An unlikely Advocate

John 14:15-21

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

By Lip Kee Yap - originally posted to Flickr as Pied Imperial Pigeon, Ducula bicolor bicolor, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7627022

If I had to sum up the last few weeks of my life in a single word, it would be 'disruption'. As the UK plunged into lockdown, the routines of my life before COVID-19 (BC?) were upended, and much of the content of my life disappeared overnight. The rhythm of my life which had been, if not exactly steady, at least reassuringly present... suddenly vanished. In those first tentative days I remember feeling its terrible absence, which created a deep disturbance of both space and time.

For many of us, this sense of disruption is something we can relate to - even if our experiences of it have been very different. My own experiences of disruption have encouraged me to examine my life before COVID-19, asking myself what I feel drawn to keep and what I need to let go of, as I try to re-fashion new rhythms to live by. But as well as encouraging reflection on my past, the disruption has also been a means of revelation - it has helped me to see the predictable patterns of my life ,with both then and now, with fresh eyes. Parts of my life which blended into the background (like my constant multi-tasking in the name of 'efficiency') are now suddenly coming into sharp relief. Going for a daily walk by the canal near where I live, something I rarely 'had time for', now feels absolutely vital. Putting off going to bed in order to keep scrolling through Twitter, something which I wouldn't have given much thought to before, now feels utterly deadening.

In short: the disruption is changing not just how I see, but what I see. It has revealed that many of my life choices were (and are!) made in a state of inattentiveness to myself and the world around me. I think part of that inattentiveness came from simply assuming that the world as I experienced it would just continue as it has always done.

In both our personal lives and in the collective life of our society, I think there has been an unspoken assumption that we understand enough about our present to make predictions about the future which will be reasonably accurate - especially with the aid of economics, science and technology. In response to this assumption, the economists John Kay and Mervyn King have recently written about a concept called 'radical uncertainty'. This includes the notion that the most meaningful questions we can ask about our world are not puzzles which can be solved analytically, but mysteries. Models of the world may still be useful, they write, but "should be treated not as forecasting tools but as ways of organising our thinking". In navigating the mysteries of our world, we use not mathematical modelling but 'reference narratives': stories about ourselves and our world which frame our individual and corporate identities. The radical uncertainty of our world will frequently challenge these narratives and so they must be resilient, able to adapt to situations that we cannot anticipate.

The disruption in the wake of this pandemic has revealed our ultimate inability to forecast the future, and unmasked the underlying 'radical uncertainty' of the world in which we live. In the church, we are feeling this acutely as the most basic acts of in-person prayer, fellowship and hospitality, which many of us took for granted, are no longer possible. This is a time in which some of our most important reference narratives as church - around worship, community, presence and many others - are being challenged by radical uncertainty. It is not the uncertainty itself but our response to it which will determine whether we can navigate a way through the ongoing mysteries of the present, or become hopelessly lost in them.

Disruption is thus not the cause but the revelation of the radical uncertainty of our lives: it reveals that the reference narratives by which we live have always been under threat, and urges us to adapt them in response to the signs of the times. Perhaps this revelation of uncertainty is the "Spirit of truth" which Jesus promises us in our Gospel reading. Perhaps this unmasking of our assumptions about the world is our unlikely Advocate, our guide which fills us with the grace that we need to keep the commandments of Jesus. The two clear instructions which we have been given - to love God, and love our neighbour as ourselves - seem so often in practice to be clouded by our false, unexamined  assumptions around who God is, and who our neighbour is.

Come, Spirit of truth, and dwell in our hearts. Challenge our assumptions and disrupt our unthinking routines. Do not leave us as orphans: be with us and fill us with your grace, as we navigate the mysteries of this life. Amen.