Guided Into Truth
A Juneteenth sermon about the Holy Spirit
June is a particularly busy month for me this year so these newsletters have been especially intermittent lately. However, this past Sunday, as is typical this time of year, was our church’s Juneteenth service so, in honor of the holiday, I wanted to share this lightly edited version of my sermon from John 16:12-15.
Introduction
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” Do you sense the layers of emotion in Jesus’ words to his disciples? He’s told them that he would soon be arrested and executed and they’ve responded with confusion, denial, and grief. Jesus read the anxiety in their faces and decided that, though he had more he wanted to share with them, what they needed most in that traumatic moment was not more of his teaching but the assurance of his presence. He too, must have felt the emotional weight of what was about to happen to all of them: the threats to their lives, the splintering friendships, the shame of crucifixion. And what about the desire to share more of himself with his closest companions yet realizing that they were in no state to really hear him? That they could no longer bear what he wanted to tell them?
I wonder if Jesus provides words for how many of us are experiencing our world’s “many things” these days. The announcement that the names of Confederate generals would be restored to the Army bases which had been stripped of those names; the budget bill which, according to nonpartisan experts, will add trillions to the debt while serving as the largest wealth transfer from the poor to the rich in American history; the decision to deny asylum to all but white Afrikaners and then making a public spectacle of sending high-level officials to welcome them; the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s decision to walk away from clear cases of racial discrimination in Houston and Dallas and environmental racism in Louisiana’s cancer alley; the decision to revoke the Temporary Protected Status from asylum seekers from Haiti, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and other fragile countries which cannot promise safety to those forced to return; the president’s decision to bypass state governors and call up the National Guard to respond to relatively tame protests before deploying the Marines for the same purpose… it all can feel like too much to bear.
And the ugliness unfolding before our eyes takes nothing away from the closer, deeply personal experiences under which we are individually struggling to bear. Together we hold divorce and endless job searches, failing friendships and grievous miscarriages, memories of migration and fears of deportation, aching bodies and minds pulled in a million directions. How much more can we bear?
Today, as has become our yearly habit, we’ve made space for the witness of the Juneteenth saints who’ve gone before us in order that they might reshape our experiences of contemporary circumstances. The women and men from whom news of emancipation was purposefully kept for 18 months have a testimony whose power has not lessened over the ensuing decades. They – along with their descendants who each 19th of June gathered in the threatening face of white supremacy to sing freedom hymns, and amen to freedom sermons, and march in freedom parades – they have a word for us in 2025 which harmonizes with the Word of Scripture we just read. In these verses, Jesus promised his disciples that the Spirit would glorify him by guiding them into truth.
It is the disregard and disdain for truth that has so many of us worn down. It seems like every day, those with the loudest voices and largest platforms subject us to deception– lies about history, lies about entire communities of people, lies about what our own eyes have seen and ears have heard. The disciples knew about surviving regimes of deception, with client kings and imperial representatives subjecting an occupied people to rebellion-stifling propaganda. So perhaps it's not surprising that with some of his remaining time, Jesus spoke to his followers about the truth. But Jesus’ truth does more than simply counter Herod and Pilate’s disinformation; it is a deeper and more abiding truth Jesus points to.
So, as we honor the women and men whose lives testify to a God who will not deny the freedom others try to delay, here’s what I hope will encourage us during our own deceptive days: The Holy Spirit guides us into the truth.
Try as they might to discourage us with constant deception, the forces of deceit cannot rob us of the truth because the Holy Spirit himself is our guide into truth. To understand the importance of the Holy Spirit as our truth guide, we need to remember that the truth Jesus presents his followers with is more than facts or reality. It includes these things, of course, but truth, as presented by Jesus, is something that cannot only be known or believed. No, this truth must be lived. To that end, our passage shows that the Holy Spirit guides us into the truth of Jesus and the truth of God’s kingdom.
The Holy Spirit guides us into the truth of Jesus.
Jesus has told his disciples that he us going away and they are distraught. To comfort them, he’s told the disciples that he would send the Holy Spirit to be their teacher. Now he adds to his promise, saying “he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (16:15) More than just reminding us of Jesus’ teaching, the Holy Spirit guides us into Jesus himself.
It is a feature of Christianity that we don’t aim to know about God, but that, in Jesus, we know and are known by God. This is worth emphasizing because Christianity has often been used as tool of oppression. Many Texan enslavers who kept news of emancipation hidden for so long were faithful church-goers. But there is a kind of self-destruct button built into every form of oppressive Christianity, because you can’t have the Faith without Jesus and once you know Jesus the synthesis of oppression and Christianity impossible to maintain.
It didn’t matter how hard the enslavers tried to present a fraudulent Christ by cutting out passages, pages, entire sections of Scripture about freedom; by outlawing literacy; by surveilling worship services; by financing theological education which justified their heresies and ecclesial initiatives which accommodated their blasphemies. It didn’t matter that, as Malcolm X once said, “our American enslavers have given us an overdose of their own white-controlled Christian religion.”[1] It didn’t matter how violent their enforcement, how devilish their tactics, or how spiritualized their duplicity. When the women and men who’d been subjected, as Isabella Wilkerson puts it, to a racial caste system in which “those who were darkest, and descended from those who were darkest, would be assigned to the subordinate caste of America for centuries,”[2] when these image-bearers of the living God got hold of Jesus the entire house of cards came tumbling down.
Because Jesus makes it plain, “All that the Father has is mine.” (16:15) When the Holy Spirit guides us into the truth of Jesus, we find that we have been guided into the very arms of God.
And I know that some of us are feeling dragged down by deception this morning. The lies can be quiet and personal: You’ll always fall into that sin. Your child will never come home. Your heart will always be restless. Your friend will never recognize the pain they’ve caused. And the lies can be loud and public: Migrants and refugees from some countries are less human than those from other countries. Black economic empowerment is nothing more than a corporate marketing tactic easily abandoned with shifting political winds. Undocumented immigrants are the source of our economic woes and not the corporations who pad their bottom lines on their vulnerable labor or the rest of us who’ve come to expect cheap food and cheap stuff delivered to our doorstep.
But I’ve come to tell somebody today that the truth the Holy Spirit will guide you into isn’t one fact among many, isn't one perspective on reality among countless others. No, the truth the Spirit guides us into is the truth of Jesus and when you have Jesus, God has you. And when you find yourself living from the God who just is Truth, there is no lie that can last and no deceit that will not eventually be demolished.
Will you let the Holy Spirit guide you into the truth of Jesus? Sometimes you might need to shut down your social media and turn of cable news. You might need to stop distracting yourself with binge watching and binge shopping. You might need to take a break from comparing your righteousness to your less-enlightened family members and broadcasting your virtue as evidence that you’ve discovered the right side of history. You might need to take your weary body outside and feel the soil under your feet and the Midwestern humidity on your skin. You might need to get around some people who know how to talk about Jesus unironically, who know how to share testimonies with joy, whose lives are producing that satisfying fruit, who aren’t slow to turn to God’s Word with a curious and listening ear.
What I’m saying is that the Holy Spirit wants to guide you into the truth of Jesus. So, tune out the propaganda, shut down the pundits, and join the other truth pilgrims who are following the Guide who knows the way to Jesus who is the way to God.
The Holy Spirit guides us into the truth of God’s kingdom.
Jesus tells his disciples that the Holy Spirit “will declare to you the things that are to come. (16:13) It’s my sense that he’s referring to the kingdom of God, the realm of God’s perfectly expressed will which Jesus announced and brought near.
But now Jesus is leaving, so what about his kingdom? If the king has left, what of his kingdom? How will the disciples know how to live the ethics of Jesus’ kingdom when surrounded by competing kingdoms?
These ought to be our questions too. Some of us are navigating careers that assume cutthroat competition, capitalize on greed, and tolerate violence against most vulnerable. Others are navigating social contexts which assume other people are commodities to use for advancement or resources to manipulate for advantage. All of us are navigating economies which assume monetization of sin, profit from enemy-making, and insatiable growth through that age-old strategy, theft.
If we are even halfway alert to our world’s assumptions, we have to wonder about the possibility of actually living as citizens of the kingdom of God. What room is there in this world for people who believe that Creation is held together by God’s abundance and not human scarcity? For people who believe that grace is more durable than judgment, that mercy is more lasting than vengeance? For people who believe that community is held together not by strength or mastery but by confession and forgiveness? For people who believe that victory will never come through violence but has already arrived in the form of the Son of God who assumed our vulnerable flesh and submitted himself to death, even death on a cross?
These are reasonable questions and followers of Jesus had better be prepared to grapple with them because we’re living through days when, for example, your commitment to pray without ceasing is going to seem to some people like a distraction. When your commitment to nonviolent resistance to oppression is going to seem naïve, your commitment to gathering for corporate worship is going to seem like a waste of time, your singular allegiance to Jesus Christ is going to put you at odds with those who worship temporal kings and fleeting ideologies.
But somewhere I read that Jesus said, In this world you will have trouble, and I’m starting to think he really meant it. And I don't know about you, but I’m everyday more OK getting in trouble with a world in which presidents take resources from the poor while spending millions on military parades. I’m OK getting in trouble with a world in which immigrant parents are snatched from their children. I’m OK getting in trouble with a world in which every morning brings more news of more bombs reigning down on more people. I’m OK getting in trouble with a world which asks us to pretend that its latest money-making scheme isn’t going to be built on the backs of the poor like every other one of its money-making schemes.
I wonder if anyone else has made their peace about getting in trouble with this trouble-making world? And I wonder if anyone else hears what Jesus says next? “Take heart! I have overcome the world. It is the same trouble-overcoming Jesus who brought his kingdom of righteousness and grace to our groaning world who now sends his Spirit to guide us into the truth of that kingdom.
We actually believe, even in the midst of so much noise and confusion, that the Holy Spirit wants to lead us into the truth of God’s kingdom so that we might taste and see of his righteousness and mercy, peace and justice, grace and more grace. The Spirit stands ready to guide you into the truth of Jesus and his kingdom, to lead you into a way of living that will often be out of step with this trouble-filled world but which always lead you nearer to the One who has overcome the troubles of this world.
Conclusion
In 1900, a principal in Jacksonville, FL, sat down to write a poem remembering Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Surrounded, as he was, by the demise of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow laws, and the constant threat of lynching, his poem took an unexpected turn as he began to reflect on the terror and deprivation Black Americans were subject to: “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered; we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.”
Writing just four years after the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was constitutional, we can imagine a scenario in which James Weldon Johnson’s attempt at a commemorative poem turned toward despair and despondency. From every possible vantage point, after a brief moment of multiracial democracy, American society was being clawed back into the jaws of institutionalized, government-enforced white supremacy: “Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died.”
And yet, as he later recorded in his autobiography, Johnson found himself weeping as he wrote, not from despair but as a witness to the truth that began to surface as he put his people’s story into song. Not for a moment did the principal-turned-poet look away from the evil Black people had been subjected to in this country; in the three stanzas making up the song that would become Lift Every Voice and Sing, we encounter a people so weary they can only sigh, a people walking a path marked by their own tears and bloodshed. But underneath these indisputable lived realities and historical facts lay a subterranean truth whose influence Johnson could not ignore.
The third stanza begins, “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way; Thou who hast by Thy might, led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray.” I hope you’ll forgive this white preacher for engaging a bit of imaginative speculation, but can we consider for a moment that audacity of Johnson’s declaration? He wrote his hymn in the hearing of a vicious society built upon the plunder of Black labor, the surveillance of Black communities, the co-option of Black politics, the dissolution of Black families, the disruption of Black education, the purging of Black economies, the undermining of Black love, the seizure of Black properties, the appropriation of Black aesthetics, the suppression of Black history, the perversion of Black manhood and womanhood, the gentrification of Black arts, the slander of Black personhood, and the ignorance and disdain for Black people’s Jesus who, as Dr. Tiya Miles writes, was “a freedom-loving, caretaking God.”[3]
In other words, within earshot of a society literally built and bent on the total domination of Black people, James Weldon Johnson had the nerve to say no, no, no! God has been the witness to our years and our tears. God has been our light and our path. God has brought us this far and God and God alone will see us through. Try though the authoritarians might, despite their frantic grasping for power and control, their deception could not withstand the God-ordained, Spirit-guided truth to which the songwriter could testify: “Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand, true to our God, true to our native land.”
Torn from generational homelands and forced to a land built on their exploitation, James Weldon Johnson bore witness for a people who had found that, in the suffering and victorious Christ, God himself had become their native land. Like the Judean exiles who inspired their own prophetic imaginations, these women and men had been made to be strangers in a strange land. “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” wondered God’s scattered people as they grieved their loses by the rivers of Babylon. (Psalm 137:4)
It’s a question asked by every displaced people– by every community forced by violence, war, and poverty to flee their home countries; by every family made desperate enough to embark on risky journeys across thousands of uncertain miles; by every parent so besieged that the risk posed by human traffickers is outweighed by the instinct to simply keep their child alive; by every community reminded every so often by the executioners of state sanctioned violence that though this country has been home for generations your security and safety remains negotiable; by every person forced to the streets once again to declare the simple fact of their God-given humanity.
“How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” And yet, in the words of his now famous hymn, James Weldon Johnson could testify, not only can we sing, we will sing. Why? Because at the end of every single day – no matter how sophisticated the propaganda, no matter how persistent the deception, no matter how violently enforced the hypocrisy – at the end of every single day the Holy Spirit of the Living God is still guiding his people into the truth. And the truth that allowed Johnson to proclaim that he and his people would “march on till victory is won” and “forever stand” was the truth that God himself had become their native land. God himself, in the person of Jesus, was welcoming his people home.
So, let’s lift our voices with the saints who’ve gone before us who testify that the Spirit of God is still guiding us into truth. The truth of Jesus himself. The truth of the righteous kingdom of God. Lift your voices in joyful defiance of every lie, every deception. There are some of people here today who know what it’s like to be lied against. Who know what slander feels like. Who know what it’s like to step into a room and immediately become the magnet for a whole bunch of warped assumptions.
But I know for a fact that there are also a whole lot of testimonies in this room to the guiding-into-truth Spirit of God. Somebody here remembers what it’s like to have been guided into Jesus himself. You were twisting and turning trying to fight your own way through this world’s trouble and heartache and deceit and then you found yourself being nudged into the Savior who became your shelter in the trouble, heartache and deceit. Somebody can remember the joy that came with discovering that God’s kingdom has been planted in our world. That the Spirit makes it possible for us to live by God’s rhythms of righteousness and grace. That we don’t have to go along with those who call evil good and good evil, no matter how impressive their platform or how well-financed their bullhorn.
I’m thankful that in this age of duplicity and hypocrisy, Jesus promises his followers that we will know the truth and that the truth will set us free. (8:31) So, free people; truth abiding people; Holy Spirit led people. Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand, true to our God, true to our native land people. Lift your voice now and sing to the God who guides you to the truth.
[1] The End of White World Supremacy, 71.
[2] Caste, 103.
[3] Night Flyer, 20.
(Photo credit: Josh Hild.)
The Race Against Gun Violence
A huge thanks to everyone who supported my fundraiser on behalf of New Community Outreach. Thanks to you, we surpassed our goal of $32,000! Fun fact, I placed 115th in the 8K and our oldest son placed 12th!
