by CCW | 12 June 2011 14:37
Pentecost. What does it mean? The fiftieth day after Passover, after Easter. What does it signify? In the Christian understanding, it signifies the Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples to give birth to the Church.
What? Was there no Church before Pentecost? Yes and no. The Church is present yet hidden in the history of Israel as “the People of God,” a people defined by the Law, the Old Testament or Covenant. The Church is present, too, in the Incarnate Christ of the New Testament. But now, at Pentecost, the Church is present and empowered in a new way. How? By the Descent of the Holy Ghost or Spirit, sent from the Father by the Son, sent by the Father in Jesus’ name. A powerful pedigree and a moving and powerful scene. No Trinity. No Church.
Luke tells us about the event of Pentecost. At once exhilarating and strange, we all catch, I think, something of the ecstatic and experiential wonder of the event. “A sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind,” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire,” lighting and resting upon each of the disciples, inspiring them, it seems, for “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues,” the Spirit giving “them utterance,” it seems. A curious, yet awe-inspiring event. Everyone speaking in other tongues – other languages – but all singing from the same song-sheet, all singing “the wonderful works of God.” Somehow the confused babble of the nations has been converted into a unity of praise. That surely is a marvel. But what, really, are we to make of it? At the time, some thought they were drunk!
Peter, in the passage which immediately follows this morning’s lesson, is quick to respond. “These men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day;” it‘s a long time before happy hour, after all! Yet, it is a curious scene. It seems, well, rather unsettling, and, yet, John tells us in the Gospel that this unsettling Spirit is God the Holy Ghost, the Comforter. Is this what we should expect will happen to us at Pentecost? What does it all mean? What kind of birthday of the Church is this?
A divine and heavenly one. Pentecost reminds us of a critical and important truth. The Church is more than simply a human institution. In the face of the confusions and uncertainties, the follies and agendas, the sins and wickednesses of the churches in the variety of the forms of their institutional expressions – parishes, dioceses, synods, priests, laity, whatever – it is good, really good, to be reminded that the Church is about more than us. It is God’s Church. That is the message and meaning of Pentecost.
I take great comfort from this. P.D. James, the great English writer of literary detective fiction, puts it wonderfully in an insightful introduction to The Book of the Acts of the Apostles in the Library of Pocket Canons Series. “No organisation with which human beings are concerned, even one divinely ordained or inspired, is ever free from controversy.” Thus “it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.” We forget this at our peril. More importantly, we forget that the Church is divinely established. As she points out, the controversy in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles “was whether Christ’s revelation was to the Jews alone or whether Gentiles could also receive the gift of the Spirit and be baptised.” At issue, is the universality of God and the Church and the unity and order of the Church. The issue is perennial.
The story of Pentecost deliberately recalls the Genesis story of the building of the Tower of Babel, a story about humanity’s attempt to reach heaven or build the heavenly city on the strength of our own power. A story about human presumption and hubris, it is also an account of the differences of language and tongues in the world. God scatters the peoples into the nations and languages of the world. Unable to communicate in one language, the ur-language of our mythical origins, the human project collapses into confusion and disarray.
There is a divine check upon our human projects and presumptions. Pentecost reverses the story. A unity is now achieved and celebrated through the diversity of tongues but it is a divinely inspired, directed and guided event. The principle is not our humanity in our self-assertions and agendas, in its diversity and complexity; it is the Descent of the Holy Ghost bringing unity and order to birth.
Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, Paraclete, Comforter – these are all terms for the Spirit of God, the uniting Spirit of the Father and the Son. Jesus teaches us the most about the Holy Spirit, that most elusive divine person of the Blessed Trinity. Wind and fire are but images, images which have a suggestive and elusive aspect to them. After all, who can catch the wind? Who can grasp the fire? They are images that connect us to the mystery of God revealed in Jesus Christ and settle us in the understanding of God’s Word.
The terms ghost and spirit reflect a distinctive feature of the English language which the Prayer Book especially respects. English has both a Germanic influence in terms of Anglo-Saxon or Old English and a Latin influence through the French of the Norman Conquest. The word ghost derives from the German geist; the word spirit from the Latin spiritus. Something is lost by referring only to spirit in talking about God the Holy Spirit. What is lost is exactly the theme that Pentecost signals: the variety of languages and nations now redeemed into a spiritual unity of praise and worship by the power of the Spirit through the diversity of tongues. God unites us with himself in the outpouring of his Spirit, the Holy Ghost.
The Church is born as a visible entity by this invisible spiritual power imaged in the similes of wind and fire; “as of a rushing mighty wind,” “like as of fire.” But the whole story points us to the marvel of unity in truth. We find our unity in the essentials of the faith revealed in the witness of the Scriptures and concentrated for us in the Creeds. This is what Pentecost reminds us. The human community has no unity in itself; its unity is found in God and in what God bestows upon us through his Word and Spirit.
This divine birthday of the Church also signals the Church’s vocation or mission. The Church is the Mission of God charged with giving birth and life to the spiritual community of our humanity. This morning we are wonderfully reminded of the nature of that spiritual community into which we have been born. The baptism of Kyle Robert Langdale is a Pentecostal reminder to us all of our divine identity in Christ. His baptism recalls us to each of our baptisms, the effective sign of who we truly are in the sight of God and what we are called to be: “the children of God, inheritors of the Kingdom of heaven and members of the Body of Christ.”
Having born anew by this divine and heavenly gift of spiritual life conveyed through Holy Baptism, Kyle and all of us are to live that life of the spirit in the very meaning of Pentecost, namely, in lives of prayer and praise, singing “the wonderful works of God” in his Holy Church. Baptism and Communion, as our Anglican teachings emphasise, are the two “dominical sacraments,” that is to say, the two sacraments ordained explicitly by our Lord, by Jesus Christ. Pentecost reminds us of the divine origins of the Church and the divinely ordered life of the Church. Our task and privilege is to embrace what God gives us and to make it our own to his praise and glory and to the good of his Church and people.
Our liturgy, I like to think, is about the wind and fire of Word and Sacrament. Our language of prayer and praise is tongued with the fire of the Spirit when our hearts are one with the words of our lips, words given on the wind of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is indeed the Comforter, the one who strengthens us in our spiritual fellowship and life in the Holy Church which the Holy Ghost brings to birth. “Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire and lighten with celestial fire” is what our Pentecostal worship is all about.
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost, 2011
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2011/06/12/sermon-for-the-day-of-pentecost/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.