Sermons

Pentecost

Sunday 27th May at 10am

Simon Cowling
Readings: Acts 2. 1-21; John 14. 8-17

What is the Kingdom of Heaven like, they asked? Well, said Jesus, it's like a man looking for fine pearls. When he finds one that is especially fine, he sells everything he has so that he can possess that one pearl. Or, if you like, it's a place which prostitutes and tax collectors will enter before those who are outwardly respectable, but whose spiritual blindness has caused them to miss the right path.

What is God like, they asked? Well, said Jesus, God is like a woman who loses one of her ten silver coins. She is diligent in searching it out, sweeping and looking in every nook and cranny. When she finds it she rejoices with her neighbours. Or God is like a father welcoming back a son who has wasted his inheritance and generally made a mess of things.

What are you like, they asked Jesus? Well, I'm the good shepherd, he replied, who is willing to die for his sheep; and I'm the way, the truth and the light. It is through me that you can know the Father, for whoever has seen me has seen the Father - the God who searches for the lost and who welcomes the errant child.

What does it mean to be born again in the Holy Spirit, asked Nicodemus? Well, says Jesus, think about the wind. The wind blows wherever it wishes; you hear its sound but you don't know where it's come from or where it's going to. It's like that for all who experience birth in the Holy Spirit.

Jesus used images all the time in his teaching: simile, metaphor, picture language - call it whatever you like. Whether it was the Kingdom of Heaven, God the Father, himself or the Holy Spirit, Jesus preferred description to definition. And there's no need for us to think that he used images simply because he was talking to people who had no formal education. Try this: how is it easiest for you to think of a second? Do you prefer, 'the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.'? Or, 'the gap between the pips before the radio news.'?
When he was describing the momentous events on the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, Luke used picture language too. The sound of the Spirit as it descended was "like a strong wind blowing", and as the Spirit touched the believers in the house where they were sitting they saw what "looked like tongues of fire." Luke, along with Matthew and Mark, used picture language to describe the Holy Spirit in his Gospel as well: remember the Holy Spirit coming down on Jesus "in bodily form like a dove" at his baptism. Wind, fire, a dove. All of them descriptions of what the Spirit is like, none of them definitions. But these descriptions nevertheless enable us to capture something of what the Spirit is. The Spirit can't be tied down to any one place, any more than the wind can. The Spirit gives warmth and light, just as fire does. Like a dove, the Spirit is alive and free.

The Christian Church has often been ambivalent about the role played by the Holy Spirit, both in the Christian understanding of God and in the life of the faithful. Sometimes this ambivalence has had its roots in doctrinal debate, in arguments about what it's reckoned we should believe: it was several hundred years, for instance, before the Church came fully to accept that the Holy Spirit was divine, part of the Holy Trinity that we shall be thinking about next week. Sometimes the ambivalence has been to do with the need of church authorities to control the behaviour of the faithful: one of the biggest insults that the Church of England reserved for men like John Wesley in the eighteenth century was that they were 'enthusiastic'. This term of abuse implied espousal of a faith that was dangerously out of control and which risked disturbing the equilibrium of a social order that suited the Established Church very well. And sometimes the ambivalence about the Holy Spirit has been to do with an understanding of Christian history: there are Christian groups, especially within the Protestant tradition, who reject charismatic worship of any sort because of a belief that the particular gifts of the Holy Spirit that Luke describes in Acts chapter 2, and elsewhere in Acts, ended at the time the first generation of apostles died. Speaking in tongues, the gift of prophecy, miraculous healing - all of these are activities that had ended by around 100 AD, and any worship in which these activities appear today is, almost by definition counterfeit.

These examples of ambivalence about the role of the Holy Spirit, and there are others, all seem to me to suffer from the same underlying problem: they are all concerned with keeping things under control: making sure that people believe the right way, behave the right way, worship the right way. But in St. John's Gospel Jesus says to the Samaritan woman by the well: "God is Spirit, and those who worship God must worship him in Spirit and in truth." If we put that statement alongside the scriptural images of the Spirit as fire, wind and dove we must surely conclude that our worship must be open and adventurous, attentive to the promptings of the warmth, the unpredictability and the freedom of the Spirit.

Yet, although central to our life as Christians, worship is not the only context in which we should be alive to the promptings and urgings of the Spirit. In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul has another image of the Holy Spirit, a wonderful picture of the Spirit as a kind of seed planted in the heart of Christians. This seed, Paul says, will produce fruit: love, joy, peace; patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control. These fruits are what will reveal us to the world as a people whose lives have been forever changed by our encounter with the living Spirit of God. How many of these fruits do we allow the Spirit to produce in our lives? How does the Spirit change our lives as a result? Is the Spirit calling us to more active service as a volunteer in one of the many social action groups in our city: PAFRAS, the Simon Community, St. George's Crypt, the Samaritans? Is the Spirit calling us to share more fully in the life of St. Ed's: by coming occasionally or regularly to the Prayer Hour or joining a House Group. Is the Spirit calling us to take seriously God's call to us to care for his Creation, perhaps by joining an eco-team in Roundhay? Or is the Spirit simply prompting us to make a resolution to share the Peace of Christ with one person we don't know in church each week, and then to speak with that person after the Eucharist? What is the Spirit calling you to do?

Spirit of truth,
whom the world can never grasp,
touch our hearts
with the shock of your coming;
fill us with desire
for your disturbing peace;
and fire us with longing
to speak your uncontainable word
through Jesus Christ. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay