The Comforter and Sasse's Farewell Speech

John 14:15-21

‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.’

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What would you say on your deathbed, your last lecture, your farewell speech? Would you offer sage advice? Share your favorite stories? Or maybe crack a few jokes you’ve learned along the way?

We don’t get much of any of that from Jesus’ farewell to his disciples. That’s what we hear from that passage from John. We are still in the season of Easter, but today we return to the words he spoke to his disciples just before his crucifixion.

At first he seems like he is doing something you're told not to do on a deathbed and that’s asking for promises. It’s as if Jesus is saying, “if you love me, promise me you’ll keep my commandments.” Talk about manipulation and guilt?! But that’s not what Jesus is after. It’s not a conditional, if/then. He’s not asking for a promise. Rather, Jesus is saying you’ll know your love for me when you keep my commandments.

More importantly, Jesus is the one making promises on his deathbed. “I will give you another Advocate and he will be with you forever”. That word for Advocate can be translated in many different ways: counselor, helper, but also comforter. Jesus is offering assurance to terrified disciples, telling them, “I cannot stay here with you, but don’t worry. I am giving you the Holy Spirit, who will be a comforter to you.”

Now that’s a beautiful promise. I’m sure the disciples needed it. I’m sure some of you need it today! But what does that mean or look like? I mean how is the Holy Spirit going to give not just the disciples, but give you and I comfort here and now, in this life?

Well I think I’ve seen that comfort in Ben Sasse, who is also giving his farewell speech. Sasse, as you may know, was senator from Nebraska, serving from 2013 to 2023. He left under his own volition and became the president of the University of Florida. Before all that, he was the president of Midland University, a small ELCA college in Midland, NE.

Since early February, Ben has been doing interviews and podcasts at breakneck speed because he’s dying. In December of 2025 Ben found out he had cancer. Actually, he found out he had five different types of cancer that had metastasized into 47 tumors, tormenting his torso and the rest of his body. They gave him 90 days to live.

Which is perhaps why you have seen clips of him or his name on your social media feed. When asked why he’s spending so much time with interviewers and journalists, he said, “I did not decide to die in public. But even with three to four months left to live, you have to redeem the time. There’s only so many bits of unsolicited advice I can give my children. So, you journalists want to talk, and if you don’t have anybody better, I’m your huckleberry.”

From all I’ve seen and heard in the talks and interviews, Ben is doing a bit of everything in his farewell speech. He cracks some jokes, he tells great stories like one explaining what’s happening in this photo of him, looking like he’s a bit hungover or had a workout (you decide), and Chuck Schumer holding a giant cig in his right hand.

And as expected he gives sage advice. Advice that comes with the clarity that, according to Ben, only comes with having a terminal diagnosis. For him, his cancer has clarified what matters and he feels a responsibility to use whatever time is left for the good of others. And while Sasse and I may be on different ends of the theological spectrum, his clarity on a number of issues is compelling.

He speaks about everything from AI to politics and the way our screens, addictions, and tribalism are reshaping us. But what I find most compelling from his farewell speech is not the advice, stories, or hot takes. Rather, it’s his regrets.

He wishes he hadn’t worked so much. He laments how much he traveled. He would have locked away phones and turned off screens at the dinner table, because you don’t get that sacred time back. He would have taken sabbath more seriously, undistracted by sports or the ever present lure of work. He would have strengthened bonds with family: siblings, cousins, parents.

And somehow he says all this without despair… , even though he has regrets, even though he knows deeply the mistakes he made, he still has comfort in these last days. In all the interviews I have seen and heard, Ben is noticeably weak, doped up on morphine and nauseous, yet something strengthens him. I mean look at him here with this interview with the NYT. He is literally bleeding from his face because he can’t grow skin as a result from his chemo, yet he doesn’t hide it one bit! How can he have such comfort in the midst of such regret, pain, evil, and death?

I can’t help but think this is the Comforter at work in one’s life, the Holy Spirit giving comfort today in the here and now. Because what I hear in Ben Sasse is that he can name these regrets, these mistakes because he knows, he trusts that he is forgiven. Not only by his family, but by God, too. He can call cancer evil, but at the same time, sanctifying because he now has a divine dependence he never knew before and likely wouldn't have, had this not happened to him. He can call death the enemy, but also trust in the full healing that comes after it.

Such comfort I can only understand as coming from outside of himself, from God at work through the Holy Spirit, assuring him of his forgiveness, giving clarity about what matters most, and supporting him when he can’t support himself.

It’s tempting to hear comfort and imagine soft sheets, fluffy pillows, or simply a calmness. But I don’t think that’s the comfort Jesus promises nor what the Spirit gives. Comfort is not the removal of suffering, but the freedom to tell the truth. It’s not emotional numbness but courage to face regret. And it certainly isn’t empty platitudes, but the ability to face death without despair.

The Spirit gives more than just coping skills.

And I see that in Ben’s farewell speech. He is still grieving. Still suffering. Still regretting. Still dying. And yet something holds him. Strengthen hims. Comforts him. And when I look at him and hear him, I can’t help but believe that is the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the promise of Jesus manifested in this life.

How this comfort comes? Or what exactly the Holy Spirit does to cause it? I don’t know and Jesus doesn’t explain it. Nor do I think Jesus is all that concerned in the mechanics. He is more interested in the promise, to the disciples, to Ben Sasse, and to you and I; that when you face regrets, when you are confronted by pain and evil, when death is inevitable, because it is, you will not be orphaned, left to face any of it alone. You have a comforter.

I pray you know that comfort. I pray I offer it to you. I pray the Holy Spirit works through you to offer it to someone else.

Because the truth is, we are all moving toward a farewell speech of our own. One day there will be regrets we cannot undo, suffering we cannot avoid, and a death we cannot outrun.

And when that day comes, Jesus does not offer explanations. He does not provide escape. He promises this: you will not be orphaned.

And maybe that is the comfort of the Holy Spirit. Not the removal of pain, but the assurance that even there, in grief, in weakness, in death itself, you are not abandoned.

That is the work of the Father who promises,

the Son who assures,

and the Holy Spirit who abides with us still.

Amen.

Artemis, Awe, and Choosing Each Other

John 10:1-10

Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.”

Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

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I am a little late to the party, but this past week, I have been intrigued by the Artemis 2 space mission that launched at the beginning of the month. Because the trip coincided with Holy Week, I didn’t have much time to take it in as it was happening. Now with Jesus thoroughly out of the grave, I have been mesmerized by the mission and the moments captured by the crew aboard Integrity, their aptly named spacecraft, which carried some of the kindest, well qualified, yet humble overachievers we could find.

Of the many remarkable moments, a few struck me most.

The first was just the tightness of the crew, in more ways than one. In all of the photos and videos the crew seems to genuinely care not only about the mission they are on, but for each other too.

When asked what it means to be a crew back on earth Christina Koch, one of the mission specialists said, a crew is “a group that is in it all the time, no matter what. That sacrifices silently for each other, gives grace, has the same cares and the same needs, and is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked. Planet Earth: You are a crew,”

What a hopeful, aspirational description for a place that acts the opposite most of the time.

But it’s a good thing the crew on Integrity got along so well, because look at how tight those quarters are! For nearly two weeks, those four grown adults were in 316 cubic feet of shared space,

which is like being confined to the interior of two mini vans.

I mean look at the size of the bathroom!

Speaking of the bathroom…there was a small problem with the toilet, which is really no small problem at all. As I understand it, which isn’t well, the vent that pushes all their fluid out into space had frozen. That meant they’d have to use bags for all their toileting needs, which sounds difficult in space. So to fix this they rotated their craft so that the vents faced toward instead of away from the sun. And it worked!

What a wonderfully human problem and need to see people work together and overcome.

These kind of moments led to the contagious moonjoy many talked about, this awe at the moon and those who approached it.

The second is this photo. It’s a picture of earth setting behind the moon’s crated filled surface.

This was the first public photo of Artemis II crew’s trip to the dark side of the moon. We’ve seen sunsets, sunrises, and in 1968 we saw earthrise for the first time with pictures from Apollo 8. But never before had we seen all the earth setting, as if we, the whole world, were off to bed at the end of a collective day.

Describing that moment the best he could, Reid Weisman said:

“No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal. I know there’s no adjectives. I’m going to need to invent some new ones to describe what we are looking at out this window.”

And finally, minutes later from that photo, the crew lost all signal with earth for forty minutes, becoming the first crew to ever travel that far around the moon and that far away from the earth. Once they came back in contact, Christina Koch had this to say to all of us: Click here to watch.

We will always choose earth. We will always choose each other. What a beautiful, much needed message to everyone.

Such a statement might be the result of the overview effect. It’s the profound mental shift that many astronauts report having experienced after seeing Earth from a distance. It is an awe experienced from space.

Awe is that moment when something is so vast, so beautiful, so beyond you, that it rearranges how you see everything else. And whether in space or on earth, all experiences of awe encourage attitudes of compassion, generosity, and selflessness. That’s according to leading researcher Dacher Keltner, whose book we’ve read here. Those four astronauts had an overwhelming experience of awe and it shows in statements like: “We will all always choose each other.”

It was awe that led the early church to live the way described in our story from Acts. After the resurrection, they experienced awe from the signs and wonders being done by the apostles who were filled with the Holy Spirit. They heard the good news proclaimed by Peter about Jesus who was crucified and killed, but whom God raised up, freeing him from death, and giving everyone forgiveness of sins in his name.

All of this drove them toward not just an attitude of generosity, compassion, and selflessness, but action that encompassed all of that. As Luke tells it, these early disciples lived together and shared all they had. If anyone was in need, they would sell what they had to meet that need. They were committed to doing life together: learning, eating, praying, and playing together. In the words of Christina Koch, they were a crew, “a group that was in it all the time, that gave grace, and had the same cares and the same needs, which was the people beside them.

They were inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked, choosing each other, in the most Christ- like way.

Now it would be easy to say that this is the goal of the church and of this church, to live like the picture given to us of the first disciples. But if that’s the goal, we’ve already missed it. If all I did this morning was tell all of us to live together, eat all our meals together, come to church everyday, sell our possessions: One, no one would do it. And two, it would just set us up for failure.

All of our striving would only show how short we fall, and become a form of works righteousness,

believing that what we do will make Jesus love us more or bring about our own forgiveness and salvation.

Instead, the exhortation or hope is that you experience awe – not only from artemis 2 and all the moonjoy they brought, but awe at our God who became human, lived, walked, and suffered among us. Awe at a savior who as Peter says in his letter, bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we are free to live the right way.

When we are in awe of our savior, something shifts. We start to see each other differently. We start to live differently.

My prayer for us as individuals and as a church, is that we do not seek to live as the early disciples.

If that’s our aim, we will only disappoint ourselves and each other. Instead, I hope, I pray you experience awe. And if you are wondering how or where to experience that: Go to a concert, take a walk with a three year old (I’ll loan you mine), visit with a centenarian, stare at a rainbow, listen to mozart, look at great art, read the words of Tolstoy or Toni Morrison. Watch the light cascade over a lake at sunset, feel the warmth of the sun at its rising.

Be in awe at a crew of four humans who traveled the furthest distance of any human ever before, only to reemerge and say we must choose each other.

Most of all be in awe of a savior who chose to go to a cross and rise out of a tomb for you

and still chooses each and every day to forgive your sins and give you grace.

When we are in awe of that, we too will be more generous, more compassionate, more selfless to our neighbors.

We too will choose each other.

Amen.