It was a very rainy day not long ago when I was waiting for a streetcar to come along. I was hiding under one of the glass partitions, dressed in my full clerical garb. A gentleman came and sat beside me on what they call a bench, as we waited for the streetcar to arrive. He had a shirt on celebrating his attendance at The Masters, the great golf tournament. Inquisitive as usual, I asked him which Masters he had gone to. He told me and who had won at great length.
Then he said something very strange to me. He said, “I am disappointed that today’s game that I was going to play has been cancelled because of the torrential rain. But I have looked at the forecast, Father, and I believe that next Monday I will be sick.”
I said, “Okay, right!” How do you respond to that? “Oh, dear!” I continued, “I am sorry you will be sick.”
He said, “No, Father, I will be sick, but I will be on the golf course. So is this a sin if I tell my employer that I will be sick on Monday?”
I said, “I wouldn’t advertise to him ahead of time that you are going to be sick on Monday, but that is just wisdom; it is not from God, it is from me, but just think how bad you would feel if you didn’t take advantage of playing on such a beautiful day!”
“Oh, Father” he said, “I needed to hear that so badly! You have no idea!”
I went home and realized I had just caused someone to sin! This is not in my job description! But I have no idea who he is, so I can’t correct it. I just pray he is listening on the radio today, and if you are I hope you enjoyed the game, but you should really tell the truth! I realized though for a moment that this man had given me an immense sense of power over him. By declaring what he was going to do and this secret of his, he had unveiled something that I could use for ill gotten gain and improper purposes. I had the power of a secret. When you have the power of the secret you have a hold over something, and you can control the situation. It is a very terrible thing when you know something that can hurt somebody. That is why sometimes when a secret hidden within our hearts actually comes out and people know it, there is this incredible sense of relief, this sense of freedom and of being unburdened.
The great poet W. H. Auden wrote a wonderful poem entitled, At Last the Secret is Out. In the first stanza he writes these words:
At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicious story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongue has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there's never smoke without fire.
You can picture, can’t you, Auden sitting in a coffee shop talking about inner secrets, and the relief of being able to convey a secret and let it be known to your closest friends. There is something liberating when you let go of the secret. A secret has both a scylla and charybdis: two sides to it. On the one hand, it can have enormous power over something or someone, but when it is shared, it can give an incredible sense of release and relief. The secret is out!
So often, I think that people think that religion and Christianity, maybe in particular, are sort of about a secret, about a code, about something that we know that nobody else should know about what we have and that we possess, but that others should not possess. Yesterday, I was reading The Toronto Star, and there was an incredible headline, “Breathing New Life into Honouring the Dead”. The article was by Allan Woods. I started to read it. It is about Guy Laliberte, who is the former head of Cirque du Soleil. In it, he states that he wants to start a new business to celebrate the dead and dying. He uses the word in here to describe the way that the Christian funeral has dominated the way that people deal with death and dying. He calls it a “code”. He actually calls it a code! He says that the problem in particular in Quebec is that during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s the province cast off codified religious ceremonies, designed and refined over thousands of years to both give meaning to a life’s last act and kick off the grieving for those left behind. He goes on to say that with the Church there was a code, but now the codes are no longer there, and people are reinventing them, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
“A code”, notice the language. This is the philosophiae nouvelle–a new idea that is out there in intellectual circles. It is the notion that the Christian faith is in fact a code designed through our symbols, language, theology to hides something. So often over the years people have seen religion, and the Christian faith as being a code, sort of like a secret society, with our own language, and our own themes, and our own symbols, and our own rites of passage, that are designed to obscure rather than to reveal.
I would like to suggest to you this morning that there is no code, there are no hidden secrets and there is no password required to be a Christian or to understand the Christian faith. It is in fact anything but a secret code! Our lives are dominated, are they not, by codes and passwords, and it is natural for people to feel this. Sometimes these passwords become so important in your life. I learned this lesson just recently when I got a new credit card, and I went to the restaurant and I used it for the first time, only to forget my PIN number! They asked, “Do you have another card?”
I said, “No. I don’t have another card.” I had to look at my guest and say to my guest, “Would you mind paying for this particular meal right now. I will reimburse you.”
My guest didn’t look too happy, but said, “Sure.”
It was so embarrassing! It was like I had lost the code somewhere, and I had to memorize it again. I probably won’t make the same mistake again.
We are so dominated by passwords and codes and secret knowledge and protecting ourselves that we live in a world that imposes that on our notion and understanding of religion. There have been those throughout the years who clearly have used passwords or codes to describe the faith. I think what distinguishes the true faith from a cult is that cult uses a code. It is that that gives it power, but it is also that which gives the cult hold over you. It is also one that gives you a sense of belonging to it, and when you belong to it and you have this deep inner knowledge that only that cult can give you, that secret that only they possess, it becomes a powerful thing.
True faith is not like that, as we will see in a moment. But there were those in The New Testament times who also believed that our knowledge of God was based on a secret knowledge or on a code. These people were Gnostics. They genuinely believed in God, but on the other hand they wanted to control this God and control who could worship this God by having a secret inner knowledge. If they had this secret inner knowledge, then they had control over people and they had control over God. Enter our passage from John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel is the exact opposite to the whole notion of a password or a code or a secret knowledge. The Gospel of John is not about concealing God, but revealing God. It is all about how God desires to let himself be known by the world and to the world. It is God’s way of addressing this notion of mystery and secrecy that so often goes with the unseen God.
That is why I have chosen this passage from John today. It is such a powerful passage because it talks about how God reveals himself. He does so in a way that talks about the Trinity. I know one of the great objections to the Christian faith is that there are moments in the Scripture where it seems like there is sort of a secret. The parables sometimes are seen as a secret knowledge that only a few people can understand, and yet, they are told in such a way by Jesus that those who understand them must then share it with the world. The parables are designed to reveal, not to conceal. They are designed to send a message out. That is why we know the parables so well, and we know what the story and the meaning of those parables are – look at The Good Samaritan, The Prodigal Son, The Mustard Seed – they reveal something powerful about God. The parables are not secret passages. Likewise, the doctrine of the Trinity is not some sort of secret, mysterious thing that only great intellects or people who can speak three languages can interpret and understand.
The doctrine of the Trinity is in fact very simple. In its greatest and simplest form we find it here in this great passage from John, where God, who is the Father, has come in the form of God the Son, who has been publicly seen and heard, who has lived on earth, who has spoken and taught, who was crucified and risen, but then, subsequently sends The Holy Spirit, who bears witness to the Son, who glorifies the Father. That is why Jesus says to the disciples in this closing prayer in his ministry “There will come a time when I am not with you any more (and this is something I talked about a couple weeks ago with the notion of the orphans), but I will not leave you alone. I will send you a Counsellor. I will send you an advocate. This advocate (The Holy Spirit) will lead you into the truth, and this truth is something that you must now yourselves tell. You must pass on the message that you have received from the Spirit, who bears witness to me, who gives honour to the Father.” This is not complicated. It is simple! It is clear! How the Father and the Son and the Spirit relate to one another we have no idea, we are not God! But this is clearly how God deemed to let his wishes, his will, his purpose, his kingdom be known to humanity.
I often liken the Holy Spirit to the people who worked on St. Paul’s Cathedral. Any of you who have been to the great St. Paul’s know that it is the most incredible structure, built by Sir Christopher Wren. There was a story told about a journalist, who at the time of the building of St. Paul’s Cathedral, decided to interview some of the artisans about what they did and how hard they worked. One of the artisans was asked, “What do you do?”
The artisan said, “Well, for three shillings I cut all the stone for this part of the Cathedral.”
Then, the journalist goes to another and says, “What do you do?”
He answers, “Well, for ten hours a day I prepare the mortar that helps the men who cut the stone put up the walls of the Cathedral.”
The journalist asks a third person who was working there, “What do you do?”
He said, “I work for Sir Christopher Wren. I am building the greatest Cathedral in all of Britain, and what I am doing is to the glory and the honour of God the Father.”
What a job description! Sort of sounds like Dr. Hunnisett’s job description, right! I am doing something great for God! I am not just building a Cathedral! I am not just putting bricks and mortar up! Rather, I am working for the great God Almighty! That is what I am doing, even though all I am doing may be cutting wood or putting in bricks and mortar. It was a wonderful testimony of faith. I think the Holy Spirit is just like that. The Holy Spirit comes along and says, “I tell you what I am doing: I am working for the Lord God Almighty; I am creating the power of the Kingdom of God; and I am doing it to the glory of God the Father. The Holy Spirit has come in order that God might be known. It is not a secret. It is not something that is hidden. It is something there that we simply need to ask for.
The beautiful thing about this passage is that when Jesus spoke to the disciples – and it is the sense in which he is building a community of faith when he says these words to them. It is not only a matter of the Father and the Son and the Spirit as if somehow they are a closed circle, but rather it an open circle: it is open to the world; it is there for the disciples to share and to bear witness to. The Father and the Son and the Spirit are within themselves a community of faith, so they invite the world into their community of faith. There is no exclusionary password. There is no secret code. There is an openness to draw people in. That is what the advocate does. Jesus knows, however, that to be part of that community there might be difficulties. In the case of the disciples, there might be persecution. In this community of faith it might reveal the sin and the avarice and the greed of the enemy. It might not all be beautiful and soft and smooth. There might be a cost to be borne. Nevertheless, it is a cost that is not borne alone, but with the very power of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit.
I liken the Spirit to a story about the great George V when he was visiting New York City. At the time, he was giving a speech on disarmament at one of the great disarmament conferences. He was due to go on the radio in New York City and to tell over a million listeners what it is that Britain wanted to do in terms of disarmament. It was a critical message by the King. The only problem was that there had been a breakdown in communication. It was a technical breakdown, to do with the core that was going to link the radio broadcast to a transmitter. Part of the line had broken. So the engineer, Harold Vivien, decided that the only way that these two wires could be connected was if he were to hold either one of them and for 250 volts to go through him. He was so committed to the King being heard in New York that he decided to make himself the conduit. He grabbed the wire and for the duration of the broadcast he held it and he endured it.
In all the accounts of this, and there were many in many newspapers, no one said what happened to Harold Vivien: whether he lived or died or recovered fully. We don’t know. But we do know that a great message had been sent that required an enormous sacrifice for it to be delivered. The power of the Spirit is that connector: the connector between Almighty God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and the world, and the disciples, and you and me. There comes a point where we have to say, “We don’t have a secret. We don’t have a code. Laliberte is so wrong! There is nothing hidden about what we do or what we believe. Rather, the power of the Spirit is given to us to share fully what we know of God as we see in Jesus, our Lord, to the glory of God, the Father.
I have been thinking about secrets a lot this week. Maybe this was really what was behind me preaching on this text in the first place, because as we all know The Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave their report this week. Next week, I want to dwell on it more fully from a biblical point of view, but I will say this: it never hurts when a secret comes out; it never hurts when truth is. It might be painful. It might be hard to listen to. It might be filled with strong language and hyperbole on all sides, but nevertheless, it needs to come out, and be heard. Secrets, you see, can control us. They can hold us back, but the truth sets us free. Secrets, when they are shared, as W. H. Auden noted, are a source of great freedom. The question is now that the word is out, what is the Holy Spirit going to do with it? How are we, as the servants of Jesus Christ, lovers of God, going to be as we react to it? We do not have a secret. We do not have a code. We do not have a password. We have the Holy Spirit, who leads us in all truth. Thanks be to God! Amen.