Sermon for Pentecost

admin | 27 May 2012

“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”

Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples in Jerusalem to give birth to the Christian Church. An event, to be sure, of mystery and wonder, it is also more than an event. It is a teaching, a doctrine, and one which gives rise to our life in the spirit, our life in communion with God.

A Greek word, Pentecost simply signifies the fiftieth day after Easter and commemorates the promise of the Ascension, the coming down of the Holy Spirit, designated as the Comforter or Strengthener. It communicates to us a profound and special reality. The descent of the Holy Spirit gives birth to the Church. That is the special reality, the reality of the spiritual community in which we “live and move and have our being.” We have forgotten, I fear, the radical nature of the Church as a spiritual body and communion. To recover this sensibility and understanding is the constant task but most especially at a time when the meaning and the reality of the Church has been so completely discredited and dismissed by those within and without the churches because it is looked at largely in sociological and political terms. Pentecost teaches us the profound truth that the human community has no unity in itself but only in God, and no truth in itself apart from God.

The story of Pentecost is the story of the redemption of the human community. In ways that deliberately recall the ancient Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, a story understood to be about human presumption as well as a just-so story about the different languages of our humanity, Pentecost celebrates the diversity of tongues and cultures and peoples by making them one. Through the diversity of tongues one thing is heard and understood by all. There is unity in and through diversity. They are one in the praise of God. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” Pentecost reverses Babel. One thing is heard in and through the diversity of tongues and cultures; it is the praise of God. Rather than a project of our devising, Pentecost is God’s work. And unlike the work of Creation and Redemption, Pentecost is visible and tangible to us. There is something heard and something seen, “a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues, like as of fire” and wondrous words that are spoken in the things that Jesus says about the Holy Spirit. Nothing is hidden. And we are made very much part of the story. This is all part of its special wonder.

What does it mean to be the Church? It means to be defined by God’s Word and Spirit and to live in the reality of the spiritual community that God inaugurates and sustains. That is our constant challenge. The Holy Spirit comes down, to be sure. But the coming down of the Holy Spirit does not mean that God is collapsed into the world and made the servant of its agendas and ambitions. No. The Holy Spirit comes down to give birth to the Church which is to be our spiritual homeland under God’s guidance and direction. What is primary is not some sort of accommodation to the fads and fancies of our social, political and economic lives but our openness to the things of intrinsic worth, the things of God.

John’s Gospel makes ever so clear the necessary interplay of Word and Spirit. The Holy Spirit “shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.” The Spirit keeps us in the Word of Christ and teaches us “all things,” which is an astounding thing. It means that there is no truth about the world and about our humanity which does not come from God. God is truth. Which is not to say that there is not the struggle on our part to comprehend and understand how the manifold ways of human knowing all relate to the truth and unity of knowledge in God. Pentecost reminds us of the limits of our knowing, on the one hand, and God’s infinite knowing, on the other hand.

We are privileged to participate in something that is more than our own doing and yet brings joy and peace and unity to our weary, worried and divided souls. The peace of Christ is given, as Jesus says, but “not as the world giveth”. It is the peace that “passeth all understanding,” meaning that it is not a product of human knowing. It is the peace given by God to our humanity, a unity that is found in our being in communion with God.

What then is our task? To be true to the Pentecostal experience and doctrine. To be open to the things of the Spirit in humility and in patience. Pentecost, in its truth, is the counter to our atheisms and our idolatries, to our denial of God and our attempt to make him in the image of our aims and interests. Pentecost at once humbles us and exalts us. God creates the spiritual communion in which we find the things of eternal worth, the things that shape and govern our approach to life in all of its varied and sorry array, in both its grandeur and its misery.

We are being changed through our participation in the reality of this spiritual communion. “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord,” Paul says “are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” It is not we who can change God but God who can change us by teaching us “to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort,” as the Collect puts it. Learning to live in the Spirit is about honouring the spiritual community created by God. The Church exists for the praise of God and here we learn the special nature of our being, namely, that we are spiritual creatures, the sons of God, to whom “God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying Abba, Father.”

Teaching is transforming but it is teaching about God and by the Spirit of God in the Communion of God. Such is the divine reality of the Church, all our human failings notwithstanding. Bishop Cosin’s wonderful translation of the ancient hymn, Veni, Creator Spiritus, sung at the ordination of priests and found in The Book of Common Prayer (BCP, p.653) captures the point wonderfully and prayerfully.

Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,
And lighten with celestial fire.
Thou the anointing Spirit art,
Who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart.
Thy blessed Unction from above
Is comfort, life, and fire of love.
Enable with perpetual light
The dulness of our blinded sight.
Anoint and cheer our soiled face
With the abundance of thy grace.
Keep far our foes, give peace at home:
Where thou art guide, no ill can come.
Teach us to know the Father, Son,
And thee, of both, to be but One;
That, through the ages all along,
This may be our endless song:
Praise to thy eternal merit,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.