Missed you Wednesday. We were down in the dark catacombs of the Fellowship Hall, scratching out messages on the walls. We had what the insurance companies call an "act of God," which is another way of saying that there is an X factor of losses that their actuaries cannot compute. Which is another way of saying that, act of God or not, we-not God, and in the long run not the insurance companies-will pay for it. Mother Nature gave us our worst power outages in 100 years this week. And the loss of power left us unable to carry on with our usual church life.

This is Trinity Sunday, which is the Sunday after Pentecost, which is the Sunday we remember the Holy Spirit of God coming with power upon the disciples in Jerusalem, lighting up the church. There is no usual church without the power of the Holy Spirit. Without the animating agency of the Holy Spirit, the church is nothing more than another NGO, don't you know?!- (a nongovernmental agency.)

On Trinity Sunday we remember together-out loud so that we don't forget-how we are connected to God. We are connected to God the same way God is connected to God-by the one Holy Spirit that keeps Father and Son united in a divine community of love as one God. The same Spirit keeps believers connected to God by up-linking us into the password-protected network of the divine life. JESUS is the password that must be authenticated. An always-on connection is God's gift to you, a one-time payment made in full on the cross of Christ.

I was traveling this week in Pennsylvania, helping a Brethren in Christ church develop a plan like ours to nurture and train young ministers. These are some of our Anabaptist cousins. I took my laptop with me. In DFW Airport I connected to the T-Mobile wireless network. In Chicago O'Hare I was shut out. Go figure. At the Pennsylvania church I picked up the church's Linksys wireless network. I passed on another link in the Harrisburg Airport because they wanted $8 an hour to connect.

The upside and the downside of staying connected all the time is that you are connected all the time. Information comes at you whether you want it or not, and then you are responsible for it when you have it. You may not have enough down time to reflect and read and take in life, because you are always on. I had a fun novel with me-Matthew Pearl's The Dante Club, so I wasn't lonely. But when you are hoping for a message from friends or family, it's a piece of Dante's Paradiso to be in touch. Feeling cut off from the people you love, sensing that you are out of the loop, that you don't know things you want to know or need to know-well, that's a taste of Inferno. Most of live in Purgatorio, most of the time. We are on again, off again, with God, always hoping to get hooked up for good.

The Holy Spirit keeps us eternally connected to God. The Spirit allows us to be always on, without the downside of information overload. We often talk about the benefit of the Holy Spirit in our life as the assurance of salvation or as the love of God poured into our hearts or as the gift-giver for ministry or as the encourager that gives us hope in our darkest times. But have you ever thought about the Holy Spirit as a personal tutor? As a master teacher? Or, in the wake of Ronald Reagan's passing, as The Great Communicator? The Holy Spirit is a professor of divine wisdom who grades on the cross, not the curve. Lucky for us.

Jesus says this teaching ministry is one of the chief functions of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the shy member of the Trinity. The Spirit is a spy that listens in on the conversations of the Father and the Son, and then whispers them to us. The Spirit is a godly gossip, filling us in on holy family secrets.

Now some of these things we don't get right away. Notice Jesus tells his disciples that he is sending them the Spirit because he could not tell them everything he wanted to, since they were unable to bear all he could tell them. The Spirit, in other words, gives us what we need to know, when we need to know it-in fact, when we are capable of handling the knowledge the Spirit wants to give.

Imagine taking calculus before taking algebra, or senior English before sophomore English. Some things build on others, and you cannot handle higher thoughts without mastering lower ones first.

I remember studying New Testament criticism in seminary. When the professor gave out the book list for the semester, he delivered a warning. You must read them IN ORDER. If you jump ahead, you will only be confused. He bumped into one of my classmates in the library one day and saw him reading ahead, a book down on the list. Bad decision. So much understanding depends upon the foundational knowledge given at the right time.

Jesus knew that his disciples could delve deeper into the divine mind until they had established certain basics. And likewise we do not ask you to master the Apostles' Creed or translate the 23^rd Psalm from the Hebrew or explain the nuances of the doctrine of the Trinity before you put your trust in Christ. The first and most basic truth of the Christian faith is that Jesus is himself the truth to be known and trusted. The most sincere young person and the most cynical older person, the least educated mountain man and most erudite scholar are all capable of coming to this same Truth that is Jesus Christ. It is simple without being simplistic. In knowing the truth that is Jesus Christ, we come into connection with the fount of all wisdom, with the mind of the universe, and we are invited into the conversation of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Years ago, shortly after I came to Wilshire, I was invited into a very special and privileged group. For years a small group of my predecessors in the ministry had occasionally gathered for dinner and conversation. Bruce McIver, Jimmy Allen, Foy Valentine, Cecil Sherman, Darold Morgan, and BO Baker. One night they invited me to join them. I heard things that night that helped me to understand the generation that came before me. I was honored to be included, but I also knew that I was welcome because they believed I had come to the place where I could handle knowingly what would be shared. They thought I was ready to bear the truths they had learned across the years. It was a rite of passage for me, an unforgettable night.

When you first become a Christian, we point you the Gospel of John and the Book of James and those parts of Scripture that reinforce the basic truths about Jesus and how to live. We don't ask you to plunge right into the heavy parts of the Book of Romans, and for God's sake stay until from Revelation until you have been a Christian longer than Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins! You might find a Sunday school class designed to introduce you to the faith and work on the ABCs before going on to the CBFs and the BGCTs and the BWAs. Feel free to skip the SBCs altogether.

But we hope that you will not remain there forever. The Spirit wants to lead you deeper into spiritual truth. Some people are unwilling to go there. They figure that as long as knowing Jesus is the key to salvation, why go deeper into the castle of truth, as long as you're crossed the moat and entered the gate? I will never forget the successful businessman who told me he was leaving the church because he had to think all week long on his job, and he didn't want to have to think when he listened to my sermons on Sunday. He wanted someone to tell him what he already knew. Okay, well, I think that's kind of frustrating when you go see a doctor who will only tell you what you already know, or a lawyer. What about a teacher? Well, why then resist the teaching of the Holy Spirit?

God expects us to grow in our faith, not to be eternal sophomores. Do you know what the word sophomore means? It comes from the combination of two Greek words that mean "wise fool." A sophomore knows just enough to think he knows enough to stop learning. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. We have to keep ourselves open to what God might want to reveal to us at any time.

And that includes things in the Bible we thought we knew but didn't fully understand. One of the frequent questions I get when people come to Wilshire is about all the women in our church that serve as ministers and deacons. They thought the Bible was quite clear on limiting the role of women in certain ways. And then we look at it together and sometimes-not all the time, sadly-the light will go on and they will say, We'll I never looked at it that way before. Now, of course, this side of heaven, we have no way of saying for certain whether our view of things like this is genuinely one of those things of which Jesus said that the Spirit would declare to us "the things that are to come." or rather, as one of my critics recently wrote me, that I have put my interpretations ahead of the Word of God and would stand to account for that before Christ himself. Well, yes, I imagine we all will. But wisdom is proved by her children, as the old proverb puts it. Time tells whether the church that lets loose all the gifts of God's people for ministry is more or less the church of Jesus Christ for it. What is for sure is that if we are not ever open to the teaching ministry of the Spirit in our days of discernment in this life, we would never have come to claim the full partnership of women in ministry as a gospel truth or the equality of races or the immorality of slavery or even the fitness of democracy as a form of government, which does not appear in the Bible! Now if we could just get on to seeing whether the Spirit is teaching us of things like the peril of greed, the love of beauty, and care for one another. regardless of where you were born, what language you speak, how much money you have, or whether you pray like we do or not.

Unfortunately, we have some who claim that the Spirit instead is teaching them things that are to come that, to my mind, don't seem very helpful. There's a pastor in San Antonio who has just published a new book on helping women go through menopause God's way. Someone else has published the secrets of the Leviticus Diet. And of course we have those Left Behind books that want to clue us in to the hidden wisdom of the last days that the Spirit has now revealed, having been buried in the Bible all along.

Here's the key thing from Jesus on the Spirit of things to come: the things to come that the Spirit will teach us about is the One who has already come. The Holy Spirit points to Jesus, who points to the Father. So the point is the Trinity, after all. The point is God-from beginning to end. At our end and at the end of all things is God. There is nothing more to learn.

So glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.