I don’t know what your
garden’s like at the moment, if you have one, but if it is anything like mine,
over this last week or so it will have just exploded with life. All that rain,
followed by long-awaited warmth has meant that everything is growing, fast, and
in every direction at once. It always seems to catch me out when it does this,
though it happens every year. One minute you are impatiently waiting for plants
to creep into growth, and the next minute you are engulfed in greenery. Quite a
lot of it is weeds, of course - let’s face it, they didn’t get to be where they
are by hanging back politely – but that’s how it is, “life in all its fullness”
to quote the words of Jesus, whether you want it or not.
Today we celebrate the feast
of Pentecost, the moment when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’ disciples
propelling them out into the world with the message of his love. In a way, the images
Luke uses to describe this event remind me of that exuberant explosion in the
garden. He talks of wind and flames, things that are by their nature uncontrollable,
violent, disturbing and overwhelming, with a life of their own. Before they
know what is happening, the disciples find themselves out on the streets
proclaiming the good news in languages which they don’t understand. Their words
are recognised instantly by the polyglot
crowd in Jerusalem, though, the Parthians, Medes, Elamites and all the rest. They
have come all the way from their homes to this place which seems so distant and
foreign to them and yet to their surprise here is a God who speaks their own
language. In their heart of hearts they had probably thought of God as an
Israelite – but no, he is one of them too. They had come as strangers, seekers
after truth or just sightseers, but suddenly an experience they thought they
were looking at from the outside becomes their experience. God comes home to them and the effect is
explosive, changing their lives completely.
These ancient events
described in the Bible can seem so strange to us as to make no sense at all.
What has all this to do with us? But my experience is that far more people than
we might imagine at some time feel the presence of God with them in a way which
overwhelms and changes them. They might not see flames or hear a rushing wind. They
might not speak in strange languages or understand them, but many people –
perhaps most people – at some point in their lives will have had a moment when
they have felt touched by something beyond their understanding, moved in ways
that they can’t account for. A chance encounter, a poem that strikes home, a
piece of music, a loving gesture they weren’t expecting gives them a glimpse of
some deeper reality beneath the surface of their lives, and perhaps gives them
the strength and courage to do something which they thought was quite impossible.
I watched a television
programme this week called Hitler’s
Children 1. It was about the
children and grandchildren of some of the most notorious Nazi war criminals,
people whose whole lives had been blighted, through no fault of their own, by
the surnames they bore. One of them, Rainer Hoess, was the grandson of the commandant
of Auschwitz. His father, just a child at the time, had grown up in a villa on
the other side of the wall from the camp, but the family photos were full of happy
images of the children playing in the garden there, no hint of the horrors
taking place over the wall. Rainer decided that he needed to visit the camp,
though he was clearly very anxious about it. What would happen if people
recognised a family likeness? How would he be received? As it turned out, he
was there at the same time as a group from an Israeli high school, and bravely
he agreed to talk to the young people. As he struggled to express his sorrow,
and the guilt he felt at what his grandfather had done, an elderly man called
out from the crowd. He was a survivor of the camp – one of few left now. Could
he come out, he asked – why? - because
he wanted to shake Rainer’s hand? As the
two of them embraced, the survivor explained that he’d spent his life visiting
schools in his town in Germany, talking to the young people there about what
had happened to him. He wanted to say to Rainer the same thing as he said to
them. “You weren’t there. You didn’t do it…” It was a profound and moving
moment to watch, but for Rainer, as he dissolved into tears, it was absolutely
transformative. It lifted a lifetime of guilt, guilt which had never been
rightly his of course, and afterwards he said that he had felt for the first
time a profound sense of inner joy. It
was utterly unplanned, unsought and unexpected, a moment of complete grace when
love broke through the barriers that awful history had built, and it spilled
out to those who witnessed it as well as into the lives of these two men. Love and forgiveness are possible, it said,
even in these circumstances. We can be infinitely more and better than we
think.
It might not seem that such a
story has anything to do with Pentecost – there was no rushing wind, no
speaking in tongues, no mention of God at all – but it seems to me that it
captured the essence of what this feast is all about, the moment when we find
ourselves opened up to power beyond our power, when a peace that passes our
understanding comes to rest in our lives. And like many of those moments when
we feel ourselves to have been touched by the Spirit of God, it was also
something which couldn’t be predicted, controlled or contained.
What those visitors to
Jerusalem found on the Day of Pentecost was that God wasn’t the property of the
Jewish people, to be doled out in carefully measured doses to those who met
their criteria of righteousness. They didn’t have to become something other
than they were in order to know God and be accepted by him. They thought they
had come as strangers to visit God in his Jewish Temple, but actually he had
been with them all along, at home in their native land, speaking their native
language, just as much present in their lives and customs as in those of the
Jewish people. That lesson was crucially important for the early Church which
was a mixture of Jew and Gentile, but it is just as important for us today.
God is no respecter of human
boundaries, says this story of Pentecost. He is a free-range God. You can’t
cage him, and if you think you’ve managed to then what you have in your tidy
box is not God at all. You can’t tell him what to do or where to go or who to
associate with. The Spirit of God is like the wind, says Jesus, which “blows
where it chooses. You hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes
from or where it goes.” (John 3.8) One of the delights of ministry is that I
find I come across God at work in all sorts of unexpected contexts, in people
who have never set foot in a church, in people who have no intention of setting
foot in a church, in people of other faiths and of none. Children who haven’t
got the language to describe what they have experienced tell me things of great
depth as we sit in the school quiet garden. People on buses and trains talk
about their deepest longings and their deepest joys. Sometimes people ask for
baptism quite out of the blue; something has made them realise that there is
more to life than meets the eye and they need to affirm that. They may have
little or no idea what the Church thinks baptism is all about – they just know
they need to do it, to acknowledge the divine possibilities in their lives.
People are promted by the Spirit, moved by the Spirit, called by the Spirit
constantly.
The medieval Sufi poet Rumi –
a Persian Muslim - wrote of this moment when we are drawn by a call like that,
an experience beyond our understanding. Among other images, he likens it to a
hunting bird summoned back to his master by a distant signal.
He said:
Sometimes you hear a voice
through the door calling you,
as fish out of
water hear the waves or a
hunting falcon
hears the drum’s “come
back”.
This turning toward what
you deeply love
saves you. 2
Rumi may have been from a
different faith and culture, but the Spirit, which blows where it wills, had
clearly blown through his life too. Jesus says in our Gospel reading that the
Spirit of Truth calls us into truth. St Paul says that all creation
groans for the touch of God’s love (Romans 8.22). We may call this experience by many
different names, understand it in many different ways, but the sense of longing
is the same, and we know it when we find it. “Turning toward what you deeply
love saves you.”
In our hymns and prayers for
Pentecost we often ask God’s Spirit to come to us. “Breathe on me, breath of
God.” “Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us” we ask, but good though it
is to issue the invitation, the hallmark of the Spirit is that we can’t make
him come to us by order, and we don’t need to. He is here already, calling to
us in our deepest loves and longings. It may be a call to forgiveness, to
healing, to reconciliation, as it was for Rainer Hoess. It may be a call to
embark on a journey or make a commitment. It may be a call simply to learn to
rest in God. It may come through familiar channels – the words of the Bible, a
hymn or a prayer. But it may also come from way outside the Church and in some
form that takes us utterly by surprise. When we find it, though, however
strange a form it takes, it will also feel like coming home, like the falcon
responding to the drum’s signal or the fish slipping into the water again, coming
home to the God who dwells at the heart of all things.
Amen
1. Hitler’s Children BBC Two www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01j10j3
2. [Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, (from “Saved by a
Poem” by Kim Rosen)]
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