John 16:12-15       “Guidance for a Time of Chaos”

     Writer Gordon MacDonald tells about driving with his wife, Gail, to a small community to attend a dinner.  They’d had never been in that area before, and they became quickly lost.  Seeing a police officer parked in his car, they pulled over and asked him for directions.  The police officer said, “You go down two more lights; turn right and go to a fork in the road where you bear left.  Go two stop signs . . . or is it three . . . No!  Here’s an easier way.  Make a U-turn and go back to that little shopping mall back there; you know the one with the gas station on the corner.  You hear what I am saying?  Turn left there and just follow the road down to the ocean.  It makes several turns, OK?  And you have to be careful not to . . . No!  Go back to the first way I said.  Go down . . . Oh, what the heck.  Look, I’ll take you there.  Just follow me, and stick close!” 

     Gordon MacDonald writes, “I followed him and stuck close.  And it occurred to me along the way that that is the invitation of Christ to someone who wants to know God, figure out the inner self, and understand how to live in the real world.  Follow him and stick close.  Christ doesn’t miss a turn.”

     In our lesson from John’s Gospel, Jesus is teaching his disciples.  He says to them, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” 

     As we saw last week in our celebration of Pentecost, God works on us from the inside out through the power of the Holy Spirit to bring life and power and peace into our lives.  Today, Trinity Sunday, I’d like us to think of the Holy Spirit as the source of guidance as we live in this chaotic world, a world filled with unexpected twists and turns.

     Jesus knew that his disciples were going out into a hostile world.  It was a dark world filled with danger and confusion.  They would need both power and guidance.  Jesus himself would no longer be with them in the flesh.  But he would be with them through the power of the Holy Spirit.

     It’s not enough for us as Christians to simply say that God is our creator and sustainer.  It’s not even enough to say that God was in Christ reconciling us and the world to himself.  God is alive and at work in our world and in our individual lives yet today through the power and guidance of his Holy Spirit.

     It’s perhaps an understatement to say that this is a confusing world.  In some ways it’s a crazy world.  Sometime back they arrested a man in Washington, D.C. who had been robbing liquor stores all over the city.  The odd thing was he only robbed the stores during the day.  When the police asked him why he did this, he said, “Are you kidding?  It isn’t safe to be on the streets at night with that much money.” 

     It’s a crazy and confusing world.  In his book, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” David Meyers writes that from 1957 to 1990, per capita income in the US more than doubled, but the number of Americans who reported being very happy remained the same.  All the advances in medical sciences, all the achievements in technology, all the increase in material wealth and prosperity hasn’t supplied us with an answer to our deepest yearnings or fulfilled our deepest needs.  Never have we been so self-reliant, yet so lonely.  Never have we seemed so free, yet our prisons so overcrowded.  Never have we had so much education, yet such high rates of teen delinquency, despair and suicide.  Never have we been so sophisticated about pleasure, yet so likely to suffer broken or miserable marriages.

     In this confusing world we need a guide we can depend on.  If you’ve ever put together a jigsaw puzzle, you know how important it is to be able to look at the picture on top of the puzzle box as a guide to help make sense where the pieces are to go.  Sometimes life can seem like a giant jigsaw puzzle.  All the pieces are there but they’re all jumbled up and it’s sometimes difficult to know where each piece is to go.  There’s a lot of options to which to turn to help us find our way and to make sense out of life, but it is only Christ, working through the power of the Holy Spirit, that gives us the guidance we truly need.

     But what it takes on our part is to yield our lives to his leadership.  We need to trust Christ and let him lead us daily.  When we make it a habit to trust his guidance, it’s amazing how life comes together.  It may seem a little mysterious, even coincidental at times, when all the pieces come together the way they do, but it’s interesting how many happy little “coincidences” happen to those who yield themselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

     In our lesson from John’s Gospel, Jesus is teaching his disciples.  He says to them, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.”  We need that Spirit today.

                                                AMEN