Despite the fact that about one in six people who attempt to reach the summit of Mt. Everest die trying when thirty-two year-old Eric Weinhenmeyer got there this past week his story might not have been all that newsworthy except for one thing.  When he was thirteen retinoschisis, a degenerative eye disease, took his sight and today he sees no light whatsoever.  So, totally blind, he climbed the tallest mountain in the world using his other senses.  He said he not only felt his way along but that he also kept his bearings by relying on the sound of bells attached to the clothing of other climbers and by the feel of the wind on his face.  A reporter asked him why he would take such risks when he couldn’t even see anything.  Eric’s response was breathtaking in its own right.  He said, “Oh, the view from here is stunning.  It’s just not visual.”

In the gospel we have read this morning, Jesus is telling his disciples that, very soon, they wouldn’t see him anymore.  He knew how frightening it would be for them to keep moving forward when he wasn’t visually present and they’d have to rely on more than what they could see.  So, he reminded them of a promise he’d already made and then gave them one more.  Though he was going away, he’d already promised, he would be coming back to take them with him to where he’d been.  “‘Do not let your hearts be troubled . . . Trust . . . me.  In my Father’s house are many rooms . . ..  I am going there to prepare a place for you.  And, if I go . . . I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am (John 14:1-3).’”    There is perhaps no more widely read passage of scripture at funerals than that promise Jesus made to his disciples as recorded earlier in this same passage and of which he is now reminding them.  “‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’”  We comfort ourselves with those words of promise when someone dies not only because we need hope for them beyond death but hope for ourselves as well.  Whatever else I’m doing when I preach a funeral I’m talking to myself.  I’m trying to reassure myself that though I am headed for an unavoidable rendezvous with death, I’m headed for something hopeful beyond it, too.  How else could we face the fear of dying?

When I stood in this pulpit on Mother’s Day three years ago this month to accept your call as pastor, I told you the story of Katherine Hepburn.  Someone had asked her how she’d so successfully faced a horribly difficult life, including a near-death experience with cancer.  Her simple response was, “It’s the fear that gets you.”  She was saying that the fear of something happening is almost always more debilitating than the experience itself.  It seemed like a good story to tell as I faced what appeared to be rather daunting that day.  You may have thought I was trying to encourage you.  In fact, I was talking to myself.  I do that now and then.  Susan Shanks walked in on me talking to myself in the office one day and asked if I did that very often.  I had to confess that I do.  And, one way or another, this is what I often tell myself.  It’s the fear that gets you.

Did you hear about the kitten that fell one hundred feet off a bridge in Corpus Christi last week?  It lived to meow again!  But, one of the firemen who rescued the kitten couldn’t help but ponder, “I wonder how many lives he spent on the way down.”  If that cat is anything like your pastor, he spent at least eight of his nine lives fearing what didn’t even end up killing him.  It’s the fear that gets you.  But, only if you choose it as your response to whatever is happening.  We do have another option. 

Jesus knew that leaving his disciples would be a fearful thing.  So, making them a promise that he’d be back and then reminding them of it, he asked them to choose another option than fear.  “‘Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.’”  In older days, we’d likely say that those words of Jesus would warm the cockles of your heart.  Honestly, does anyone know what a heart cockle is?  I don’t.  But, I know what a troubled heart is.  It’s a heart full of fear and uncertainty about what the future holds.  It’s a heart, too, that feels terribly alone in its fear.  Jesus is not concerned about what the future ultimately holds for anyone who trusts him.  But, he also knows how fear can stall our courage and hope and transform our days between now and then into nothing less than a living death.  So, he promised his disciples then and all who would ever be his disciples that he’d be back.  Then, he made one more promise.  Between now and the time, as the old gospel hymn celebrates, “our faith is made sight,” Jesus promised we wouldn’t be alone.  His Father would send “‘the Holy Spirit’” who, Jesus said, “‘will teach you all things and . . . remind you of everything I have said to you.’”

It is so difficult to describe who the Holy Spirit is because we’ve never seen him.  But, last week when our choir presented Experiencing God, we were given a beautiful image that ought to help us.  It was in the video of the runner in the 1992 Olympics who pulled a hamstring during the most critical race of his life and fell to the track.  His father pushed his way through security guards and ran onto the track and leaned down beside his son.  The father told his son that he didn’t have to finish the race.  But, when his son protested that he did, do you remember what his father said and did?  He said, “O.K.  Then we’ll finish it together.”  And, with those words, he put his arm around his son, got under his weight with him and they crossed the finish line together. 

That is what God the Father gave us in the person of the Holy Spirit when Jesus had to go.  The actual word in the original language, the word translated here as “‘Counselor,’” is paraclete.  It means one who comes to walk alongside.  That is who the Holy Spirit is.  Like the father coming alongside his hurting son to help him finish the race, the Holy Spirit is the presence of God in our lives to help us finish ours.  And, that presence is not something God gives only to those who’ve advanced to some level of expertise in spirituality.  It’s not a presence we conjure up through emotionally intense worship.  It is God’s gift to us when we are good or bad, up or down.  A presence he just gives because he doesn’t want us to be alone or afraid or troubled.

Jesus called him a counselor because that’s what he is, too.  He advises us.  He helps us think through things.  He pricks our conscience.  Jesus said the Holy Spirit would teach us and remind us of God’s promises when our troubled hearts forget them in the confusion of fear.  And, the Holy Spirit does more.  Just like he did with Jesus in the wilderness, he’ll come alongside us in our temptation.  Just like he did with the apostles at Pentecost, he’ll empower us and gift us for ministry.  And, in one of the most powerful promises in all of scripture, we are reassured that when we are so confused we can’t even find the words to pray, the Holy Spirit will pray to the Father for us “with groans that words cannot express (Romans 8:26).”  Isn’t that something?  When we are so lost in weakness or fear or confusion our tongues can’t move to say a word, the Holy Spirit will do our praying for us.  But, just as Jesus promised his disciples, between now and the time we actually see him make good on his promise to come back and get us and take us with him, the presence of the Holy Spirit means that, whatever else, we’re never alone. 

Is there anything more frightening or troubling than the thought of being alone?  The other night everyone but me had something that took them away from the house so that I found myself alone for the evening.  I like my privacy as much as anyone.  But, the only thing that really gave my evening any meaning was knowing that, eventually, my family would be coming back home to be with me.  It’s just that time in between, between the time they leave and when they come back, that can be the worst.  I don’t know when Jesus is coming back.  I don’t even know what that will look like.  I have a hard time visualizing it.  But, he said that he told us what he was up to “‘before it happens, so that when it does happen’” we’d believe it when we saw it.  Whatever it will look like, however and whenever it will happen, it will be the fulfillment of all hope and we won’t doubt what we’re seeing when our faith becomes sight.  We’ll know it for what it is.  It’s just the in between time that can be the worst.  So, Jesus promised that he’d give us peace to sustain us in the journey.  “‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you.  I do not give you as the world gives.’”

We know what that means, don’t we?  The part about the kind of peace the world gives.  Among other things, it means that there is one thing that even those who love us most can’t give us.  They can’t promise us they’ll never leave. 

They can’t promise us, like every parent knows when their child learns to drive, that when they leave for just a little while, they’ll be back.  They can’t give us that.  And, it’s a troubling thought to know that eventually, even those who love us most, have to leave and stay gone.  I remember visiting with an old man one day some years ago who lived far out in the east Texas countryside.  No neighbors close by.  His wife of several decades had died the year before and we were talking about that.  I asked him, after being married all those years, what was the hardest part about her being gone?  Without even hesitating he said, “It’s not having someone with whom to share the little things that happen every day.”  The little things, he said.  That’s what being that kind of alone is like.  Not having someone to walk with and talk with along the way. 

Cynthia Clawson sings the words from the old hymn, In the Garden, best, doesn’t she?  The writer was talking about the presence of God, the spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, when he wrote, “he walks with me and he talks with me and tells me I am his own.”  That’s the peace Jesus gives like no one else can.  Because he gives us the one thing no one in the world, not even those who love us most, can give us.  His presence.  His presence is his peace.  He promised that though he had to go away for a while, he’d be coming back.  He also promised us that between now and then, no matter what, we’d never be alone.   He promised that we would never be without his presence when we have to face the big things, like dying, and that we’d never be without him when we just need to share the little things that happen between now and then.

Please note, again, that his presence is his peace.  Jesus wasn’t defining his peace as insulation from struggle or disease or poverty or even from dying.  He never defined peace in terms of the absence of pain or fearful circumstances or the absence of anything.  He defined his peace as his presence with us, in the person of the Holy Spirit, no matter what.  The last promise Jesus gave his disciples, as recorded in Matthew’s gospel, had to do with his presence even in his absence.  Having commissioned them to go into what can be a very frightening world to share a gospel that would not always be warmly received, Jesus said, “‘I am with you always, to the very end of the age (Matthew 28:2).’”  That’s who the Holy Spirit is.  The presence of Jesus.  Beside you, before you, behind you and even in you, right now.  In every moment of your life, waking or sleeping, laughing or crying, walking or running, living or dying. 

You don’t have to conjure up his presence or earn it as a reward for good living.  It’s his gift.  All Jesus asked was that we trust him for it.  Even when we can’t see what we know to be true.  Especially because we can’t see.  You see?  Those who trust him find that Jesus, the Holy Spirit, teaches them to walk using other senses than the one that processes physical light into images the brain can recognize.  Especially when they are so confused by what they can see that only by faith can they see enough to take the next step.  It’s those people who sometimes talk to themselves.  But, more often, if you listen closely, they’re actually talking to their best friend.  The one who is helping them on the journey to a place they’ve never been before but know they want to see.  A place where Jesus has gone to make preparation for the day he comes to take them there to live with him forever. 

If you ask them how they even take the next step when life is unfair or when those they loved most had to leave them for a while or when life is so hard it’s like they’re having to climb a mountain blind they may tell you that they are following a voice that calls them from within.  A voice that sometimes rings with the beauty of the very bells of heaven or whispers to them like a quiet wind blowing.  And, if you ask them why they take such incredible risks in living for something they can’t even see they’ll probably tell you, “Oh, the view from here is stunning.  It’s just not visual.”

Amen.