And when the Holy Spirit comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment. (John 16:8)

You remember the Pentecost story: That day, the disciples were gathered together, probably still in fear, wondering what was next, because Jesus had left them. His post-Resurrection time of comforting and teaching them was over, and he had ascended, returned to God. Before he left, Jesus had told them he would not leave them alone, but would send the Holy Spirit to continue guiding and teaching them. Not sure at all what that meant or what they should be doing, they were together, waiting. Then, suddenly, “From heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages,…and a crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.”

I always remind us in my Pentecost sermon that people sometimes say what happened at Pentecost is the reversal of what happened in the story of the Tower of Babel, when humankind had become too arrogant and God confused their single language and scattered and divided their communities. That’s wrong—Pentecost is not the opposite of what happened at Babel, Pentecost is the redemption of what happened there. On that first Pentecost morning, people didn’t all start speaking the same language again—they understood each other’s different languages…They could hear each other through the differences that were previously barriers.

If there is a single story in the Old Testament that is an allegory for our current situation, it must be the story of Babel: We are divided, almost literally at war with our family members, friends, and neighbors, because we refuse to listen to each other, to hear each other. Rather than find the common foundations that bind us together and give us a way forward together, we fixate on our differences…and we turn them into barriers to community and connection and shared action, barriers that are unscalable and cannot be broken down. Where there should be respect and compassion and empathy there is ridicule and hatred. This is sinful, and, like all sin, it is destructive. You can see the destructive power of its evil all around us. All around us, it looks like Ezekiel’s valley: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.”

But as St. Paul says in Romans today, “in hope we were saved.” In Ezekiel’s vision God asked him to prophesy over the dry bones, and the Holy Spirit came like the four winds and breathed new life into them. There is hope—hope for us all, hope for the world, and Pentecost is about the full-scale launching of that mission of hope.

In today’s Gospel reading Jesus is explaining to his disciples what will happen after he departs, when he will send the Holy Spirit, and why he is sending the Spirit: Jesus says the Holy Spirit will guide Jesus’ followers to ever more fully follow in his footsteps and enable them to ever better testify on his behalf. The Holy Spirit will “prove the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.” The Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Counselor, is sent to continue Jesus’ work of breaking through the darkness of the false, destructive ways of this world with the redeeming and reconciling light of God’s forgiving love. Let’s explore these three things Jesus says the Spirit will do.

The Holy Spirit will “Prove the world wrong about sin, because they do not believe in me.” Jesus teaches over and over again that believing in him means following in his footsteps. He constantly talked, and ate with, and reached out to touch, those the religious authorities condemned as sinful and unclean. When the leaders are stoning the woman caught in adultery for her sin, Jesus says, “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.” He rebukes and condemns the stone-throwers, and not the woman. Whenever Jesus condemns sin, it’s a condemnation of the religious leaders and their lack of compassion and their hypocrisy. To prove the world wrong about sin is to follow Jesus’ lead and treat it with healing and compassion, to lift up in forgiveness and to give hope and new life where the world offers despair and cynicism.

“Proving the world wrong about righteousness, because I am going to the Father.” Righteousness in Jesus’ world was the focus of Jewish Temple worship and all the religious rules and regulations. We hear Jesus proving this wrong all the time in our Sunday readings. For example, their idea of righteousness caused the religious leaders to condemn Jesus for healing on the Sabbath. One of the most consistent tasks in Jesus’ ministry was to expose the emptiness and pretensions of this kind of false righteousness, to prove it wrong. It wasn’t the two religious leaders in the Good Samaritan story who were righteous, even though they were following the law—it was the hated and presumedly sinful Samaritan who was righteous because he cared for the fellow human being he saw wounded in the ditch. Righteousness is doing what Jesus did. And because Jesus is going to the father, the Spirit empowers Jesus’ disciples to continue in his footsteps, to continue doing what Jesus did, to continue to prove the world wrong about its empty righteousness.

Proving the world wrong about judgment, because the ruler of this world has been condemned. The world’s judgment—false, perverse, vindictive—evil—killed Jesus, an innocent man, because he dared to expose its hypocrisy. The false, self-serving, power-hungry judgment of the world was completely exposed by Jesus’ death, and completely overthrown by Jesus’ Resurrection. And, when Jesus tells his story about what Judgment Day will be like, those who relied on the world’s view of sin and righteousness and judgment, the ones saying, “Lord, we never saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison,” are the ones who are cast out!

Proving the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment—this is what Jesus did throughout his ministry. This is why Jesus gave his life for us all. Pentecost, Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit, is the continuation and culmination of the great 50-day celebration of Easter and Jesus’ great work. Fifty days ago I preached about Jesus’ offering of himself on the Cross as victim to our violence—his ultimate demonstration that God’s way is self-giving, self-sacrificing, love for all—even enemies—showing once and for all that God’s way is not the way of condemnation and retribution and violence but the way of forgiveness and love. Jesus sends the disciples the Holy Spirit to inspire and guide them to continue that great work. And you can see result of the Holy Spirit in action in all of their New Testament stories. The Holy Spirit guides Jesus’ disciple Peter to accept the religiously unclean Gentiles fully into the newfound church rather than reject them—proving the world wrong about their righteousness. Jesus’ disciple Paul goes to Athens and gives a speech to the pagans there at the Areopagus—literally the “Hill of the god Ares,” and he doesn’t condemn them or threaten them with hellfire—he quotes from their own Greek philosophers and talks about how close they are to understanding the true, living God who gives everyone life and breath. And we’ve just heard six weeks of readings from Jesus’ disciple John instructing us over and over again to love as Jesus did. All of this proving the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment. In his letter to the Galatians Paul lists the fruit of the spirit—the kinds of things the Holy Spirit causes to spring forth in those who follow Jesus: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. To demonstrate those in our lives is to prove the world wrong about nearly everything!

This is the purpose of the Holy Spirit—to enable and guide Jesus’ followers to truly follow in his footsteps and continue his gentle way of teaching and his accepting way of living and his boundless way of loving. The Spirit came upon those disciples on the day of Pentecost and that’s exactly what they started to do. Jesus promised the Holy Spirit will enable and guide us to do the same thing—enable and guide us to continue his work of proving the world wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment.

You know all those “He gets us” ads about Jesus they had on the Superbowl broadcast? There are several of them: a Latino cop washes the feet of a young Black man on a metal milk crate in a sinister alleyway…A woman washes a girl’s feet outside an abortion clinic…A rancher washes the feet of an elderly Native American man…An oilman washes the feet of a girl protesting on behalf of the environment at his oil field, and more. If you didn’t know it, these ads were created by and completely funded by one of the very most politically and theologically conservative organizations in the country. Other conservatives have accused them of “having an agenda,” and here is their response: “The more ideologically defensive we become, the more we are willing to sacrifice things like kindness, patience, and the respect and dignity of others for the sake of victory — [we start thinking] our righteous ends justify the dehumanizing means. And it’s tearing us apart. We experience it in politics, in the workplace, in schools, and even in churches. And at the heart of the conflicts is a fundamental disagreement about what it means to be good. Throughout our shared history, Jesus has represented the ultimate good that humankind is capable of aspiring to…[But] many have relegated Jesus from the world’s greatest love story to just another tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions…Our agenda,” they say, “is to move beyond the mess of our current cultural moment to a place where all of us are invited to rediscover the love story of Jesus. Christians, non-Christians, and everybody in between. All of us.”

He gets us—Jesus gets us—we just don’t get Jesus. This, my friends, is the reason Jesus sends the Holy Spirit. The Spirit empowers and guides us to continue Jesus’ work of proving the world wrong about sin, and righteousness, and judgment with his overpowering love. It isn’t easy, but the disciples did it long ago in far more dangerous times, and we can do it today. My prayer this week is that each of us will welcome the Spirit’s power to help us and the world rediscover the promise of abundant life that is found in the story of Jesus’ abundant love.