May 10, 2026
She Stays
Psalm 139, John 14:15-21
Rev. Caitlin C. T. Johnson
When I was in my early twenties I spent a semester working at Horizon Hospice in Chicago. Horizon was the first hospice in Chicago, a non-profit that grew up during the AIDS crisis, providing compassionate, dignified care for patients to die wherever they called “home.” That meant that I traveled a lot – I didn’t have a car so each day I would put on sturdy walking shoes and map out which bus routes, L lines, and occasionally suburban trains, I would need to see my patients. A few of them were at home, beautiful homes filled with art, and good food, family and love and comfort. But many more of them were in nursing homes paid for by Medicaid or in public housing. Sometimes in fair conditions but often in really challenging situations. It was good and holy work, it was one of the places where God’s call was revealed to me most clearly. I had read a journal article that lifted up the benefit of picture books for people who were dying. And so, one afternoon on my way home I ducked into a bookstore, bought a book, and tucked it in my bag.
One patient I worked with was in one of the roughest nursing homes I’ve still ever been in…. and I think I’ve been in my fair share at this point in my life. This patient had a shared room that was bare – nothing on the walls, no personal touches anywhere. The tray of beige food sat untouched next to the old metal hospital bed. It was bleak, there was nowhere for any respite, any place to rest your eyes or thoughts from reality. The man never spoke. I quickly learned that my attempts to engage him went nowhere, so most days we kept holy silence together.
On one visit, I decided to read. I took out the book I kept in my bag and slowly began to read: Once there was a little bunny who wanted to run away. So he said to his mother, “I am running away.” “If you run away,” said his mother, “I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.” Most of us know how this story goes, the little bunny becomes a ship, and his mother becomes the wind that guides the ship, the little bunny becomes a mountain climber and his mother becomes the mountain itself. She will do anything and go anywhere to be with her little one. As I read, I watched the man’s distant face soften, and as I continued, giant tears streamed down his face, and seemed as if they would never ever end. And then, at last, a smile overtook his gaunt face.
No matter who we are: someone who has lived the full length of years and is now preparing for what is next, students who are afraid to lose their beloved teacher and friend, a spouse whose marriage is suddenly, and quickly, collapsing, or a child who wakes in the night in a dark room, no matter who we are, we need to know the answer to this question: Is there a Love that will not let me go?
That question is exactly the question Jesus is answering in our Gospel lesson this morning.
Jesus is going to die. He knows it. And gathered close, in an upper room, on the night before his arrest, are the people he loves most. This is not a public teaching, not a sermon on a mount or a plain. This is a deathbed conversation. A beloved teacher preparing a terrified inner circle for what comes next.1
The disciples have already been asking their questions… and their questions are as raw as we might expect. Peter has asked where Jesus is going. Thomas has said they don’t even know the way. Philip has asked to just be shown the Father – as if a glimpse of God might be enough. The questions underneath all the questions are the ones they can’t quite say out loud:
Will you leave us?
Who will we be when you are gone?
Is there anything that holds when you are no longer here to hold it?
Into that fear, on that night, Jesus speaks.
And he does something remarkable. He names the fear directly. He does not say: don’t worry, you’ll be fine. He does not map out a plan for what steps they should take the next morning. Instead, he uses a single word that cuts straight to the heart of their fear.
He says: “I will not leave you orphaned.”
In the ancient world, an orphan was not merely a child who had a lost parent. An orphan was socially exposed – legally unprotected, economically vulnerable, cut loose from the network of provision and belonging that made survival possible. To be orphaned was to be without an advocate.
Jesus looks at his disciples and says: I see exactly what you are afraid of. And I promise you that will not happen to you.
An orphan is someone in need of an advocate. Someone called alongside. Someone who stays. And that, Jesus says, is exactly what is coming. What Jesus promises on this night is this: an advocate. And not for the first time, he promises another advocate.
You see, this is not a new idea, Jesus himself has been the Advocate, all along. The Greek word is Paraclete –
the one called alongside, the one who stays, the one who advocates, the one who heals, the one who names, who feeds, who weeps, who refuses to leave anyone outside the circle of his attention.
The Spirit that is coming does not replace that presence. The Spirit will continue it.
God does not send a substitute. God comes to stay.
Look at what happens in verse 17, because the text is tracking a movement we can easily miss. Jesus says the Spirit abides with you – and then, in the same breath – will be in you. That is not a repetitive phrase. It is a progression. From with to in. From accompaniment to indwelling. From God alongside you to God inside you. The Spirit does not hover nearby. The Spirit takes up residence.
The Greek word here is meno – to abide, to remain, to stay. It is one of John’s most important words and it carries the weight of a promise: The Spirit does not visit. The Spirit does not pop in and move on. The Spirit stays.
This is the kind of Love that shows up in the hospice room and moves right in. The kind of Love that elsewhere in the gospels Jesus described like a mother hen longing to gather her brood under her wings, 2 the Love that, the Hebrew scriptures say, has inscribed you on the palms of her hands and cannot forget you any more than a nursing mother can forget the child she has carried.3 This Spirit… she stays. She is already with you. And she is moving, even now, from with you to in you.
And then Jesus shows us what that actually looks like: On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. A quick read can make it sound like some kind of list, this, then this, then this, but it’s not. It’s nested — like those cups or boxes your toddler plays with, one inside another inside another inside another. Jesus is in the Father. You are in Jesus. Jesus is in you. It’s not a sequence, it’s an embrace. And you are included.4
This isn’t poetry, though it sure does sound like it, or maybe better put, it is poetry its truest sense…
This is a claim about what is actually, really true about who you are.
I think the body knows this too. In pregnancy cells from a child cross into the mother’s body — and stay there. For decades. Lodged in her heart, her lungs, her brain. And that’s not all, in the same way the mother’s cells cross into the child.5
All of that means this: you don’t just carry the memory of the one who carried you. You carry her — materially, bodily, in your actual flesh. She is in you and you are in her. Long after everything has else has changed.
Which is perhaps not so far from what Jesus is saying.
You do not merely remember God’s presence. You do not merely feel God nearby on a good day. God’s life is actually, really, truly, lodged within you – in your mind, in your heart, in your hands, in your feet. The Spirit has moved from with to in, and she is not leaving.
And it’s important that we not miss this next piece: God dwelling in you is not a private spiritual experience. You can’t tell it in this translation, but in the Greek, or southern vernacular the you in this passage is plural… y’all.
Jesus is not speaking to isolated individuals about their personal experience with God, he’s speaking to y’all. He is speaking to a community. The Spirit inhabits the body together.
The church – this gathered, imperfect, sometimes stumbling community – is the Spirit’s primary residence, it’s where she gets her mail. Look around. She probably could have chosen a more impressive address. Be she chose this one. She chose you. And we carry this presence not only each in ourselves, but together, as one body.
So what does any of this mean on a beautiful spring morning in May where the sun is shining and the bird are chirping and we come to worship with gratitude and questions, wonder and weariness, all sort of jumbled together.
I think it means this: we are not who we think we are.
Or rather, we are much more than we think you are.
Because if what Jesus says to his disciples is true, then the Spirit of the Living God is not someone we are trying to get to. She is somewhere we already are. She is the deepest truth of who we are.
This is part of why we are here6 week after week, in this season of Easter saying the same things, telling some of the same stories over again. Not to be reminded of a fact, but to be formed by a reality.
To have God’s presence in us and our presence in God worked into us, practiced into us, until we know it is not just in our heads, but in our bones.
When Jesus is no longer physically present with the disciples, it is the community of disciples that becomes the location where God is visible to the world. That is not metaphor. In John’s Gospel, after the resurrection (when God makes Jesus alive again), after the ascension (when Jesus goes up to be with God), after Pentecost (when the Holy Spirit comes down and births the church) – the community is where the Spirit, the Advocate, the paraclete lives. The church is where the Spirit lives.
You — y’all — are where the Spirit has chosen to stay. We do not generate God’s presence. We cannot create it or manifest it.
We bear it, the way a body bears cells that were given to it, the way a mother bears a child that will always be both hers and its own. We bear it the way a dying man was able to recognize something lodged within him that was more true than even his most desperate fear.
That is what we are: witnesses, bearers, a people where God has chosen to stay.
Our Lord who was betrayed, who was crucified, died, and was buried. Our Lord who was raised from the dead, who ate at table with friends, who appeared to them on the road. Our Lord who ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty, and who now dwells in you and you in him. That is how far love goes – lodged in you, in your mind, in your heart, in your hands, in your feet, and it will not leave and cannot be removed.
Perhaps the runaway bunny, aware at last of his mother’s love, doesn’t simply need to stay in the burrow as the story suggests. Perhaps the response to a love that will go anywhere to be with you is to stop running from Love – and to start running with Love.
So go with the God who stays –
to bind the broken,
to heal the hurting,
to comfort the grieving,
to befriend the lonely,
to feed the hungry,
to advocate for the exhausted,
to set a place setting for the orphan,
to make eye contact with the stranger,
to steady the hand of the weary,
to quiet the room so that those being talked over can finally be heard.
Stay here.
And there. And over there. And here.
God is with you. She stays. Don’t run away – run with her.
Thanks be to God. Amen.