The Spirit

1989 (Year C), 14 May /
Pentecost

St Peter de Beauvoir Town

Four weeks ago, at the beginning of the Area Synod all the members were given a piece of paper. Just like this one. We were invited to hold it on top of our heads and close our eyes. The man who was leading the part of the Synod then played a recording of a great wind and told us to open our eyes and see what the church looked like that first Pentecost. I wanted to die of embarrassment. My only thought was that if this is really what the first Christians looked like, then it is a miracle that the church lasted two minutes let alone 2000 years.

The experience wasn’t helped by Maureen Brastock and Maria who had come in late, and so – as it were –were flameless. They proceeded to giggle at the rest of us.

Of course they had every right to giggle. The hundred or so of us, with paper flames coming out of our heads, must have looked incredibly foolish. I am left wondering why Christians always seem able, with such apparent ease, to shoot themselves in the foot.

Afterwards, when I reflected on what had happened, I was angry. Angry not only that we’d all been made to look and feel silly but what had been done to our vision of God. The vision that was experienced by those first disciples and what has been felt by countless numbers since.

What happened was profoundly belittling to my vision and yours. But I am determined that no silly farce, like the one that happened the other week, will destroy our vision.

God is present in his spirit. We have to understand this as meaning that God is present in our lives as the living God. Our limited, vulnerable and mortal lives are encompassed and penetrated through and through by his life, which is unlimited, glorious and eternal. With all the perceptions of our minds and spirits, with all the impulses of our souls, and all the needs and urges of our bodies, we participate in; we are drawn into the eternal divine life. In our existence we sense God’s existence: in, our suffering we feel his pain; in our happiness we meet his bliss. God is present in his Spirit, that’s what today’s about. ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’ Paper flames are simply an insult.

‘Old men will dream dreams and young men see visions,’ we are told. Too right they will. For it is the purpose of the spirit to bring this most precious gift of vision. And when the spirit came it brought with it excitement and joy because the spirit unites us all in visions for this world, as God would have it be.

Now you may say that you don’t have a vision, you may think it so small that you are embarrassed about it, you may have been told half your life that you don’t have one so now you actually believe it. But Pentecost is about the release of all these different visions, half-formed and unconnected. It says that they are all important and precious in the sight of God for they come from him. One of the visions of the early church, for there were many, was that there was more than enough to satisfy life’s needs. The emperor Julian said of the Christians in Rome 300 years later.’ These Christians do not merely feed their own poor; they feed the poor of the whole city as well.’ None of these people were rich, and yet they lived in superfluity.

They thought that if God is for us, if God is in our midst, between each and all of us, then there is no longer any want, in any part of life. People share everything and share in everything. That is the vision of the Pentecost community in Jerusalem, which made so many rich. And that is the vision which they have to offer to us.

It is not the only vision, there are many more – but that is one which we might reflect upon at the start of Christian Aid Week, a week in which more than 500 Kurdish people, with literally nothing have come to Hackney. A week in which our Bishop has appealed to a Minister of State to come and see the poverty of this city.

May the gift of visions brought by the spirit encourage us, may we be bold and joyous in offering them to our community. And may God in all goodness bring us, together with the whole of creation to peaceful and gentle union with him. AMEN