May 27 Worship: "What is Truth?"

We celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit on Sunday during our special Pentecost worship.  Both the children's sermon and my sermon focused on the day of Pentecost, though in different ways.

The sermon, drawn from a description of the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John, was an attempt to figure out how we can recognize the Holy Spirit in the lives of others around us.  In "What is Truth?" (echoing a question famously asked in John's gospel, I pondered how we might glimpse the Holy Spirit, embodied in the words and deeds of others, in moments of transcendent truth.

I was pleased with the sermon, which is always a good thing when a preacher dares to tackle a passage from the complex Gospel of John.  In some ways, it was a weird experience.  If I had dealt with the theme more fully, it easily would have been a 45 minute sermon.  For whatever reason, my thinking generally (almost naturally) leads to 25 minute sermons, so I've often wondered how ministers in previous centuries could talk so much longer week after week.  On Sunday, I could easily have joined them, without resorting to lengthy anecdotal stories or random jokes, simply working through related scriptural passages to explore significant theological ideas.  I mention this only because I left some significant pieces of my thinking and scriptural backing out of the sermon, in the interest of time; I wonder if others saw leaps of logic in the sermon or too many unanswered questions.

Then again, we cannot do everything in any single sermon or worship service.

If you missed Sunday's sermon, if you'd like to listen to it again, or if you'd like to share it with someone, you can listen to an audio recording here.