Sermon for Pentecost
“He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance”
Pentecost. God is believable and thinkable. I am not so sure about our contemporary institutional churches but Pentecost marks the birthday of the Church universal and makes Church and churches at once believable and thinkable.
There is a wonder to Pentecost. It marks the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples to form the Apostolic Church, the Church, if you will, of which Anglicans notionally lay claim to belonging. And rightly so.
But what is the wonder? After all of the comings and goings of Christ, we might wonder, what on earth is Pentecost really about? Simply the absolute spiritual reality of God. No greater message to our depressed, discouraged and despairing age. The whole point of the religions of the world, and, especially, the Christian religion, is the idea that we are incomplete without God. That bears repeating because the assumption of the Western cultures has been that we have matured and out-grown God. We have come of age! Sadly only to discover our adolescence!
Pentecost challenges us about the spiritual reality of God and about ourselves as spiritual beings. It marks the beginning of the Church as a spiritual society, a community defined by the clarity and the charity of Christ. Nowhere is that more apparent than at Pentecost.
