecost miracle. “Each one” of those present “hears [the disciples] speaking in the[ir] native language,” specifically because “the Spirit gave them ability” to speak in those other tongues.

“Spirit” is always present when we speak: the Latin word spiritus, after all, just means “breath,” speech is mind and voice shaping the sound of breath. But sometimes, when we speak, the Holy Spirit is joined to our spirit, and we speak as one. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we speak words of love and kindness to one another. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we speak truth to power in the hope of building a better world. We speak with the Holy Spirit when we share the good news, as those ancient disciples did: when we proclaim the love of God to the world, and the Spirit helps us translate what that means to all those who hear it. The Holy Spirit is there, whether we invoke its name or not, when we share out loud with someone else the joy and the pain of life; when we translate our experience into a language someone else can understand, and we are heard.

But God is also with us when we cannot speak, when we don’t know what to say, as Paul reminds us in his Letter to the Romans. “The Spirit helps us,” he writes, “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.” (Romans 8:26) The Holy Spirit is with us when we speak in love, and that’s a wonderful thing. But sometimes we just don’t have the words. Sometimes, a situation is too hard, and there’s nothing we can say. Sometimes, someone’s looking for advice, and we have no guidance to give. Sometimes we know we need to pray, but we don’t even know what it we’re praying for, and yet, the Spirit prays for us, “with sighs too deep for words.” God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, and when, despite the Holy Spirit’s help, words fail us, there the Spirit is, praying with us nevertheless.

So I wonder what the Holy Spirit needs to translate for you, this Pentecost. Is there some aspect of your faith or some practice of prayer that you’ve received from someone else but which isn’t quite speaking your language, and which needs to be translated for you? Is there someone in your life who’s trying to tell you something, which you just can’t understand? Is there something you need to say, but can’t quite find the words to express? Or do you simply need the Comforter to come and be with you awhile?

Whatever it is, may the fire of the Holy Spirit give light to your eyes, so that you can see the road ahead; may the wind of the Holy Spirit give you a nudge in the right direction; may the Holy Spirit be your translator, so that you can speak and you can hear; and when there are no words to say, may the Holy Spirit speak for you in “sighs too deep for words.” Amen.

Eternal Life, Now

Posted on by

Eternal Life, Now

 
 
00:00 / 13:24
 
1X
 

Sermon — May 12, 2024

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

From time to time in every one of our lives, a certain question arises. It can be born of frustration or confusion, dread or despair. It’s a question that arises at the intersection the big issues of value and meaning with the realities of daily life. It’s a question you may have even asked yourself once or twice this week:

“What’s the point of this meeting?”

Now, the exact situation varies from time to time. If you’re in school, you may sometimes wonder why you even have classes the last few days before summer vacation, when exams are over and all you’re going to do is watch a movie anyway. If you’re sitting in a monthly committee meeting, you may wonder why it wasn’t just canceled, if there’s nothing actually on the agenda. You may find sometimes that having a meeting is serving as a replacement for doing something. And sometimes, it turns out that there really is a point, it just takes a while to get there; for the first ten or fifteen minutes of a conversation, you wonder why this person wanted to talk with you at all, until suddenly the penny drops, and the true purpose is revealed—and then the whole conversation that’s already happened begins to make sense.

There’s a little bit of this third situation in the writing style of John. Both the Gospel of John and the First Letter of John reveal their meaning in a certain roundabout way. And you might think to yourself, as you read them or hear them: “I know there’s a point to this… But what is it?”

And then, toward the very end, both the Gospel and the Letter just lay it right out. Each one of them, in the closing chapter, tells you the point of the meeting; they tell you why they’re writing. And there’s a difference between the two that’s part of why I love the First Letter of John so much.

The Gospel of John comes to an end just after the Doubting Thomas story, when Jesus has revealed himself in resurrected form to this questioning disciple. We don’t have the clean ending of the Ascension story that we get in the Gospel of Luke, when forty days after Easter—that was on Easter—the resurrected Jesus finally leaves the disciples behind and ascends into heaven. John leaves the story open: “Now,” he writes, “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31) At the end of twenty chapters of elevated theology and difficult discourses, John finally tells us the point: He’s written all this “so that you may come to believe,” and that through believing, “you may have life.”

There’s a similar statement of purpose in the closing verses of the First Letter of John: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.” (1 John 5:13) And while this speaks the same language and shares the same vocabulary as the conclusion of the Gospel, it’s not quite the same thing. The Gospel is written “so that you may come to believe,” and through believing, have life; the Letter is written “to you who believe…so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

And this, to me, is a magnificent phrase: “so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

First, that verb: “Know.” The Letter isn’t written to convince or persuade you. It isn’t written to criticize or condemn you. It’s written to remind you, to help you know something. It’s there for what Christian theology traditionally calls “assurance,” the reminder that you don’t need to worry about salvation, or be afraid of judgment. John doesn’t want to teach you how to earn eternal life, he wants you to know that you already have it.

1 John reminds us to be honest about our failings, because “if we say we have no sin,” we deceive only ourselves. It invites us to be transformed and grow in the Spirit, because while “we are God’s children now… what we will be has not yet been revealed.” It reminds us that we ought to “love one another, for love is from God.” But in the end, what really matters is not what we do, but what God does. The power of our faith is not our love for God, or our love for one another, but God’s love for each one of us, for “God is love,” John writes, and “God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” And this beautiful letter has been written to help that message of God’s grace and love sink in; John really wants you to know that you have eternal life.

And to know that you have it. And that’s a second important thing. The message of 1 John is not that you will “inherit eternal life,” which is a phrase common in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It’s not that one day, you’ll go to heaven and then you will have eternal life. It’s that you have eternal life, already now. “Whoever has the Son has life,” the letter says. And you have the Son. You have Jesus in your life. You have Jesus in your heart. You can have Jesus with you because, as the beautiful prayer for Ascension Day says, Jesus “ascended far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.” And because you have Jesus, you have life; already now eternal life is yours.

And this can only make sense if we clarify what “eternal” means. In Christian theology, “eternity” is not so much a quantity of time as a quality. In other words, the “eternal” in “eternal life” is not primarily a measurement of length, it’s a description of what that life is like. It is, as the Nicene Creed says, “the life of the world to come,” the life of the new creation God has in store for all of us. Now, we believe that in that world we do not get sick, or suffer, or die, and so eternal life does last forever; but that’s not its only quality. The life of the world to come, is a life in which we love, and are loved. It’s a life in which we will know one another, fully, and be fully known. It’s a life in which we will be reconciled to one another and to God, in which truth, and beauty, and peace are the organizing principles of life.

And the message of Easter is that that world isn’t only a future reality for which we wait. Christ is risen, and Christ is alive, and the process of renewing and restoring and recreating the world is already going on—even though it is not yet complete. Although the kingdom of God has not yet arrived in fullness, it is already present here, intersecting with our world in a thousand different ways. And so even now, we can begin to live the life of eternity; even now, while living in this world, we can live as if we were living in the world to come, and this is what John wants us to know: that even now, we have eternal life.

One of the great blessings of my life has been the presence of our brothers just up the river at the Society of St. John the Evangelist, in Cambridge. SSJE is an Episcopal community of monks, a dozen men who’ve devoted themselves to a life together shaped by service and prayer. The brothers are some of the most loving, authentic, and holy men I’ve ever met. And part of what makes them so loving and so authentic is their willingness to admit that being a monk is not all sweetness and light. Being a monk is, in large part, like being married forever to a bunch of people with whom you’re not in love; or being life-long roommates with a dozen guys with whom you have no bonds of family, or prior friendship; who are united only by the shared desire to abide in the love of God, and who sometimes get on your nerves. Monastic life is a constant practice of living the life of the world to come together, even amid the resentments and disappointments of the life of this world.

Because they are the Society of St. John the Evangelist, after all, the brothers have always had a special relationship with the Gospel and Letters of John, and so I’m going to let Brother David Vryhof have the last words in this sermon series on 1 John. Reflecting on the Gospel of John and on the life of the great mystic Brother Lawrence of the Cross, Brother David writes, “We, too, can learn to abide in God, to draw our strength from God’s life at work within us, to rely on God every moment of every day. We too can have this larger life, this eternal life, the very life of God as our daily fare… The larger life we are promised in Christ is not found by striving for success, social status or material gain; nor is it found in pursuing righteousness or holiness (witness the Pharisees). It is found by surrendering ourselves to God’s life within us and by trusting God’s strength to be made manifest in our weakness. This life is a gift – not to be earned, but received – the gift of living in union with God.”

The Disruptive Spirit

Posted on by

The Disruptive Spirit

 
 
00:00 / 11:49
 
1X
 

Sermon — May 5, 2024

Pia Bertelli

“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child as well. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments.”

If there was any question over the last four weeks about what it means to be an “Easter People”, there should be no doubt now. The first time I heard this term “Easter People”, I was in a baptism class for my now 27 year old daughter. Someone asked a question and the priest, Dean Wolfe, who, by the way, is now the rector at St Bart’s in Manhattan, threw up his hands and exclaimed joyously, “We are an Easter People; a people of great hope!” It really made an impression on me and I began to say it to myself, to my churchy friends and, in turn, to embrace the idea. We are a people of great hope. Great hope for the victory of our faith in God’s love to conquer the world. How? How can that happen?

As I was trying to get an understanding of what was going on in this scripture passage, I had to draw a diagram. The words seemed to me to be going in a circle. It wasn’t linear and it didn’t stop at love. The writer of 1st John says that when we believe in Jesus we are born of God and if you love the parent, God, you love the child, not just his child Jesus, but we who are also born of God. Our love of God means we obey his commandments. We know from our reading of John 15, that commandment is to love one another, the other children of God. And in the middle, is the victory that conquers the world, our faith in this love. 

Herein lies the difficulty though. We learned from Greg’s sermon a couple of weeks ago we are called to an agape love, a selfless love. It is a love we would show to an adversary or someone with whom we are not necessarily familiar. This is as opposed to eros, a romantic love or filia, a brotherly, familial love. This Agape love calls us to action. As Michael pointed to in his Boondoggle sermon, when we are called as Children of God, we are set on a new path. Changed metaphysically, beyond what is perceptible to those around us. Obedience to God doesn’t mean our lives will avoid struggle. In fact, it may often mean we will choose a difficult path. It is a mindset. Julian of Norwich called it the via positiva, the positive way. It is an attitude. It doesn’t mean we make light of our struggles, but with the power of the Holy Spirit we can prevail through adversity.

The Holy Spirit…Ruach in Hebrew. In both our Old Testament and New Testament, Ruach is translated into several English words – wind, breath, wisdom. This is not to turn the Holy Spirit into a natural force, but to help our limited human minds to begin to grasp the power of God. The Holy Spirit is wind; it is movement. The Holy Spirit is breath; it is life. The Holy Spirit is wisdom; it is charism, a gift endowed by the Holy Spirit. 

Ruach was working overtime in Acts. This week we read about the third in a series of visions Peter has in addition to Cornelius’. Earlier in Chapter ten, Cornelius, a centurion, a man who lives worshipfully, was always helping people in need and had the habit of prayer, has a vision to go fetch Peter. He sends two men to Joppa to fetch Peter, who he knows from the vision is staying with Simon the Tanner. As the men are approaching, Peter is up on the balcony praying. It is lunch time. He’s hungry and thinking of food. He falls into a trance and has a vision of a blanket being lowered down by four ropes with every kind of animal, reptile and bird on it. Then he hears a voice saying, “Get up, Peter.  Kill and eat.” Peter exclaims that he has never eaten unclean food. The voice tells him that he should not call anything impure that God has made clean. This happens three times before the blanket is lifted back up to the sky. 

While Peter is puzzling out the meaning of this vision, Cornelius’ men knock on the door. The Spirit tells him to go downstairs. There are three men looking for him and he should not hesitate to go with them. Peter goes and opens the door. The men tell Peter that a holy angel commanded Cornelius to get him so they could hear what he had to say. He invites them in, makes them feel at home and the next day Peter, his Jewish friends and the travelers set off for Caesarea. When they arrive Cornelius is expecting them. Peter makes it clear that it is highly unusual for a Jew to visit a Gentile, but also acknowledges that God has led him here. Cornelius and his household are ready to listen and Peter explodes with the good news of Jesus and forgiveness! 

While Peter is still speaking, the holy spirit interrupts him, descends upon them and the gift of the Holy Spirit is poured out on them. It has proceeded from the Father and the Son and been poured out on them. Imagine yourself as an empty vessel being filled by Ruach. They are speaking in tongues and praising God. Peter finally realizes that the Gentiles, these unclean people, are like the unclean food being offered to him in his vision. Like the unclean food God has given him to satisfy his hunger, the uncircumcised Gentiles in the crowd who, having had the Holy Spirit working in their lives, are now clean and want to be baptized.    

In this scripture, we see the Holy Spirit interrupting Peter’s sermon. A point needs to be made. The gospel is proclaimed to and heard by everyone there, including those outside the Jewish circle, Peter says, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” And note, he is speaking to his brothers from Joppa; he is not alone on his mission. Peter’s rhetorical statement exclaims God’s acceptance. Peter embodies the gospel of inclusion. Love one another, Agape love. Here we learn about God’s character and his mission for the church. There is a new understanding of salvation. God does not discriminate.

Keeping people out, setting boundaries reinforces our identities – not God’s. I remember hearing a sermon on radical welcome by the Reverend Stephanie Spellers, who was previously in our diocese and is now Canon to the Presiding Bishop for Evangelism, Reconciliation, and Creation Care and is also, coincidentally, an Assisting Priest at St Bart’s in Manhattan. She spoke about how the church must change to be more inclusive. She spoke of a church in I think maybe Southern California, it might have been New York City. I think I had my hands up on my ears and was saying “nah nah nah” so I didn’t hear, because she was telling us about a church where they mamboed up the aisle as they lined up for communion. “Good God,” I said to myself. “This is the Episcopal Church. Have some dignity.” And then, in a tiny part of my ADHD brain, the Mambo scene from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story played and I wondered what that might be like to joyously dance my way up the aisle to take the Eucharist. I tried to convince Douglas to work in a Latin rhythm here, but he wouldn’t indulge me.

In all seriousness, whether or not to let uncircumcised men into the community of believers was a seminal question of the day. Changing the idea of who gets let in shapes the community of believers. Listening to God when God speaks to us through our prayer, visions or synchronistic moments, brings us closer to God’s vision for the church. The message you need to hear may come through the uncircumcised one challenging your prejudices and expectations. The Holy Spirit is disruptive. Be prepared; expect it.

I left copies of the poem, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke in all of the pews. For me it is about listening to God, and the action we are called to undertake. The flame is terrifying, yet there is a shadow in which we can move where we can hear God saying, “Give me your hand.”  And when you are pushed to your limit of loving, with the communion of your brothers and sisters in Christ and with the power of the Holy Spirit, throw up your hands and exclaim joyously, “We are an Easter People; a people of great hope!”

Pentecost Pending

Posted on by

I spent Monday and Tuesday this week at our annual Clergy Conference. Along with time to catch up with old colleagues in ministry and participate in important conversations with diocesan leaders, every year’s Clergy Conference includes a series of presentations by a guest speaker. Sometimes these are great. Sometimes they’re just fine. This year, I was really blown away.

Our speaker this year with Debie Thomas, an Episcopal layperson who serves as Minister for Lifelong Formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto. Debie was raised in the United States by Indian immigrant parents, who came from the southern Indian state of Kerala, where they were members of the community of Mar Thoma Christians, who date their history back two thousand years to the ministry of Saint Thomas in India. Her father was an evangelical pastor in the US. Debie herself is a writer and a mother, “a seeker, an explorer, a believer, and a doubter,” as she puts it.

Her presentations grappled with each of the readings appointed to Pentecost, asking how each one might point us to a way in which the Holy Spirit is leading the Church today. What are the “dry bones” in our lives and in our churches, the things that seem dead and gone that only God can restore to life? How does the Holy Spirit translate the language of our faith into the language of our own lives, so that we hear God speaking to each one of us in a way we can understand, as the disciples heard at Pentecost? How does the Spirit pray for us, when we do not know how to pray for ourselves, with “sighs too deep for words,” as Paul says? What is the truth toward which Jesus is leading us in this “post-truth” age?

It was a week of many questions, and few answers. But luckily, Pentecost is still a few weeks away. I wonder, between now and then, whether you might pick one of those questions, and explore it in your prayer between now and then.