Pentecost 2013
I will ask the Father, says Jesus, and he will give you
an Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, who will teach you everything.
When I was a child back in the 1960’s my parents used to
take me and my brother to the science museum in London as a special treat from
time to time. It was a glimpse into the future, with lots of buttons to press
and levers to pull. There was one exhibit though, which to me was the real star
of the show, completely amazing. What was it? It was an automatic door, a door
that opened all by itself when you walked towards it, a door, in other words,
that you could find in just about every supermarket in the country today – how
the world has changed! I’ve also seen the advent of colour television, home freezers, personal
computers, mobile phones, the internet…things that would have seemed like
science fiction when I was young are now just taken for granted. And I’m not
that ancient…
It isn’t just technology that has changed though. There have
been huge shifts in social attitudes too, an opening up of society to voices
that might once have gone unheard. There is a far greater awareness and
acceptance of diversity than there was when I was a child, at least officially,
and that enriches us all.
But change, even for the better, can feel quite exhausting,
and a more diverse society can make it seem as if we are surrounded by a welter
of different opinions, coming at us from every angle, online and offline, pulling
us in different directions, ” come here, go there, do this, do that”. How do we
figure out what we should think, believe, do, with all these conflicting ideas
around us?
You might be wondering what all this has to do with the
Feast of Pentecost, this celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit which we
mark today. Well, Jesus describes the Spirit as the Spirit of Truth in
today’s Gospel reading, the one who will teach us everything. If we are looking
for a voice to cut through the noisy turmoil of our world and give us the
guidance we long for, it sounds as if this is the one we want.
As it happens, the world in which the Christian Church was
born, the first Century Roman Empire was every bit as confusing and diverse as
ours is – we might think life was simpler then, but we’d be wrong. Roman roads
had connected cultures from one end of the known world to the other and brought
together people of many different outlooks. In any Roman city you would find
people of every race and language, worshipping in temples to gods from many
different faiths, debating every philosophy under the sun in the market places.
The result was that it was pretty much a free-for-all, with far fewer shared
cultural and moral norms than we have today. The Roman authorities were happy
to tolerate all this, provide people also sacrificed to the Emperor the symbol
of unity and ultimate authority. The Christians got into trouble because they
refused to do that.
So if we think it was any easier for the first followers of
Jesus to hear the still, small voice of God , if we think their society was any
less noisy and confused, we should think again. And yet somehow they did. The
picture the Acts of the Apostles gives us in our second reading is of a group
of people who were filled with confidence and conviction, with a faith that was
deeply rooted and utterly real.
I don’t think their confidence springs from the dramatic
nature of their experience of God– the rushing wind and dancing flames. These
are really just metaphors, symbols that point to the depth of the impact the
Spirit of God had on them. However mysterious and extraordinary this story
makes it all sound, the thing that made the difference was the transformation
that happened in their real lives, a transformation that transformed those
around them too. This story is not about wind and flames, but about a community
of people learning to listen for the voice of God, and being so inspired by
what they heard that nothing could ever be the same afterwards. Despite the
impression we might get from what we have heard – out of context – this morning,
it wasn’t an experience that came totally out of the blue, either. There were things this community of believers
were doing which helped them to tune into this voice which they might otherwise
have not had the courage to heed, which is good news for us, because they are
things which could help us too.
The first thing we find when we look at this story in its
context is that these people were waiting. Jesus had told them to wait for
power from on high, so they did.
What did they expect would happen? Who knows? They certainly
didn’t know. But the fact that they were waiting implies that they were aware
that they didn’t already have the answers they needed. When we are flummoxed by
life, it is always tempting to rush in to action, scattering any old ideas or
initiatives around in the hope that doing something will be better than doing
nothing. The sad fact is, though, that it rarely is. The ideas we already have
up our sleeve aren’t usually the ones we need the most. If they were we would
have already solved our dilemmas. It is the things we haven’t thought of that
really help us when we are stumped. If we are serious about hearing God’s
voice, we need to have the humility and the trust to be silent and to listen
for it, to give him space to get a word in edgeways. These disciples were
waiting, and into that waiting came something new that swept them out into a
future they could never have imagined.
Their waiting wasn’t simply passive though. While they
waited they were also praying. That means, almost certainly, that they were
joining in with the regular liturgical prayers of the Jewish faith, rather than
just praying their own prayers. They would have been reciting the Psalms,
hearing the scriptures, pondering the stories of their faith, reflecting on
them to help them see their own situations better. In this, they were following
the pattern of Jesus. He wasn’t uncritical of his tradition – he challenged it
and reinterpreted it and as a result it became richer and more powerful. But
before he did that he had to know it for himself. His followers, as they
waited, did the same, praying the ancient words which would help them keep
their ears open to the new words God was saying to them now. That’s why we still do the same thing today, why
I stand here and go on about ancient Rome and first century Israel, in the
hopes that as we reflect on these old stories we will see the challenges we
face today more clearly.
They were waiting. They were praying. But the third thing
they were doing – and perhaps the most important - was that they were gathering. When the Spirit
came upon them they were all together in one place, we are told, and this was
obviously a regular thing. Their awareness of God was not some private mystical
experience. It came as they gathered together; gathering was an intrinsic part
of it, and I think it still is. People often say that they don’t think they
need to come to church to be a Christian and in a sense they are right. Of
course you can hold Christian beliefs and pray on your own – sometimes you may
have to do so. But these early Christians would have thought it was an odd
thing to do, and that you would have a poorer, weaker faith as a result, and I’m
inclined to agree. For a start, when we don’t come together it is easy to miss
out on the wisdom we have to share as we learn together, but there’s another
reason why I think it matters that our faith is lived out in community, and not
in splendid isolation. Coming together
with others forces us to get real with our faith. Christian communities aren’t,
let’s be truthful, places where everyone is always good and kind and
considerate and wise. They can also be places where we are challenged, irritated,
bored, fed up, exhausted... And perhaps sometimes we will be the ones doing the
challenging and the irritating too. That’s life, life as it really is. Whatever
other opportunities a church community provides, my experience is that it
always gives you lots of practice at forgiveness – both giving and receiving it.
It teaches you what it means to love – not as a pious sentiment, but in the
nitty gritty practice of being there for others who needs you, and letting them
be there for you too. The Spirit of God which fell upon those early Christian
communities wasn’t a distraction from all the challenges of getting on with
others, but an integral part of that process, helping people learn to see each
other for what they really were, the precious children of God, however wounded
and fallible. It is in the struggle to love, not despite it, that the Spirit of
God, the Spirit of love, comes to dwell with us.
“Come Holy Spirit” we often pray and sing at Pentecost. But
what is it we think will happen as a result? How will the Spirit come to us? What
will the Spirit do, what difference will it make? Depending on the way we
answer that, we may find we get either less or more than we expect; less, if we
are hoping for some sort of spiritual high, a mystical roller coaster ride in
the heavenly places, but more, much more, if what we are seeking is to learn to
love more deeply and let ourselves be loved more deeply too. Rushing wind and
flames of fire are all very well, but it is love that endures when the wind
dies down and the fire goes out, love which sustains us, love which brings the
greatest and most important changes to the world.
Amen.
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