BILLTESKA

Advocate is a legal term meaning your lawyer, the one who argues on your behalf against the prosecutor, the adversary, the word for whom in Semitic languages is Satan. So, the Advocate is our defender against Satan, the accuser.

I think Satan's accusation amounts to saying that we are fools to believe that there is any reality beyond what we can see. "What you see is what you get", and you're an idiot if you believe otherwise. That is the accusation of the adversary. Our defense is the Spirit who testifies along with us, the Spirit of Hope.

As Paul says, hope is about — precisely — that which we do not see. If we could see it, we wouldn’t need to hope for it. The Advocate is the Spirit of hope, as opposed to the Satan of despair. The Advocate says to us —  to each of us in the inmost depths of our hearts —  that there is something to hope for: something Unseen. Satan (the ruler of this world) says "what you see is what you get".  Paul says:

In hope we are saved. that is why, as the Lord tells us today, it is in our advantage that He should ascend out of our sight, otherwise, we would have no hope, and there would be no future. For the redeeming work of the Incarnation to be completed, the Holy Spirit must come into the world. The Spirit of Hope must come to testify to Christ — to the cosmic sovereignty of Love. But the Spirit CANNOT come unless Christ goes “to the Father”.

The Spirit's testimony corroborates our own, but it is independent of our testimony, and more widespread. The Spirit testifies universally, in fact. Hence, the distinction between the Spirit's testimony, and our own. We testify "also", because "we have been with Him from the beginning." That is our inner longing has impelled us into the Society that lives in His Name. We now live consciously in that tradition, of which the Godman is the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega. But we, who have been with Him "from the beginning", have not been told everything. Jesus says clearly that He has things to tell us that we are not able to bear. There are levels of reality and consciousness that are simply beyond us, right now; but the Advocate will lead us into all of that. And not us alone. There is no reason to imagine that the same Advocate is not at work throughout the world — throughout the whole universe, in fact.

The Advocate, Jesus says, “ will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: about sin, because they do not believe in me; about righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer; about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.”

1.   Wrong about sin: the mistake is to imagine that sin is anything other than a failure to love, that sin is the transgression of code of behavior; while sin really is the despair that thinks Love is not the Ultimate Reality. What is what —  I think  — what the Godman means by saying of the world, "they do not believe in me"

2.   Wrong about righteousness: righteousness is a way of life, a path. The path to God presumably, the path that Jesus takes to the Father, the "right path", that the world rejects. "He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His Name's sake". " The Lord knoweth the way of the righteous in the way of the ungodly shall perish." Maybe the mistake of the world is also to imagine that "righteousness" is one unique path. We can testify to our own path and its righteousness (our hope that it is leading us in the right direction), but the Spirit testifies to much more, according to the same Gospel passage.

The Godman says that the world is mistaken about righteousness, "because I am going to the Father and you will see me no longer." What can this possibly mean? How does the fact that Jesus has withdrawn from our immediate sight prove that the world was wrong about righteousness? This is pretty opaque, but how about this: hope in that which is unseen is a positive virtue, a state of spiritual consciousness higher than the supposed "righteousness" of following orders, and higher even than the immediate association with the Godman in His earthly Incarnation. Insofar as the world imagines that the right path is the path of certainty, either in following rules or in the material presence of Jesus, it is a mistake. This mistake is corrected by Jesus’ disappearance. As long as He was visibly present, there was no need for hope — in fact no possibility of hope. The Advocate could not come, Jesus says, as long as Jesus Himself was with us. The Spirit of Hope is given only after He goes to the Father, after He has taken that “Path of Righteousness”

3.   Wrong about judgment: God's judgment has two sides: condemnation and vindication. The world is wrong about judgment because it seems to the world that Jesus has been destroyed while in fact it is the would-be destroyer who has been destroyed. Jesus is vindicated in that the ruler of this world has been condemned. That ruler is none other than our old adversary, Satan — the prosecuting attorney, the spirit of hopelessness who tells us "what you see is what you get, there is no more, hope is just self deception, and your story is over when you die." Or – worse – God is going to GET you, when you die - But that spirit has been condemned by the judgment of God, and the ruler of this world is cast out, in Jesus’ words, as the Advocate, the Spirit of Hope, pours into the world. To the hopeless world, wrong about judgment, this Spirit is a sign of imbecility or intoxication. "They are filled with the new wine." But to those who accept the Good News proclaimed to them in their own language, the new Hope is the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy:

All flesh.  Here is the distinction again between the particularity of our own tradition and the universality of the testimony of the Spirit. The Holy Prophet Joel proclaims that God will pour out the Spirit upon all flesh, and then goes on to say that — as it were in addition — your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams. You (we) are going to get the Spirit, sure enough, but don't think it's only you, because "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh."

And our own sacred tradition clearly places this universal prophecy in the mouth of Peter, as an explanation of Pentecost.

Now Pentecost. Looking back, There are three levels of meaning to Pentecost: life renewed, Torah, and the illapse of the Holy Spirit. I think it may be possible to connect them with the three ways in which the world gets it wrong.

Originally, beginning fifty days after Passover, the ancient Hebrews celebrated the feast of the first fruits of the growing season. The Earth again yields sustenance. It is time for rejoicing, because God has blessed us with continuing life. This festival of fertility and renewed life came to be associated with God's covenant —  His deal with humanity through Moses on Sinai: you obey my commandments, and I will set you up in the promised land of fertility and prosperity. So the feast of Pentecost became the commemoration of the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. The Law is divine guidance in the Way of Righteousness. But the Law, which is a reliable guide, is not to be confused with the Lawgiver. The Law, written in stone, must not become a stone idol which we serve in place of God. God Whom the Holy Apopstle John says IS Love.  All the Torah (the Law and the prophets) hang on the commandments to love, which we have been considering this season:

·        love God and love your neighbor, and

·        it is impossible to love God Whom you have not seen if you love not your neighbor whom you have seen, and

·        Those who say they love God but hate their neighbors are liars, and

·        The only way we can love God, in fact, is by loving our neighbors.

That is the Spirit of the Law, as distinct from the letter written in stone. The commandments written in stone are gracious, as far as they go. But to imagine that the whole Path of Righteousness —  the entirety of our journey to God — is accomplished by obeying these commandments is to have a heart of stone. Several places in holy Scripture we find the metaphor of writing the Law on our hearts. God promises through The holy prophet Jeremiah that our hearts of stone will be replaced with hearts of flesh — living flesh upon which the Law of love may be inscribed.

Clearly, this is the third meaning of Pentecost as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. So, in summary,

·        Pentecost is the feast of the first fruits, of the renewal of creation, Pentecost celebrates the sovereignty of life and love over death, throughout the cosmos, Pentecost celebrates the hope that Love is stronger than death, the hope that is the opposite of sin, which would have us believe that death rules, which is what the world thinks, which is why Jesus says “they are wrong about sin.”

·        Pentecost is the celebration of the giving of the Law on Sinai, the opening of the path of righteousness, which the world gets wrong by imagining that the Way of the Righteous means obeying rules.

·        Pentecost is the Transfiguration of the cosmos by the Holy Spirit, which is the real meaning of the Judgment of God.

God pours out the Spirit upon "all flesh", replacing stony hearts with hearts of flesh, and writing upon them the Law of Love. The illapse of the Holy Spirit is not confined to the Apostles, or to the baptized (as we heard in our course-reading of the Acts, two weeks ago). The Spirit goes wherever She wishes. So now all these Galilean disciples begin to proclaim the Good News of the Reign of Love in foreign languages. The great miracle of Pentecost is trivialized by reducing it to glossolalia — speaking in tongues. The important fact is that all those people from all the cultures of the earth heard the Good News in a language they could understand.

This means a lot more, I think, than faithfully translating the terms of our own cultural tradition into foreign languages. The Spirit of God fills the world. That means that the Good News becomes intelligible to all peoples and cultures, according to their own cultural paradigms, religious traditions, habits of thought, world-views, and so on. We testify to the Reign of Love, according to our own cultural tradition, but the Spirit of God testifies too, independently of our testimony.

For the Spirit is poured out upon all flesh. So we have in Pentecost a progression: fertility celebration of the first fruits, celebration of the life-giving Law on Sinai, and the pouring out on all flesh. But that is not the end of the story. From now on, looking forward from Pentecost, living in the "season after Pentecost", it is our mission, as the Collect says, to proclaim the Gospel “to the ends of the earth.” Perhaps that task is larger than the mere the delivery of a translation of the Good News as we understand it in our own tradition, perhaps — no, probably — it means the realization of the Beloved Community of all flesh, upon which — as on this day — the Holy Spirit has poured Herself, in Jerusalem.