Sermon for Pentecost
Click here to listen to audio file of Matins & Ante-Communion for the Day of Pentecost
“And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind”
Sometimes the things that come upon us suddenly unsettle us most of all. We live in rather unsettling times because of the Covid-19 pandemic and all of the disruptions that it has occasioned. This prompts the question as to whether we are simply and completely determined by things outside our control. To be blunt, you cannot blame Covid-19 on Christ Church or Windsor or Nova Scotia or Canada or China or Wuhan. It is not so simple. It is a modern pandemic which has to do with global mobility and the inequalities socially and economically among so many in our so-called global world. We are all, in that sense, completely implicated in our current unsettledness. Everything comes down to the spirit in us by which we confront our struggles and concerns; in short, about how we think about ourselves in relation to one another.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Pentecost might provide us with a way to think about things more universally and yet profoundly local. There are things which unsettle us, perhaps, never more so than in these unsettling times. But is it so with the Descent of the Holy Ghost? He came down suddenly upon the disciples, we are told, but was his coming suddenly a coming unexpectedly? That he came suddenly we read, his coming unexpectedly we do not read. In fact, Jesus tells us to expect the coming of the Holy Ghost “commanding them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father,” even the descent of the Holy Ghost. We are meant, it seems, to be settled upon what comes to us even in unsettling times.
Yet we may wait expectantly and still be caught unawares, for the realisation of what we await may far exceed our expectations and so catch us by surprise. We await for what we do not fully understand. The grace of God is always something more; the mystery of God something more yet again. The promise of the Ascension was the coming down of the Holy Ghost for which Jesus prepares us and bids us wait, yet “suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind.”
Certainly, the effects of this coming down would appear to be most unsettling, the manner of their appearing no less so – “a rushing mighty wind” and “cloven tongues like as of fire,” lighting upon the disciples gathered in Jerusalem filling them with the Holy Spirit and moving them “to speak with other tongues.” To all appearances an event most unsettling, at once exotic and ecstatic.
We all know about the winds that unsettle us – the rushing mighty winds of rumour and slander, of whisperings and murmurings, of allegations and accusations which seek to belittle and destroy. The winds of hatred and revenge, of judgement and accusation, are the winds of death. These are the winds that unsettle us as sure as the sea-storms which come up suddenly and trouble our ships upon the waters. But in our current situation, we live in the midst of other uncertainties, the uncertainties of those claiming to speak in the chimera of ‘science,’ those who rightly demand our acquiescence to this restriction and this but at the same time suggesting their own uncertainty, their own sense of the provisional and the uncertain which belongs, to be sure, to the truth of modern science. To be up-front about this is really about transparency and honesty, a check on our presumption and pride. To be patient about all of the forms of uncertainty that swirl around us is our current struggle and demand, a check upon our frustrations and judgements.
