Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
Well, if there's a theme to today's readings, it's gotta be "Do the right thing." In our Prayer of the Day, you heard me pray that the Spirit would inspire us to "think those things which are right, and by [God's] goodness help us to do them." In the reading from Acts, we heard Paul's warning to repent, to stop doing the wrong thing, because the day is coming when God will send Jesus to judge the world. The first letter of Peter, our second reading, is full of "do what is right, keep your conscience clear, do good" commands, and in our Gospel, Jesus says, "keep my commandments." (Which, by the way, is the commandment of Maundy Thursday - to love our neighbour as Jesus has loved us.) There isn't anyone who could look at these readings and think, oh well, I'll just do what I feel like, I'll just do what I want. Nope - the readings are pretty clear: do the right thing.
Now that would be all fine and dandy if doing the right thing was easy. But it isn't always. Sometimes it's incredibly difficult even to know what's the right and good thing to do. For instance, everybody knows that smoking is bad for you. And when you see a child smoking, it's easy to know what to do - you take the cigarettes away from them and make them stop. But what if the person smoking is an adult? On the one hand, the right thing to do is to get them to quit smoking. On the other hand, that person is an adult and capable of making their own decisions, and the right thing to do is to respect them and affirm their capacity for responsible decision-making by saying nothing. Which option is the "doing good" one?
Or what about giving money to people on the street? On the one hand, the right thing to do is to give them money so they can buy some food so that they don't starve. On the other hand, they might not buy food - in fact, they might buy alcohol or drugs, and it is definitely not right to help them do that. But then, back to the first hand, the right thing to do is to avoid stereotyping and risk giving them money in case they really do need it for food. Of course, back to the other hand... you can see that the arguments could go back and forth for quite some time. So which is the loving and good and right thing to do?
Or, my final example, what if you have a senior parent who is very ill and requires around-the-clock care, but you have your own children and a full-time job to look after? Do you put your parent in a nursing facility, where they're separated from their loving and caring family, but receive good medical care? Or do you take them into your home, where they will be among family, but where your children will receive less of your attention and your work will suffer because you're tired all the time? There's no easy answer - there's no automatic "here's the right thing to do, the thing that will show that you're a good Christian." There's plenty of room for doing the wrong thing.
And for most of us, this fear of doing the wrong thing provokes a tremendous amount of anxiety in us. How do I know what the right thing is? And what if I mistakenly do the wrong thing? What if I don't follow Jesus' commandments, and what if what I'm doing isn't loving my neighbour? What if I hurt somebody while I'm trying to do the right thing? What if God turns away from me because I didn't make the right decision?
Well, Peter and the writers of the Gospel of John offer us some reassurance by telling us that, in fact, we do not make these decisions on our own. That actually, we have a conscience which guides us to do what's right. Peter actually uses the word "conscience," but what Peter's getting at is what we call, in church-speak, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, otherwise known as the Paraclete, the Advocate, the Helper, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Lord - this Spirit, sent by God on account of Jesus, helps us to make the right decisions and to keep Jesus' commandments. It helps us to love our neighbour. And, it lets us know when we're not. It's the GPS unit that beeps at us when we're going off-track. It's the compass that shows us which way is north.
But sometimes, on occasions like in my first few examples, the Spirit seems hard to find and hard to hear. We don't always know what decision the Spirit would have us make because, let's face it, the days of direct revelation are pretty much over. Very few of us actually "hear" the voice of God telling us to do something - I know I've never literally "heard" a word from God. I've felt nudges here, and faint leanings there, but it's never clear. And in fact, we ought to be wary of those who claim to hear, in a pronounced and distinguishable fashion, the word of God for all people. The Holy Spirit doesn't generally inspire people that way. It gives us operating principles, such as killing is bad and love is good, but it doesn't usually get down to specifics.
Which is downright frustrating, if you ask me. How are we supposed to do the right thing if we can't hear the Holy Spirit speaking to us? What can we do to get the Holy Spirit to inspire us more clearly? Where can we go to find this Helper who will guide us? The answers aren't clear, but what does start happening when we ask these questions, when we don't hear the Spirit all that clearly, is that we think that the problem must be us. We're not listening hard enough, or we're not spiritually disciplined enough - that's why we don't know what the right thing to do is. And so we make the effort to listen harder, to pray more, to read the Bible as often as possible, to search out those deep and meaningful spiritual experiences and retreats. But, the thing is, those things just aren't likely to work. Not because those things are bad - they're not bad, if you don't do any of them, I encourage you to start. But when I say that they're not likely to work, it's because none of the things we do to get closer to God are going to help us.
Yup, you've guessed it by now - the desire to do the right thing, the striving to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit, to become more spiritual - all these things can far too easily become works that we do, and not something that God does for us. When we struggle to do the right thing, and suffer and crucify ourselves trying to make the right decision, we are forgetting that no suffering or death of ourselves can replace the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. That doesn't mean we aren't to deny ourselves and put others first, but we aren't to carry it so far that our own self-denial overshadows what has been done through Christ. It's not our job to replace what Christ has already done. When we agonize over our choices, and God tells us to live and choose the easier path, which God sometimes does, we aren't to deny God's gift of life to us and instead choose the more difficult path. We aren't, to be blunt, to carry the fate of the world or our work or our family on our backs. That is God's responsibility.
So how do we get on the right track? How do we go about living a life of doing the right thing while allowing God to be in control of the whole affair? We go back to baptism. And in baptism, we are reminded that God does the most important things for us. In baptism, we are drowned in the water as a reminder that God sent Jesus to die so that our sins would be wiped out and we would be reconciled to God. And then we are raised out of that water just as God raised the dead Jesus and gave him new life so that we, too, could have new life and trust in the hope of life over death. "Baptism... now saves you," writes Peter in his letter, "as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." In baptism, God sends the Holy Spirit, your conscience, the Advocate and Helper, to be God's ongoing presence and love for you, among you, abiding in you. Notice how that works - we don't actually do any of the things in baptism that save us - God does them. You don't need to go out searching for the Spirit, or working to make your ears listen harder - God actually sends the Spirit to you, to live in you, to speak clearly to your inner voice.
So, to go back to the beginning, how do we do the right thing? How do we know how to love, do right and good when it's not obvious? We don't. Not for sure. But the Holy Spirit working in us does. And that means that when it come to tough decisions, we make the best decision that we can, and then we do two things. First, we trust that God is working in us through the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus Christ promised God would. In fact, our psalm for today spoke to that when we sung, "Bless our God, you peoples... who holds our souls in life, and will not allow our feet to slip." So that's the first thing we do - trust that God is actually working good through and in us. And the second thing we do is that when we've gotten off-track (an inevitability for us), we remember that we are still loved and forgiven because of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection.
We don't need to be fearful or anxious or afraid that we're not making the right choice. Peter says it outright, in fact, "Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated." God will not strike us down with lightening for being wrong. We do not have to fear. Instead, we are called simply to put our hope and trust in God, who loves us, and who accomplishes good and through us does the right thing. Amen.<
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