Sunday, May 18, Fifth Sunday of Easter

Psalm 128:1-6; Acts 4:23-31; Revelation 21:1-7; John 16:12-22 

Divine Service IV with Holy Communion

Hymns: #545 “Word of God, Come Down on Earth”; #526 “You Are the Way, to You Alone”; #924 “Lord, Dismiss Us With Your Blessing”

It’s All About the Fruit, Part IV: 

Who Do You Know Who Needs to Hear God’s Truth?

This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. (John 15:8)

Dear Friends in Christ,

     Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our risen Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.

     In this blessed Easter season, we’re reminded every day that we live in a world where many have rejected God’s Truth, or maybe never heard His Truth at all (which is why the world is in the shape it’s in; just watch the news). One of the necessary things, as we continue talking about “bearing fruit for God” and what it takes to do it, is telling the honest Truth about Jesus – unwelcome as the Truth may sometimes be. Who do you know who needs to hear the Truth? May the Spirit of Truth give us the courage to say what needs to be said. 

     I saw someone wearing a T-shirt that said, “I reject your version of reality and substitute it for one of my own.” Nice try, but no. God’s Truth is objective. It is reality, and where everything that’s “really real” comes from. The opposite would be subjective truth, truth that’s changeable or optional or a matter of opinion, which isn’t really Truth at all. If you say one thing is true, and I say, “No, some other thing is true,” one of us has to be wrong. You can argue with God if you want to about what’s real and what’s true – but that doesn’t make what God says any less true. You can reject God’s reality for a version of your own, but that will only make you delusional, and a fool. 

     There are those who argue (as Pontius Pilate once did) that there is no real Truth, and that Truth can’t be known; but we who believe, we who are part of God’s Church, have always maintained that God’s Word is true in every respect, in every precious word, and that the God who made us doesn’t lie. “Let God be true and every man a liar,” one of the Psalms says. 

     The Truth, I will grant you, can be hard to accept. If you disagree with God, then either you or God is wrong - and no one likes to admit that they’re wrong. Because once you admit that God is right and you’re wrong, then you have to change – the way you think, the way you believe, and the way you live. Such a confrontational thing God’s Truth can be.

     But Truth is necessary. In God’s Truth is salvation. Confessing, “Lord, You’re right, and I’m wrong,” is what leads us to repentance and forgiveness, and ultimately to peace of mind. Not my will, Father, but Yours be done; not the lies I was living, but the Truth, O Lord, as You’ve laid it out before me. God’s Truth in the end is a gift of His grace, God reaching in to break through all the lies we tell ourselves, to bring us to the Truth we need to hear and believe if we hope to be saved.

     And God’s Truth is love. If you love someone – as God loves us – you’ll tell them the Truth they need to hear. If someone is going the wrong way, it isn’t an act of love to just zip your lip and let them go, is it? The truest act of love is to say something. “Speaking the truth in love,” we call that.

     God’s Truth was crucified when they nailed Jesus Christ to the cross. Jesus told God’s Truth to everyone, even when He knew the Truth was going to make them angry. Jesus told even those who hated Him the Truth about themselves, and about what they needed to change if they hoped to be saved. So they covered their ears, and they killed Him. This world will crucify us still for telling God’s Truth. 

     But Truth prevailed on Easter morning, as Truth always does. Living Truth came up from the grave. The devil’s big lie has always been that death is the grim reality, that death is the end of us, and that there’s nothing we can do about it. But the Truth is that Jesus has come to give us life. “All that came before Me were liars,” Jesus says, “but you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.”

     The setting for today’s Gospel is Jesus’ final conversation with His disciples, before the Last Supper and Gethsemane and the cross. He’d be arrested that very evening, and crucified the very next day. He tells them, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear.” There was more they need to know, more their Teacher needed to tell them, but they’d run out of time. The betrayer already had the devil in his heart and the silver in his pocket; the terrible plot was already afoot.

     I heard from a teacher once, “A big part of education is unteaching your students the things they think they know that just aren’t true.” What Jesus was doing with His students, His disciples, was to free them of their suppositions and dearly held opinions, and convince them they were wrong about many things they’d been taught and believed all their lives. 

     What if all the Truth about everything was suddenly dumped into your lap all at once? What if all your underpinnings, all the ideas you hang on to because they make you feel safe, all the things you tell yourself that make you feel like you have a clue, like you feel like you sort of know what you’re doing - were suddenly taken away? What a shock to the system that would be! Jesus, because He’s gentle and kind, doesn’t rip off the band-aid all at once. We’re only human, after all.

     Jesus says to these disciples of His – these students, these works-in-progress, these skulls full of mush, these spiritual babies: “But when He, the Spirit of Truth, comes, He will guide you into all Truth. He will not speak on His own; He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come.” The Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit, when He comes - after the necessary things have been done at the cross and the tomb - will guide you into all Truth. Not all at once, but gently, sweetly, day by day and word by word, like a baby being weaned from mother’s milk to solid food. (You can’t feed a newborn baby a steak or a porkchop!) The Spirit brings us the Word from our Father in Heaven, and the Word is spoon fed to us page by page, “as much as we’re able to understand,” as we “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it,” and as God substitutes our own ideas about what the Truth is with blessed Truth of His own.

     And “the things coming He will declare to you,” Jesus says to them. We all have our own ideas about life and death and fate, and where we think our lives are going, and a lot of those ideas are quite honestly wrong, lacking knowledge to see around the bend as we do. “You don’t even know what will happen tomorrow,” St. James says. But the God who loves you already knows your fate and your destiny and where you’re going. And for that reason we all need to learn to trust Him more and more, over and above the voice in our own heads, and above all the loud and insistent voices in the world around us.

     “He (the Spirit) will bring glory to Me by taking from what is Mine and making it known to you,” Jesus says. So God’s truth has now become revealed truth; not wood or hay or stubble, as St. Paul says, or half-truths or almost-truths or partial truths, which are really only lies - but bedrock Truth right from the source. “Look to the Rock from which you were cut, and to the quarry from which you were hewn,” prophet Jeremiah says. God’s Truth is “the stumbling stone,” Jesus says, the one you can’t get over and can’t get around, and that everyone has to face.Confrontational? Sure, but it is what it is. Deal with it!

     Jesus says to His disciples, “All that belongs to the Father is Mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is Mine and make it known to you. In a little while you will see Me no more, and then after a little while you will see Me." “You will see Me,” Jesus says. Isn’t that the Truth above all other truths? God’s not dead, He’s truly alive! The disciples would see Him again on the first Easter Sunday, after everything their eyes could see had told them He was dead.We’ll all stand before Him one day, with Him knowing every word we’ve ever said and everything we’ve ever done. A wonderful, happy, hopeful, glorious hallelujah-my-sins-are-forgiven Truth if you know Him - and a giant, stumbling block of a Truth if you don’t.

     “We all must stand before the judgment seat of Christ.”That Truth is what it is.The second coming of Christ isn’t a subjective, “maybe” kind of thing. Oh, He’s coming, alright, likely one day very soon, though nobody knows the day or the hour. But that only makes it all the more important for everyone to know the truth about Him today, while there’s still time. So who do you know who needs to hear God’s Truth?

     Again I will admit that Truth certainly can be hard, bitter, and even heartbreaking.

No one likes to be told they’re wrong, or that the road they’re on may be taking them to hell. But God’s Truth is love and grace and kindness, the Truth that saves and sets people free. Letting someone go on without hearing it because you’re afraid you’ll upset them or hurt their feelings, isn’t love or kindness all. So we “speak the Truth in love,” even if it hurts.

     Some of His disciples said to one another, "What does He mean by saying, 'In a little while you will see Me no more, and then after a little while you will see Me,' and 'Because I am going to the Father'?” They kept asking, "What does He mean by 'a little while'? We don't understand what He is saying." They didn’t understand it all yet; of course they didn’t. Their knowledge was still incomplete, their understanding not yet informed by experience (which is also a good and necessary part of a good education!)

     If God’s Truth is hard to take or hard to understand, you certainly can reject it if you wish - dismiss it, turn away from it, substitute a truth of your own, foolish and disastrous as that may be. Or you can trust, and pray, and wait for God to reveal it to you in His own good time. Martin Luther had this good advice about reading the Bible. He said, “If I come upon a passage I don’t understand, I pray, ‘Father, I don’t understand this today, but I’ll keep on reading, and I trust that one day You will reveal the meaning to me.”

     Is it OK to question God? God, what are You doing? God, why are You doing this? 

Sure it is; there’s no sin in asking the Lord a question, especially if what you’re going through hurts. Where the sin come in is in the disobedience. Sin says, “God, I don’t know what You’re doing, so I’ll do things my own way instead.” But faith says, “Lord, I don’t understand at all what You’re doing – but I’m going to trust and obey You anyway.” Remember what old Job said, sitting there in the ash heap? “The Lord has given, and the Lord had taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”

     Jesus saw that His disciples wanted to ask Him about this, so He said to them, "Are you asking one another what I meant when I said, 'In a little while you will see Me no more, and then after a little while you will see Me'?” Jesus knew His friends, and He knew their hearts. He knew they were confused, and He knew what was coming for them tomorrow would be more confusing still. He didn’t sugarcoat anything; but still, He was gentle with the Truth: Tomorrow you’ll see God’s Truth hung up on a cross; and one day they’ll crucify you, too, for telling the Truth, if you’re brave enough to tell it. Truth can be a grievous thing, for those who are willing to stand by it.

     But again, God’s Truth, the Good News about Jesus, is loving Truth. It’s Truth for our own good, the only Truth that can save us, Truth that will bring us to a place of forgiveness and grace and joy. Do you believe God for that Truth? Do you trust Him for that promise? Then the Truth will set you free.

     “I tell you the Truth,” says Jesus, “you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.” O Dear God, here comes Jesus with one of His graphic, right-to-the-point metaphors: These lives we live are like a woman having a baby! Life can be painful, and facing death more painful still. There will be joy at the end of it all, that’s God’s promise; but there’s no getting around the Truth of the pain it will take to get there. But in the end, the baby gives that borning wail and is laid in a joyful mother’s arms. Perseverance produces faith, as St. Paul says, and in the end, if we keep the faith, we’ll find ourselves laid in the arms of Jesus, where there will be “no more mourning or sorrow or crying or pain.”

     It’s Truth laid out for us on God’s altar this morning, the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, given to us for the forgiveness of our sin, and for the strength we need for the work we have to do when we leave this place and walk back out into the world.

     Jesus says, This is to My Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be My disciples. So who do you know who needs to hear God’s truth?

     Father in Heaven, may these lips and tongues You have given us produce “the fruit of lips that confess His name.” Some people may not like what we have to say. Some may not appreciate Your Truth or want to hear it. Telling Your Truth might even get us in trouble. But Father, Your truth is what saves us all. May we all know the joy of seeing Your truth accepted and embraced and believed by the people we know and love, and people we meet along the way. Help us to bear good fruit for You, O Lord. In Jesus’ name; Amen.