by CCW | 19 May 2013 14:25
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.
It is not so much about what is seen and heard but about what is understood through things seen and heard. This is the especial importance of Pentecost. It reminds us of the spiritual reality of God revealed through the things of this world without being taken captive to them. “A spirit hath not flesh and blood, as ye see me have,” Jesus said to the disciples as he appeared to them after his resurrection. “Touch and see,” he said to Thomas, the proverbial doubter. Such things belong to the teaching of the Resurrection, the affirmation that our bodies are not nothing, but neither are they everything. Such things, too, speak to the different forms of human knowing, particularly about learning through the things of the world the things of God. What Pentecost reminds us is the spiritual teaching underlying the whole Incarnate life of Christ. Everything is gathered into the communion of God and finds its truth and being in him and his will.
Wind and fire. Who can catch the wind? Who can hold the fire? These images speak about the spiritual reality of God the Holy Spirit. They have an elusive and intangible quality to them that opens us out to the mystery of God, the mystery of the divine life and communion, at once believable and thinkable. And something, too, which we are meant to feel: to feel what we believe and think. It is in this way that Pentecost reminds us of the truth of our humanity as spiritual creatures, creatures who know and love. And yet our knowing and our loving are always incomplete and fraught with folly and sin. Pentecost calls us to be a community of faith. How can we be a community of faith given our failings and shortcomings, our sins and wickednesses? “The good that I would, I do not,” as Paul puts it, “the evil that I would not, that I do,” capturing the human dilemma. How then to be a people of faith who honour the truth of God and of one another? Through the descent of the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost celebrates God’s redemptive and sanctifying presence with us and in us. The human community has no unity in itself as a world of wars and tensions, destruction and mayhem constantly shows us. No. True unity and order is found in God and in communion with God. The lesson from Acts captures this truth and wonder. It is essentially a kind of retelling and reworking of the ancient story of the Tower of Babel, the biblical account, we might say, of the human attempt to create a brave, new world order, a story of presumption and pride that results in the division of peoples through language, cultures, and nations. But at Pentecost? Here is the wonder: many voices, the voices of the nations of the world united in and through the diversity of tongues, united in the praise of God. “We do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.” No greater testimony, it seems to me, to the idea of redemption of creation. The languages of the world are not repudiated but have become the vessels and vehicles for the praise of God. It is a way of saying that our humanity in its diversity participates in the infinite life of God. That is the redemption of Babel. A unity is achieved in and through the diversities of tongues, cultures, and gifts.
Wind and fire. Things seen and heard. But even more things understood. And, as if to emphasize the point, John’s Gospel speaks directly to the intellectual and spiritual meaning of Pentecost. “He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance,” Jesus says, adding, “whatsoever I have said unto you.” Word and Spirit go together. There cannot be one without the other. It becomes the struggle of the Church to find ways to bring the things of the world into the things of the Spirit, or, conversely, to find the things of the Spirit in the things of the world.
In 1662, at the time of the Restoration after the bitter English civil war which saw bishops and the Prayer Book outlawed for fifteen years, the Prayer Book was restored with a few small but important changes. Provision was made for a service for Adult Baptism, “For Those of Riper Years,” as it is quaintly expressed. There was also an addition made to the liturgy for The Ordination of Priests. It was the Bishop of Durham’s, John Cosin’s, translation of a medieval hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus. “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,/ And lighten with celestial fire./ Thou the anointing Spirit art,/ Who dost thy seven-fold gifts impart…” What are those gifts? The seven gifts of the Spirit taken from Isaiah, “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord,” to which the Greek translation, known as the Septuagint had added piety or devotion. The concept of the seven gifts of the Spirit became part of the spirituality of the life of the Church. The seven-fold gifts have to do with ourselves as spiritual and intellectual beings, tasked with thinking and doing, knowing and loving, we might say. And all by the inspiration of God the Holy Ghost who keeps us in the communion of God himself.
This is the great wonder and mystery of Pentecost. We do not need to be defined by the world or by our self-preoccupations and actions but by God whose love and grace are poured out upon the Church in the wonder of Pentecost. We are to know and feel that love and spirit even in the midst of a broken and troubled world where we are too much with the world and with ourselves.
Pentecost recalls us to “the grandeur of God,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it in a poem by that title. “The world,” he says, “is charged with the grandeur of God,” a world which he knows has ignored and denied God. “Why do men then now not reck his rod?”, acknowledge God’s power and truth, he asks, realizing that the world is “seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil” and that it “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell”; knowing, too, our growing disconnect with nature. “The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.” An evocative picture of our disordered world, we might say. And yet, he says, “for all this, nature is never spent; For there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” There is something more and something greater, something spiritual that redeems and sanctifies. “Oh, morning … springs.“ How? “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” Beautiful. Such is the Pentecostal picture of redemption that ushers us into holy lives lived in the community of faith, the Church. The world is a bent world and we in our sins, too, are bent out of shape but “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things” and all “because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
That is to feel and know the truth of God through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Fr. David Curry
Pentecost 2013
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