The Presence of God

The greatest privilege we could ever receive is accessible to all and it doesn’t depend on anyone else, any situation, any amount of stuff, our birth, or even our capacity. The greatest privilege, from which all other good privilege flows, is the presence of God. If God is love, if God is wisdom, if God created and sustains everything and is generous in His giving, if God creates all purpose and potential, if God is eternal, what do we lack if we have him? You might be trying to come up with something, but as long as I thought I could only come up with lesser versions of what we receive from him. The hard part is that I might theologically understand this, and my head might be able to explain it, but my body and spirit don’t always believe it. We still run into those moments where we fight for more time, more stuff, better relationships, our purpose and so much more. Yet again, these are the lesser realities of what God gives - and I know that and I have experienced that. Jesus says today, “I do not give to you as the world gives to you”. Jesus gives us far more than the world gives, because he gives us himself, which is everything.

One of the first big struggles we run up against is that we are missing the physical. We might think “if only Jesus was here with us physically”. “If only he was here to touch and heal me, to multiply the loaves, to gather the flock”, yet Jesus tells us today that we should be happy he is going, that he has left because he is going to the powerful Father and he is sending us the Holy Spirit. Do we always feel thankful for this? I know my struggle. But we should be thankful that Jesus left. And here we come against two amazing mysteries:

First, because Jesus is with the Father, Jesus has lifted up our humanity to join in and become a part of God Himself. This means that even right now, we are being drawn into a unity and closeness with God, the creator, and giver of everything. We can’t even begin to understand the potency of this potential. I guess sometimes that is the issue. We can understand an apple or a raise, or a house, but how can we ever understand the infinite, the limitless? We sure can’t see it. It is interesting that most of humanity's images of infinity also represent nothing. The circle is also a zero, space is also a vacuum, and infinity on a graph always just seems to disappear. When you can’t see or understand the grandeur of something, it takes faith to approach it, to follow it, to walk its slopes.

The second amazing reality of Jesus leaving us is that he sends us His Holy Spirit. Now, it isn’t Jesus walking beside us, sleeping in the next room, walking in the neighboring town, speaking in our square, what we have been given is more. Now, we have the Holy Spirit walking in us, resting in us, speaking to us, guiding us, empowering us. There is no more distance, there is no more us and him, there is oneness. All those things that we are longing for Jesus to do with His physical body in our midst, the Holy Spirit is now longing to do in our body, spirit, and mind. Again, we run up against a problem, we know our physical limitations, even if we might try to keep control. We know so much of what we want from Jesus that we can’t do. Yet again, we are running up against the struggles of faith. The world and sin have limited us and we know those consequences, but if God is limitless good and God lives in us, there is now a door through those barriers, those limits and we need to enter through. We too often stare and contemplate the walls that have stopped us, rather than allow Jesus to show us beyond it.

Both of these amazing realities I call mysteries because we need faith and trust to see them, to perceive them, and to live them. They are not evident by what the world shows us, but through faith, we can see their evidence and grow in them.

People in Jesus’ day were not immune to these struggles. In our first reading, Jesus is telling them and us about real food - which is His body and blood. He is trying to give them real food that lasts, that fills their hunger forever, that sustains their life into eternity. At a plain physical level this is hard to grasp, is Jesus calling us to be cannibals? Of course, if people thought that they would leave him. Too often we can just look for the plain realities and miss the forest full of trees, too often we can see the greatness of what is right before us. Though many disciples left, many stayed in faith. They would see more and more what Jesus meant, as Jesus served and fed them at the last supper, as Jesus gave up his body and blood on the cross, as Jesus' body was transformed and lifted up at the resurrection and ascension. These are still amazing mysteries, but they are beginning to help us understand the grandeur and wonder of God’s infinite potential and God will do that for us too if we stay, if we follow, and if we work in faith.

After we have dealt with the struggle of this moment, we can realize what Jesus is offering us. When he offers us his body and blood as real food and food that lasts. He is offering us His life, He is offering us His eternal life that will sustain us forever. But that needs to be our source and sustenance. Jesus doesn’t ignore our need for food as it was only the last chapter where he fed the 5000, but he is telling us that we should be seeking, longing, and hungering after greater food and it should be His life that sustains us through everything because it is the only thing that can sustain us through and beyond everything. Notice that Jesus is already offering us His life, He is already offering us eternity. That means that we are not waiting for our resurrection to know eternal life, we are already in it if we feed on Him. We can already live in, experience, and see it if Jesus is our sustenance. I know this is hard to understand, but it takes faith.

Jesus does simplify it a little for us because next He tells us that His words are eternal life. This is a little easier to perceive. I can understand the idea of ingesting and being sustained by words, even if my body and spirit can too often reject it. I can better see where words of affirmation or hope have made a difference. Though if I am honest here, I would realize that outside of Jesus’ words often this affirmation or hope was shallow and short-lived. This is what the disciples confess to. Jesus says “aren’t you going to leave me?” and they reply, “we can’t leave you, where else would we go, no one else gives us the words of eternal life”. Jesus’ words are not like others in the world, because they have substance, they have substance greater than any food, or anything else we take in. The substance of Jesus’ words is the Holy Spirit and life itself. So, when we listen to Scripture, when we listen to Jesus, when we pray and take time to listen, we aren’t just hearing words with meaning, we are hearing and taking in a living, breathing word, we are taking in the Holy Spirit and life itself. This means that the simple act of reading, ingesting, chewing, and digesting Scripture is lifegiving, sustaining, and unifying with God. This is a physical and tangible way that we can know God with us, even when we don’t have faith enough to know God in us.

Even if we don’t understand Scripture, even if we are wrestling with it, even if it feels beyond us, reading Scripture does something in us if we are humble enough to receive it, ingest it, and do our best to follow it. Jesus reminds us that the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of wisdom. The Spirit that lives in God’s word and lives in us is wisdom itself. This means that even if we don’t understand something, if we have faith to follow and hold on, we will understand it, but what’s more is that new wisdom will help us to understand everything else too. I have seen this countless times in my own life. I can’t even list the number of times I was failing at school, or the number of times I felt stupid and incompetent, but at the same time, I can’t list the number of times that God used my faith to give me an understanding that was beyond me, to help me excel when it was especially important, to help me become a tutor and teacher for my peers and more. It happens practically daily in my work at this church. I know I am just a humble dyslexic accident-prone child from a small city in the prairies and yet God’s Holy Spirit working in me has done far more than I could ask for. I have seen the same realities in many of you and all of us have the amazing privilege to grow into this.

“Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you”. If we can begin to grasp the grandeur of God with us, of God in us, of the offer of sustenance leading to eternal life, of wisdom that guides our every moment and relationship there is a simple thing that remains: peace. What do we have to worry about? What do we have to fight for? What is left of a battle if all of this comes from a simple and yet profound relationship with God? “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid”. This is only possible because we have God with us, surrounding us and within us doing all the things we can’t.

In a little while the world will not see me, but you will see me; because I live you also shall live. In faith, we see and experience in a way that the world can’t. In faith, we receive and follow Jesus, even when the world is trying to lead us somewhere else. It is in faith that we know and grow in the presence of God. This is an amazing and mysterious privilege that is limitless in its good. We heard three fundamental things that come with God’s presence in us: eternal life, wisdom, and peace. These unto themselves are amazing gifts, but they only come from the far surpassing gift that is God’s presence with us and in us. AMEN