For a while, in my youth, I was in a band! I played keyboard in (what some of you might like to call) a Beat Group. We didn’t base ourselves so much on the Beatles – more on the Bay City Rollers.

We weren’t unaware of our own limitations. We knew were we never going to win any talent contest. But for the time we were together, we enjoyed making music (that’s being quite polite about the noise we made), we enjoyed our own rendition of “Bye Bye baby” … perhaps that was the original extraordinary rendition! And yes, I am aware that “Bye Bye Baby” was originally recorded by the Four Seasons in 1965. But you have to admit the Bay City Rollers version (which sold a million copies and spent six weeks at Number One in 1975) was more likely to have more of an impact on me, a child of 1961.

Like most wanna be bands, it didn’t last long. We began to fall out. To argue about the relative merits of music and lyrics. We couldn’t agree whether we ready to take on our first gig. We didn’t know which way our music was going. It didn’t last long. After two and a half hours it all began to fall apart !!

Why is it that these brief moments in our history (and I’m not joking, it really was one practice on one afternoon during a school holiday … and we really did begin to argue about all those things!) – why is it that these brief moments in our history burn themselves into our hearts, our minds, our souls?

What are your moments that you might rather forget, but that are etched into your memories forever? Some of them will be amusing, some will be far more poignant than that. Painful. Even hurtful. Moments when you have felt (as Simeon said to Mary in the Temple) “a sword piercing your heart”. Moments when you have been responsible for thrusting and twisting the sword into the heart of another human being. All these moments of memory – some we recall with amusement, others with joy, still more with sorrow, pain and shame.

I read this week of someone who (with his school friends)

“fancied ourselves as a budding rock band”

I was reading about that great blues musician Jimmy Reed (born in Mississippi in 1925 and died in California in 1976. One encyclopaedia tells us that Reed

“was an American blues singer notable for bringing his distinctive style of blues to mainstream audiences. Reed was a major player in the field of electric blues, as opposed to the more acoustic-based sound of many of his contemporaries. His lazy, slack-jawed singing, piercing harmonica and hypnotic guitar patterns were one of the blues most easily identifiable sounds in the 1950s and 1960s.”

And the would be schoolboy imitator went on to say:

“We would play and replay our old 45s attempting in vain to capture that sound. But how do you imitate someone like Reed. The pain-soaked cries of his mahogany voice could not be imitated by our too-tight, too-white, suburban throats.”

But there's an interesting story behind some of the Jimmy Reed recordings. If you listen carefully to the records, you can sometimes hear, ever so faintly in the background, a soft woman's voice, murmuring in advance the next verse of the song. The story goes – and maybe it’s true – that Jimmy Reed was so absorbed in the bluesy beat and the throbbing guitar music that he simply couldn’t remember the words of his own songs. He needed help with the lyrics, and the woman's voice was none other than that of his wife, sitting beside Reed, coaching him through the recording session by whispering into his ear the upcoming verse.

Our gospel reading this morning comes from (what is called) the Farewell Discourse. We are at the Last Supper. It is Passover. Jesus has already washed the feet of his disciples, showing them what it means to be followers of his: that it means rolling up your sleeves and doing stuff for others, not just practising piety and religious ceremonials. It’s about service, not about lording it over others. It’s about that love that draws us, not about that guilt that drives us.

After washing their feet Jesus delivers his final motivational talk, his final inspirational lecture, his final visionary sermon. And it lasts four whole pages of the bible. It’s long piece of scripture. And the part we hear this morning comes from the central section.

Here Jesus is telling his followers that the role of the Holy Spirit is, in effect, to whisper the lyrics of the gospel song in the ears of the faithful. Whilst Jesus was with them, he was the one who coached them with the right words, who guided them through the proper verses, who prepared them to live the joyful commandments. But now that Jesus approaches his death, now that he draws near to his time of his departure, now that the disciples will be on their own without him, that task is to be handed over to the Holy Spirit:

"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 ..." (John 14:15-17).

The primary task, then, of the Holy Spirit is to remind the faithful of “the truth”, to jog the memories of the followers of Jesus about all of his commandments so that they can keep them in love, to whisper the lyrics of that never-ending hymn of faithful obedience in their ears.

It may come as a surprise to think of the Holy Spirit in this way, as a quiet, whispering prompt of the commandments of Jesus. Often the Spirit is advertised in flashier terms: the Spirit gives ecstasy; the Spirit evokes speaking in unknown tongues; the Spirit prompts dramatic and miraculous healings. Indeed, the Holy Spirit of God does perform those deeds, but these are all by-products of the one, primary activity of the Spirit:

    > to teach you everything

    > to remind you of all that I have said (John 14:26).

Or, to put it another way, to whisper the gospel lyrics of God’s undying love and forgiveness into the ears of the forgetful faithful.