In the Gospels, Jesus said that the Spirit of God would lead us into all truth. My perception is that in the worldwide Church today, there is an enormous divide and it is a divide between those who are convinced that we already have all truth, that it has been revealed a very long time ago and it is our purpose as Christians to tend to that truth and to pass it on to coming generations, unchanged. On the other side, there are those that feel that we are continually being led into the expanding vision of truth by God the Holy Spirit. As an old poster said, "Be patient with me. God isn't finished with me yet." I hope that God is patient with the Church because I firmly believe that He has not finished with us yet, that he is continuing to lead us into new insights, new ways of expressing the things that are deeply felt within us, that we believe and want to share with other people.

When Italian glassblowers of the Middle Ages would discover a flaw in a beautiful piece of glassware on which they were working, they converted that failure into a common wine flask. The flask was called in Italian a fiasco. That word came to mean any type of failure. Sometimes we forget that Christ, too, had to face failures. The cause of the failures was not in him; it was in the persons and circumstances with which he was dealing. Despite his best efforts, Christ failed to transform Judas into a hero. How did Christ face his failures? Failures were not final for him because there was a purpose beyond his failures.

Failures are never final if you have a partner who is bigger than the failure. A great many failures in life seem to be final. Apart from God in Christ, they are. However, if, by faith, we say that God alone is final and ultimate, then nothing else in life can be as final as he is. That means that nothing that happens to us can be final. That means God alone will have the last word, and that word will be good!

Remember what a fiasco the apostle Peter made of all his vows of loyalty uttered at the dinner table on the evening before Christ died. What promises Simon Peter made to stand by Christ! I will never leave you even though all the rest do (Mk 14:29)! Less than three hours later, as he stood by the fire in the courtyard of the high priest and warmed himself against the chill night air of spring, Peter denied that he even knew Christ. He failed, but his failure was not final because he had a partner who was bigger than the future.

Let's go back to the first Pentecost, when the believers were all gathered together, all in one place and of one accord. The Holy Spirit descended upon them. They had no words for it. They said it was as if there was an earthquake. They said that it was as if there were tongues of fire that danced around and lit on them. But they could not explain it. They had no images or words for it. But an extraordinary thing happened. They were immediately seized with the need to go out to tell the story of Jesus fearlessly.

This was an enormous break-through because up until this time, the Christian community had been a sect of Judaism. They were a part of the Jewish community, uneasily so, but there they were and now all of a sudden, they were moved out from the familiar, out from that which they rebelled against but depended upon, out into the new world. The Book of Acts contains the roll call of all the people who heard them when they went out and spoke: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Capadocians. It goes on and on. This was revolutionary. This was extraordinary. Ever since that day the Spirit has been leading us, the members of the Church, into new insights, into new ways.

We began by moving from a Jewish sect to the Christian movement. From being the people of the Torah, from people of the law, we became the "People of the Way." The Spirit is moving us from old ways into new ways. It has always done so and is doing it now. Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church. God is just and will not allow himself to be mocked. Tragedies such as the scandals in the Church make it imperative to rise to the level of faith which teaches us to hope against hope and never to despair. Failures are never final if you have a partner who is bigger than the failure. Our partner is the Son of God.

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