10:30 am, Sun, May 19, 2024 ~ FBCA

(Acts 2:1-21; John 14:16-17, 25-26; 15:26-27; 16:7-15)

Last month, while visiting her older daughter, Sharon happened to step on a nail and get a little puncture in her foot. As she came down the ladder from the attic, she called out to seven-year-old Amelia, “I hurt my foot, I need a band aid.”

“I’m on it!” declared Amelia seriously, and went into action to get Nana bandaged up.

The grandchildren have been trained to have the spirit of a First Responder, thanks to Sharon White, with her years of training and experience. As I studied John’s words of Jesus over the past couple weeks, a Bible scholar, Caroline Lewis, talked about the Holy Spirit as the First Responder to the human condition. This grabbed me. In these days of deep personal needs among most people on earth, we need spiritual first responders more than ever. God responds to the creatures of earth when they cry out. And, we are here to join the first responding team of the Spirit.

So I turn to words of Christ about the Spirit of God. First, remembering God abides with us, in us. Jesus said, I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever… You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you. A way for God to be with us forever, to abide with people, to be in humanity.

The title for the Holy Spirit here is interesting, the Greek word is Parakletos, transliterated Paraclete. In our usual English translation, Advocate. In other Bible translations it can be Helper, or Comforter. It means one who comes alongside, goes with you. Years ago, a girl had been to Sunday school and came home saying they were getting a quilt. “Getting a quilt?” Her father wondered what this was about. She replied, “The teacher said, the Comforter will come.’

The Comforter, the Helper, the Advocate, the Paraclete is the promised presence of God with people. Multiple people at once. God with us in an unlimited way. We celebrate Jesus as God With Us. So is the Spirit, and God with the world. Our awareness is broadened.

And so God can indeed be known as our first responder. One who is nearby, ever present, always available, in any time of trouble or need, big or small.

Years ago, minister Robert Matthews told me the story of a man who had some troubles, was working at being a Christian, but who had anxieties and concerns about getting help from this God he was trying to believe in. Rev. Matthews said he comforted the fellow by teaching him the doctrine of the Holy Spirit - the available presence of God. God is real and is there, at any second of your lifetime, where you are. He said that man was quite encouraged by this.

There are four so-called Paraclete sayings of Jesus in these chapters of John’s Gospel. The second one is also in chapter 14, with Jesus saying, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you. The Spirit teaches and reminds us. Reminds us of everything Jesus showed us.

The old hymn, ‘ Come, Thou Everlasting Spirit,’ at one point names the Spirit the ‘Remembrancer Divine.’ I think the poet must have made up that word, remembrancer, as poets often do. But it is a cool word. Someone whose job it is to remind you everything you could stand to remember. Sounds a bit like ‘dancer’ too, so I like to imagine how the Holy Spirit dances beautifully with the fumbling steps of my human spirit. I don’t like the song, ‘Jesus, Take the Wheel,’ and these feet do not know how to dance, but I like the image of the Spirit taking the lead in a dance with my soul.

A few months ago, Kevin, Shauna, Angela and I took the basic First Aid course. I wonder what I remember now? We got no book to work through and keep. We had only our minds and bodies, that one day, to learn what to do in emergencies. I think I need reminders.

People who are trained are capable and can be very helpful. That is what First Aid training is for, all the way up to Medical First Responding, not to mention other skill sets like Mental Health First Aid, which Sharon and I took about twelve years ago.

Sharon is a well-trained, very experienced, Medical First Responder. It is really a personal story for her to tell, of a childhood experience in Scotland, when she witnessed an accident on the street involving a motorcycle. None of the bystanders seemed to know how to respond, or do anything! People just stood around, at first.

Sharon decided to become someone who knows how to respond.

In the fellowship of Jesus, we have this calling to be those who know how to respond, when people have a spiritual crisis, emotional upset, a traumatic moment. So for all such things, great and small, we can learn from Jesus, from Jesus’ Spirit, our Rabbi.

As with anything, training can be in three categories: One, is the teaching. Two, training exercises. Three, practice - actually doing it, using your skills in real life. It is worth evaluating the activities of our Church here, in terms of how we are being trained to care for others, to be spiritual first responders. The first steps might be One, notice and celebrate how we already do respond as spiritual first aiders. Two, get motivated by what more is possible for us to do, cooperating with the First Responder Holy Spirit. Three, discover what our next training could be. Sharon has worked on a curriculum for trauma-informed pastoral care. That could be so helpful to us.

The third Paraclete saying tells us the Spirit ‘testifies’ in us. In essence, it is our experience of the Sacred that tells us God is real. A Gospel hymn says of the risen Saviour, ‘You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart.’ So the first responder to our doubts and discouragements is the actual God we sometimes wonder about.

I’m not going to spend much time on this third Spirit saying. I suppose I should requote some of it: When the Advocate comes… he will testify on my behalf. You are also to testify… The whole ‘communicating cosmos’ tells us of our God. Our belief, faith, trust, confidence, what all we call it, grows from moments that speak to us, even speak within us. We are deeply moved, moved within. And we share this, which helps move others in good directions.

Fourthly and finally, the Spirit is the presence of Jesus, giving us life. Along with the story of the Holy Spirit filling the people, told in Acts 2, we have many other Bible moments, before and after, pointing to the Breath of Life, the Wind of God. A contemporary worship song begins, ‘This is the air I breathe; this is air I breathe. Your holy presence, living in me.’

With the story of the Christian Pentecost event, we see again God the Spirit is air, wind, breath. God, like the P in CPR: P for Pulmonary, about your lungs and breathing.

A person was asked on their hundredth birthday - of course - what is the secret of such a long life? ‘Just keep breathing!’

To live is to breathe, among other things. In Psalm 104, the creatures of the earth are given life and breath… and when they lose breath they die. As one of my deacons in Digby used to say, “That breath, that last breath you just took: it was a gift from God; you were not promised it.”

We sometimes think about our whole life as a gift. Alongside the physical action of breathing, clearing CO2 out of our bloodstream, and taking O2 into it, is the breath of the Spirit, filling our own human spirits. The God we declare that we know in Jesus becomes present to us ‘in Spirit.’ The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus. As Rev. Dr. John Bartol, of Winsdor, used to say, the Holy Spirit is like another Jesus. One who is available to all of us now, at all moments, everywhere upon earth, all at once.

And we rejoice that God, the Spirit, Jesus, wants life for us, abundant life. Jesus spoke so often about giving life, using many metaphors. He is the source of fresh water, the light of our inner lives, the bread to feed our souls, the shepherd to guide us always, the grapevine of our fruitful branches. Jesus, my Life, my Breath.

As terrible moments come and go in our lives, as great challenges come along, one after another, or as dull dreariness sometimes goes on and on, may the Breath of Life fill us. The Spirit, the First Responder. God, with us. God, to teach and train us. God, to prove to us what’s real. God, to make Jesus clear and present to us, with us. God is Good. God is Spirit. God is love. God is with us. Alleluia!