Our mortality has a way of sneaking up on us. All of us, if we have the good fortune to grow older, will wake up in the middle of some night suddenly aware of the brevity of life. However, even the young, know about mortality. Ask children in hospital intensive care units, or teenagers who've just survived a brush with death in a car accident. Garrison Keillor had the young in mind on this past Memorial Day Weekend edition of "A Prairie Home Companion," when he juxtaposed a chillingly upbeat melody in tension with a text about soldiers we perpetually send to war, and the death we require them to face on our behalf, echoing the words of essayist E.B. White from 1939: "I keep forgetting that soldiers are so young, so young, so young".

Jesus, in this morning's gospel reading from John, is with his friends and disciples confronted by the reality of human-time-that earthly boundary that seems endless and yet when the reality of dying catches up with each of us, we realize just how precious life is. Like a parent knowing they are close to dying from cancer, Jesus is acutely aware that he does not have time to say everything he wanted to say and that a lot of things will remain unsaid... unresolved. Listen to him again: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now." There is a deep sadness in his voice, maybe even regret. Whatever we think about Jesus' divinity -providing a divine lense into the future, the Jesus in John is a fully-human Jesus, who will not only miss these friends, whom he will love to the end, but also has much wisdom left to share. And so it is with affection and courage and hope that Jesus tells his followers about their advocate and guide whom he will leave with them, the Holy Spirit whose calling of the church to life we celebrated last Sunday on Pentecost. "The Spirit will take what is mine and declare it to you". Pentecost is about God's Spirit taking flesh again, in your flesh and mine. The Spirit given at Pentecost is poured out on community - on us as we gather with one another and embody Christ in the world each day of the week.

This is the Good News in the Goodbye of Jesus to his followers, when he says: "When the Spirit of truth comes, [this Spirit] will ... not speak on [its] own, but will speak whatever [it] hears, ... because [this Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it to you." It was the recognition of the power of the Holy Spirit that nudged the early church to proclaim God as a Trinity: God who as Creator and Father, had come as Love in the Son, who now is poured out on the church as the Spirit of Wisdom. The Good News of the Pentecost Season - which stretches from now all the way up to the first Sunday of Advent - is that God's very nature is community, the community of Father-Son-and-Holy-Spirit. And so the greatest work of God, as Holy Spirit is to draw us not only into closer community with the very being of God, but into a new form of community with one another. Community is God's strategy for reaching the world.