A Total Lack of Clarity

John 14:23-29 May 25, 2025 Easter 6



What we’re reading today and have been the last couple of weeks

is a small part of monologue by Jesus to the disciples,

at the last supper. It’s called the farewell discourse,

it’s Jesus telling the disciples about what will happen

and what they should do after Jesus dies

and when they continue the ministry without him.



Now when someone is about to leave,

for any length of time, there are usually some specific things

we tend to share, like where the important papers are,

emergency numbers, when to take the garbage out.

You know, practical things.



But none of the things in Jesus farewell discourse are practical.

Jesus speaks for three chapters and most of it is metaphors.

He talks about vines and branches, a lot of glorifying,

houses and rooms, and all sorts of other unclear metaphors.

John’s complicated sentence structures

and poetic language doesn’t help understanding either.



Jesus last Supper would seem like a perfect time to tell everyone

exactly what would be happening, and exactly what

to do, how to organize, what are the priorities for Jesus,

but there just seem to be no clear and simple answers

here in his last monologue to his chosen ones.

It’s very unclear.



For people who want clear and simple answers

in their religion, Jesus farewell discourse in John

can be enormously frustrating.



But sometimes I wonder if this is exactly how Jesus wanted it:

unclear.



Some people think that clarity is what religion is all about,

some think that if you admit you’re unclear on things,

then you don’t have faith.



Christians have spent a lot of the last two thousand years

trying to get everything correct.

Trying to set out the perfect doctrine and rules.

Even Lutherans have felt like we’ve got the whole thing

all sealed up in a book and we have a special kind of clarity.



But then our world changes, our culture changes, our

understandings change, the questions we ask change,

and what we thought was absolutely clear is not completely clear any more.

Some people take this as weakness, but is it?



Even something basic, like doctrine around baptism,

That has changed in the ELCA in the last 20-30 years.

They used to teach in the Lutheran church that

everyone who wasn’t baptized was basically condemned to hell.

But as time has gone on, people have realized that this

is contrary to the doctrine of justification by grace,

and it just doesn’t jive with the merciful and loving God

that we find in Jesus and in the scriptures.



Even when I was in seminary just 20 years ago

people who said that they didn’t think that the unbaptized

were going to hell were kind of seen as and radicals,

but now it’s pretty much the norm in the ELCA.



Were people bad for thinking differently back then?

No. We just have more clarity now.

And in 20 years, there will be something that

we believe now that we will have to change because we

will have a little more clarity.



Some people hate this feeling of unclarity.

To some people it feels like shifting sands.

Some people say that changing what we believe

or watering down our beliefs and convictions.



But what if this is just how Jesus wanted it?

For us to be flexible enough to adapt to a changing world?

What if Jesus wants us to have less clarity not more.

What if Jesus wants us to be able to admit

that we’ve rethought it and weighed in new understanding

and now we’ve changed our mind?

Or maybe that sometimes we don’t know what the answer is,

and we don’t know what to do, or how to do it

and that we don’t know exactly what God wants at all times.



Maybe Jesus wants less absolute clarity from

his followers and not more.

I was reading something about a man named John Wycliffe.

He was a Catholic priest in the 1300’s — 200 years before Luther,

He translated the bible into the vernacular,

words that regular people could understand

it’s called the Wycliffe Bible which you can still read today.

He spoke out against the Pope and the

extravagant lives of the clergy and the churches,

the authority of scripture, and the understanding of the Eucharist.

He died of natural causes, but one hundred years

after he died— so in like 1400 – he was declared a heretic,

by the Roman Catholic church, and his body was dug up and

his bones burned and the ashes thrown into a river.

Say what you will, but that is absolute clarity.



Those people who had his bones dug up

were very clear about what God’s mind was,

and what Jesus wanted, and they believed that John Wycliffe

was so far away from it, that they wanted his hundred

year dead body burned and thrown in the river.

That was clarity.



And that kind of clarity doesn’t seem holy or faithful to me.

It seems like it doesn’t allow for the Holy Spirit to

enter in and change hearts, and minds, and actions.


When you think about it,

clarity is really the thing that leads to

so much violence and so much of our embarrassing past.

The inquisition, the crusades, the destruction of Native

American populations, Slavery, the Holocaust, segregation,

everyone was so clear on these things. So convicted that

they killed people and started long, bloody wars about them.

Everyone at every time was sure they knew what God wanted

and what the right order of things was.



Clarity is still a problem today.

Religious intolerance, wars and persecution.

Christians in this country and elsewhere are still sticking with

racism, homophobia, misogyny, they’re trying to silence people

who have other thoughts through exclusion, slander and violence

because they have clarity about what they think God wants.

Churches that preach so much hate and condemnation

against LGBT people do it with absolute clarity.

Project 2025, which comes out of a Christian/political think-tank,

is a plan of clarity.



All of these convictions in our world that hurt so many people,

are born out of a sense of clarity.

Absolute clarity about what God wants, what Jesus stood for,

and what they believe the Holy Spirit is leading us to.



Maybe the problem is not the changing culture,

but the church’s stubborn need for absolute clarity?

Maybe “unclear” is just how Jesus wants it.



The one clear thing that Jesus says in his farewell discourse

is what we read today, Jesus promises that God would

send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate.

Jesus promises the Spirit is coming and would

be with them and teach them.


But the best we can do to describe the Holy Spirit

is to use metaphors. We know the Spirit as a dove,

a beam of light, the breath that moved over the waters,

Wisdom that dances in the entrance gates, the wind.


I think that wind is a good metaphor.

You can’t see where it came from or where it’s going

but still you can feel it. You know it’s been there.

But you can’t control it.



We like to think we can control the Spirit sometimes,

but like trying to contain the wind it’s a futile attempt

I think that’s why maybe the church has lost its impact

in the last few decades.

We’ve tried to put the Spirit in a neat little package.

We’ve tried to domesticate it and make it predictable.

We’ve tried to institutionalize it. Make its ways clear.

But the Spirit doesn’t work that way.



Early on here on Hilton Head, I was asked to do a boat blessing

at the marina. They laid out the plans with me.

There was going to be a parade of boats and I was going to bless them

through a bullhorn as they went by. It was planned for months.

But the day came and it was too windy to do anything,

so we just stood on the dock and did the boat blessing

from there and then we had lunch.

Everyone took it in stride though.



Because the sailors knew you can’t tell the wind

to blow one way or another, you can’t tell it to stop blowing long

enough for us to complete our plans.

The only thing you do is just figure out which way the wind

is blowing and how fast, and YOU adjust your world to IT,

instead of the other way around.



So Jesus clearly promised us the wind.

a complete lack of clarity at most times.

And a Spirit to guide us through it.

We’ve been reading parts of the end of Revelation.

Another of John’s writings.

In it we get visions of a life to come.

A new heaven and a new earth.

A place of eternal daylight where the crystal clear river

of the water of life flows. Where every tear is wiped away,

where death and dying will be no more.

Where mourning and crying will be no more.

It’s a vision that one day, earth will be like heaven,

and we all will all resort to love and understanding

instead of intolerance and contempt.

That we will one day live in peace together.

One day there will be no place for war or violence.

It will be a place where every person is housed and fed.

Where there will be no place for racism, and hatred.

One day, we will all follow Jesus words

of love and grace and forgiveness and not

even give it a second thought.



And maybe it’s okay that I cannot clearly see

the way to that place right now.

Maybe it’s okay that we don’t understand

our way out of this mess that we’re currently in,

and that it’s not clear how we will ever get to that vision

of God’s peaceful kingdom.



Maybe we just have to and give up our will, our clarity,

and our preconceived notions.

Maybe we have to just throw up our hands and say,

we don’t know what we’re doing.

but we trust that God is going to get us there somehow.



Maybe the most holy and faithful

thing we can say is “I don’t know.”

And then actually let the Holy Spirit guide us.



Maybe this is just how Jesus wants it.