I recently installed a new app on my phone, a prayer app, and I like it because unlike the prayer app I had before, it’s not just a bunch of readings you have to do on your own as if you were reading from a book. With this app, you can choose from a range of different prayers offerings and then you actually have someone who talks to you and guides you through your time of meditation. One practice that this app helped me reconnect with is Lectio Divina. Lectio Divina (“Divine Reading”) is a very ancient way of praying, that was mostly practiced in monasteries to start with and it’s really about spending time in silence with the Scriptures and listening to what God has to tell you. So if you want to try it at home, I can give you the name of the app during coffee hour, but you don’t need the app to pray. You can just sit in a quiet spot, take a few deep breaths, ask the Holy Spirit to help you listen to what God wants to say to you, and then you read a passage from the Bible, you can choose the daily readings in the BCP, you read the lesson once, twice, a third time if necessary and just listen to what God is saying to you, and then you can respond to God and after a few minutes of silence, you say the Lord’s prayer and you’re done. You can make it as long or as short as you want. Ten minutes is usually a good time to start with. And if you try that, let me know because I am really eager to hear back from you, and what difference it is making in your prayer life and, hopefully, in your whole life.
But why am I talking about that? Well, in the Gospel we have just heard, Jesus tells us: When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak of his own, but will speak whatever he hears and will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine, and will declare it to you. As I was reading this passage, you may have thought: What does it mean? Because it’s a lot of words, and a lot of pronouns! Yet I think it touches to what Lectio Divina does. When I started praying with this app, it was huge help for me to have somebody guiding me through prayer, because, even when you’re a priest, you certainly don’t always know how to pray. We all struggle to pray. We wonder what to do with ourselves, what to do with our bodies, what to read, what to ask, how to be quiet and attentive, how to listen, and if you’re like me, you finish praying a you realize everything you have forgotten to say! We need a guide, and that’s also why we come to pray together at church, or why we download an app. But of course, the real guidance is not about the person who leads us in prayer, it’s really about the Holy Spirit. The voice of God inside of us, who makes us understand things about Jesus and how to grow in our faith. Some theologians assume that in our passage today, Jesus is talking about the New Testament: After his death and Resurrection, Jesus will send his spirit and make the Apostles understand what Jesus’s life and mission was all about, how he is the Son of God who died for people’s sin and to reconcile them to God. They couldn’t understand all of that while Jesus was still with them, but when everything will have happened, they will start to understand, and then teach and preach (as we see them do so often in the Book of Acts) and then write: the Apostles wrote the Book of Acts itself, the Epistles (Paul, Peter, James…) and the Book of Revelation. And at least two of the Gospels. So it was very true for them, The Spirit came and made them understand who is Jesus and they all wrote it down. But it is also true for us. Although we aren’t going to write another book of the Bible, the Holy Spirit reveals to us the truth about Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection as we read the Scriptures.
Okay. Yet I can’t help but feel a little bit concerned when I hear about “knowing all the truth about God“, and I am a bit concerned for two reasons: On one hand we have the world, secular people who claim that we cannot really know the truth about God, and everybody should hold on to their own truth, and then, in our churches, mostly mainline protestant churches, we claim a little bit the same, we say that God is love, but it’s like there is very little we can know beyond that and so there is not much to say, especially when we realize we don’t know much about love either. And then, on the other hand, you have people who are more traditionalists, and even fundamentalists, who claim we can know exactly the truth about God, and we actually know very well who God is, what God has done in history and even prehistory, they claim to know what is God’s will, and some of them say they can even foresee the end of times. And of course it’s dangerous. Both attitudes actually are dangerous. If we claim we cannot know the truth about God, then we let others define it for us, and impose it to us and it can lead to terrorism and wars. But even going that far, it’s dangerous because each time we claim we cannot know God or when we claim we know everything about God, each time it leads us to miss what God wants to say to us and make known to us.
So what are we to make of what Jesus tells us today? Well, I really like this idea that the Spirit is “guiding us into the truth”, It means first that yes, God wants us to know the truth, but we also see how the truth is not something we can possess or control or manipulate, rather it’s about the Spirit gently unfolding the truth for us, to guide us into deeper comprehension. It is actually the meaning of truth in Greek: aletheia is an uncovering, a lifting of the veil, and in this case a lifting of the veil on the Kingdom of God. We celebrate today the Holy Trinity and we see that what we believe is that God reveals who God is in the person of Jesus-Christ through the Holy Spirit. God reveals the things of God through God. God leads us into all truth with love, I almost picture the Holy Spirit holding our hand as we walk with him through the Scriptures. It is really God’s will for us to know God, that’s what the all Bible is about, God revealing God to people, but again it’s not a truth we are are able to control, we cannot use our knowledge about God to serve our own interests, exclude, judge or make war on people, or make money, gain social or political privilege. Throughout all his life, Jesus shows us that God reveals God only to the humble, those who seek God to be saved, those who seek God for the love of God. In fact, when the Spirit leads us into all truth, it’s not only a truth about God, it’s in the meantime a truth about ourselves. And that’s what I really enjoy about Lectio Divina: We listen to God so we can be open to notice what’s wrong in our lives, how we need to adjust our behavior, make changes etc. You know, it’s always surprising to see how holy people don’t think much of themselves, and sometimes we wonder if maybe there is a little bit of false modesty, but I think it makes sense because the more we understand God, God’s greatness and God’s holiness, the more we have to acknowledge our limitations and sinfulness. To me, it’s also what Jesus means when he says to his disciples “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now“. The depths of sin is going to be revealed to them through Jesus’s death, but he does not want to brutally overburden them.
So what are we to take away today? I see a few things:
– We need to remember that God wants us to know the truth God, and I know some of us have been schooled either to think there is nothing we can know for sure, or, on the other way around, that faith is to believe blindly, but look at what it does to our world when we just assume we know all the truth or that there is no truth at all: it leads to destruction or despair.It’s as bad to say that we cannot know God at all or that we know everything there is to know about God. We need to educate ourselves, read the Bible, ask questions, listen to each other and listen to God’s Spirit, and God will let us know what God wants us to know about God. Not all God’s plans and designs but what’s enough for us to live a holy life and grow in intimacy with God.
– The world needs to hear about God. We have talked about evangelization recently and how the Apostles started sharing the good news and how we should do the same. Yes. But too often evangelization has been understood as telling people: Believe in Jesus or else. Once someone stopped me on the street and asked me: If you were to die today, do you believe you’d go to heaven?Honestly, I didn’t know how to respond to that. Because of such offensive ways, some people have grown embarrassed to try to share their faith. But the example of the Apostles show us something completely different: They took the time to listen to people, and then to explain the Scriptures to them, leading them gently into the truth. They respected people, even when they disagreed. They were the ones who were persecuted, not the ones harassing others.
– God wants us also to know the truth about ourselves, because when we learn about God, we automatically learn about ourselves. We have to be ready to let God guide us, correct us, reorient us. Most of the things God has to say to us are deeply personal: It’s not about what our neighbor or our spouse does wrong, it’s about us. Not about what God wants our neighbor or our spouse to do, it’s about us. It’s also about serving and helping concretely those around us. A pastor asked: We come to church because we’re looking forward to see our friends, but do we ask God to show us the people sitting next to us who need help? That’s also the truth the Spirit want to reveal to us. The Spirit knows what’s in every heart, so we can ask the Spirit to show us who we should turn to today, and it may not be the most obvious.