Pastor Darren: Well, today I'm talking about sequels.
Pastor Darren: Sequels, one of the best cultural conversations we can have.
Pastor Darren: What are the best movie sequels?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Do we wrestle over this or is that just me?
Pastor Darren: Name a few.
Pastor Darren: What's your favorite movie sequel?
Pastor Darren: Do you got any?
Pastor Darren: Godfather 2, the classic.
Pastor Darren: What else?
unknown: Empire Strikes Back.
Pastor Darren: Empire Strikes Back.
Pastor Darren: Amen to that one.
Pastor Darren: Yeah.
Pastor Darren: What say it again?
unknown: Jurassic Park.
Pastor Darren: Jurassic Park?
Pastor Darren: Yeah, they did a pretty good job, although number one was pretty darn good.
Pastor Darren: Right, right, right.
Pastor Darren: Others?
Pastor Darren: Shrek?
Pastor Darren: Oh my goodness.
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: Rotten Tomatoes.
Pastor Darren: They're top three.
Pastor Darren: Are you ready for this?
Pastor Darren: Kind of uh tainted or coated by being a little bit of a newer uh uh um website.
Pastor Darren: Number one, Toy Story Two.
Pastor Darren: Not bad.
Pastor Darren: Not right.
Pastor Darren: Number two, Wallace and Gromit, Vengeance Most Foul.
Pastor Darren: Yeah?
Pastor Darren: All right, we got some fans out there.
Pastor Darren: Then uh more of a uh dramatic uh film from France, Three Colors, uh Red.
Pastor Darren: I don't know.
Pastor Darren: Have any of you watched that?
Pastor Darren: That series of three in the colors of the French flag, blue, white, and red.
Pastor Darren: Anyway, too artsy for us, I guess.
Pastor Darren: Too artsy for me, clearly.
Pastor Darren: Uh all right, IMDB, a little newer website, kind of a little more in the industry, Godfather 2, right, which we named.
Pastor Darren: Are you ready for this one?
Pastor Darren: Rocky 2.
Pastor Darren: You know, he wins that one.
Pastor Darren: Spoiler alert.
Pastor Darren: Yeah.
Pastor Darren: If you haven't seen that, that's on you.
Pastor Darren: All right, here, and here's one I was a little surprised: The Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers.
Pastor Darren: Oh, good one?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: It's sort of weird.
Pastor Darren: When you go look it up on the internet, uh uh you find you you'll be reminded of ones you're like, oh yeah, sure.
Pastor Darren: Uh the only one, uh, Rolling Stone did a little survey and they listed as one of theirs Terminator 2.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: We like Arnie as a good guy.
Pastor Darren: Maybe just me.
Pastor Darren: Maybe the rest of y'all are like, let him be the bad guy.
Pastor Darren: All right.
Pastor Darren: Well, I'm sure he'll be back.
Pastor Darren: There you go.
Pastor Darren: So pretty provocative uh endeavor, the sequel, right?
Pastor Darren: Because you you've got this built-in audience of people, presumably a movie people liked, or otherwise you wouldn't be making a sequel.
Pastor Darren: So you got this built-in audience.
Pastor Darren: You think, all right, we make this, we know we're gonna make the money we need to make to be able to make more.
Pastor Darren: On the other hand, you've got very high, or should I say narrow, expectations.
Pastor Darren: It better be this movie right here, or I will shun it publicly.
Pastor Darren: Am I right?
Pastor Darren: If it doesn't live up to the first one, we are very, very critical, at least a lot of us are.
Pastor Darren: Uh so I bring this up because the Holy Spirit is kind of a sequel, right?
Pastor Darren: What we have in John 14 is the promise of the sequel to Jesus' life, which is the presence of God, not as Jesus, but as the Holy Spirit that will arrive.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Verse 16, and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you forever.
Pastor Darren: The advocate, though, that's the Holy Spirit right there.
Pastor Darren: This is what we live out in our Christian calendar.
Pastor Darren: Forty days of Lent, not including Sabbath, right?
Pastor Darren: Lands us on Good Friday, and then as at Easter, 50 days waiting for the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.
Pastor Darren: That's the season we're in right now.
Pastor Darren: Two more weeks, and then we celebrate Pentecost with the arrival of the Holy Spirit.
Pastor Darren: But the bottom line is we have a sequel to Jesus.
Pastor Darren: We have the Holy Spirit going to be with us.
Pastor Darren: You know, in the Bible study this week, we actually sometimes this happens.
Pastor Darren: We landed on the the same passage as I'm preaching on, and uh, we got into a conversation about the Trinity, right?
Pastor Darren: God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and and how that all works.
Pastor Darren: Have you have you had that conversation slash debate?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Have you wrestled with trying to understand how all of that works?
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: The God, the God Jesus thing or the fully human, fully divine thing, that alone is tough, right?
Pastor Darren: Because being God kind of means not human, right?
Pastor Darren: Humans, we know mortality, we know limitations, and God doesn't know those things, right?
Pastor Darren: And so it's just how does that all work?
Pastor Darren: And now we're talking about the Holy Spirit showing up.
Pastor Darren: How does that work?
Pastor Darren: And then are we not monotheistic anymore?
Pastor Darren: Now do we have multiple gods?
Pastor Darren: Have you had this debate before?
Pastor Darren: Have you wrestled with it?
Pastor Darren: Or is it just me and Stephen?
Pastor Darren: Okay.
Pastor Darren: I guess it's you and me, brother.
Pastor Darren: That's it.
Pastor Darren: Nobody else is like uh motivated here.
Pastor Darren: No, when uh Christianity first became a nationalized religion, the leaders were tasked with solving this dilemma, I guess, this question of how that all works.
Pastor Darren: So you know it was a meaningful question to them.
Pastor Darren: Super quick history of it is early Christianity, like first and second century uh CE after after Christ was uh uh um on walking this world, uh, there was talk about how we experienced this active presence of God, but not really distinctly described as a divine person.
Pastor Darren: Then in the third century, uh some some of the uh early church fathers started talking about the Holy Spirit and describing uh having three different entities in this one uh uh God understanding.
Pastor Darren: And then the Council of Nicaea, mostly it was about defining Jesus, but it set the stage for the Council of Constantinople in 381, where they solidified this uh divinity of the Holy Spirit, but it was not without its arguments.
Pastor Darren: It was not without uh a little bit of uh debate and even gnashing of teeth, largely because it comes down to belief.
Pastor Darren: There's this mystery about all of it.
Pastor Darren: We can't know a hundred percent how that all works.
Pastor Darren: That's kind of why we call it faith.
Pastor Darren: Now, there are some really good metaphors and understandings of all of this that will be helpful to you if you really want to dig in and if that will feed your faith and your journey.
Pastor Darren: But I did think it was worth mentioning a bit of a concern.
Pastor Darren: We don't really want to get lost in those questions and in those debates.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: Take a look at the verse right before it.
Pastor Darren: Uh, the right before the verse where he talks about the advocate on his way, it's verse 15.
Pastor Darren: If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
Pastor Darren: Maybe you can see how that phrase is important, but also could get lost in the debate of this verse that comes right after it.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: We're talking about what we need to do, keep the commandments, but all of a sudden we're arguing, debating, trying to find verse 16.
Pastor Darren: There is room and encouragement to do the work of theology, to try to figure out what the Holy Spirit means to you, especially if it will strengthen your faith.
Pastor Darren: But if it comes at the expense of the verse before it, to get lost, right, in in what will always be a bit of a faith mystery, we're in danger of maybe missing the larger point.
Pastor Darren: If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
Pastor Darren: In today's words, do the things I've told you to do, bring the comfort, fight for the justice for all of God's children.
Pastor Darren: Share the love you've been given to share.
Pastor Darren: You can enjoy the stretching that comes with wrestling with these questions, but don't get stuck on verse 16 and how it all works at the expense of verse 15.
Pastor Darren: Look at verse 21 again.
Pastor Darren: They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.
Pastor Darren: Reveal myself to them.
Pastor Darren: I would probably write it a little bit differently than our gospel writer John did.
Pastor Darren: But what we see here is that God's revealing comes to us when we live the life.
Pastor Darren: Right?
Pastor Darren: That intimacy that we're seeking.
Pastor Darren: I want to know the creator of all that is, I want to know the strength, I want to know the comfort, I want to know that there's something bigger than me that I can live into if we are wanting at that.
Pastor Darren: The revealing comes by living the life, by doing the things that Jesus taught us to do, by being in service to this creation and to the inhabitants.
Pastor Darren: You know, instead of this inner and outer debating on the essence or the authority of the Holy Spirit, we ought to be looking at the role of the Holy Spirit.
Pastor Darren: What is the Holy Spirit doing other than being the presence of God amongst us, letting us know we're not alone as we're trying to bring wholeness and justice and comfort and peace to the world?
Pastor Darren: We aren't doing that alone.
Pastor Darren: And then Jesus uses this word advocate for the Holy Spirit.
Pastor Darren: Isn't that good news?
Pastor Darren: That we have an advocate, right?
Pastor Darren: Somebody who is arguing for us is on our side.
Pastor Darren: Who doesn't need somebody on their side, especially someone from on high in tap with all the blessings and the joy and the love that is amidst this world?
Pastor Darren: Who doesn't need a reminder that they're worthy in God's eyes?
Pastor Darren: Here on Mother's Day, I think of that idyllic image of motherhood, loving our children unconditionally, even when they're a little unlovable.
Pastor Darren: There I said it.
Pastor Darren: All right?
Pastor Darren: Only those of you who've ever been children of someone are allowed to be mad at me on that one.
Pastor Darren: Now keep in mind, we're just human.
Pastor Darren: We've never really mastered this whole loving our even our children unconditionally.
Pastor Darren: In fact, some mothers and fathers have really struggled with it.
Pastor Darren: We are just mere humans, but as Christians, our belief is that the Holy Spirit, being part of God, is fully that affirmation, fully that unconditional love, that guidance, that strength, that peace, that comfort, that love.
Pastor Darren: This is how we understand the Holy Spirit's presence amongst us.
Pastor Darren: We can debate the essence, but let's not confuse the role that the Holy Spirit is playing in our lives, that role of reminding us that we are children of God and worthy of that love.
Pastor Darren: And the beauty and joy of that is we get to be the ones that are sharing it, sharing that message in our words and in our deeds.
Pastor Darren: Maybe we should be recognizing something right now.
Pastor Darren: This the series theme is stories that matter.
Pastor Darren: They matter because they are stories here in the season of Easter that are helping us to understand the resurrection that we celebrate at Easter.
Pastor Darren: Helps us to understand what that resurrection might mean.
Pastor Darren: There's stories of how Jesus was explaining his impending absence, which for us today helps us understand that absence that is uh real for us.
Pastor Darren: What we should start to recognize is that that story would always have a sequel.
Pastor Darren: He was always going to be crucified.
Pastor Darren: That sequel that follows Jesus is the Holy Spirit.
Pastor Darren: But isn't it also us?
Pastor Darren: Wasn't it always supposed to be us?
Pastor Darren: The Holy Spirit has the role, the presence of God that we can experience here.
Pastor Darren: But we should see our role too.
Pastor Darren: To follow the commandments, to love God, to love neighbor.
Pastor Darren: And in doing so, we become the presence of God as well.
Pastor Darren: Do we not?
Pastor Darren: We become God's love for other people.
Pastor Darren: When we love others as God loves them, are we not offering that experience of God and God's love?
Pastor Darren: We are the sequel.
Pastor Darren: And let's face it, we've uh we've made our world uh a lot to handle.
Pastor Darren: We've given ourselves a lot to wrestle with.
Pastor Darren: Our world can use a sequel with our rising cost of living, our increasing isolation through technology, wars for money and control, weird relationships with the truth, lack of action to help our climate.
Pastor Darren: People really need this sequel.
Pastor Darren: So let's give it to them.
Pastor Darren: Amen.