24 th May: Pentecost

Pentecostal Fire

The followers of Jesus had gathered to celebrate one of the great festivals of the Jewish year, the Shavuot, a harvest celebration. It was a time of thanksgiving for the first fruits of the spring. They were disorientated and discouraged. They had been through the trauma of Jesus’s crucifixion and the shattering of their world. Now they believed that he had conquered death. But what did it mean? What sense could they make of it? What should they do? They were too confused to do anything. About all they could do was to stay together and talk.

Then it happened - an experience they compare to a violent wind and red hot fire erupts among them. As Luke explains it, the Holy Spirit arrived and danced through the air and there was a great opening up of the human spirit, one person to another. Before they had time to catch their breath, they were filled with the Holy Spirit and they began to speak to each other in other languages. What exactly can we make of this?

Sometimes this is interpreted as the practice we call speaking in tongues, when people pour out incomprehensible sound. The point here, however, is exactly the opposite. They were speaking coherently. People were hearing and understanding the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, in their own language. Probably the honest truth is that no one exactly knows what happened. But, as is so often the case in the Bible, it is the invisible event that counts. They were changed, energised, the Holy Ghost battered their hearts, and the fire of the Spirit etched its way onto their souls.

This experience continues. When John Wesley was converted in Aldersgate Street, he used the image of fire to describe what happened to him. “My heart,” he said, “was strangely warmed.” Until then his immense spiritual energies had been mostly directed upon himself. Now there was an experience of presence and power, his energies were directed outwards to others.

Or I think of Monica Furlong, the religious journalist. At the age of 20 she tells how she took sandwiches one day to eat for her lunch in the garden of Lincoln’s Inn. As she sat the sun behind the clouds grew brighter and brighter. The shape of the clouds fascinated her. Then she says, “Between one moment and the next, although no word had been uttered, I felt myself spoken to, I was aware of being regarded in love, of being wholly accepted, forgiven, all at once. The joy of it was the greatest I had ever known in my life. I felt I had been born for this moment”. Sometimes:

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

(T. S. Eliot)

Such experiences do not come to everyone. Some people seem to go through life never having it, like the Welsh poet and Anglican priest, R. S. Thomas, to whom God was the void in his life which he ached to see filled.

To one kneeling down no word came,Only the wind’s song, saddening the lipsOf the grave saints, rigid in glass;Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,Bats not angels, in the high roof. ³

Even for John Wesley, his Aldersgate Street conversion was a rare experience - he talks of his heart being “strangely warmed,” because the experience was wholly exceptional in its emotional quality. And yet perhaps the miracle is not that sometimes we miss the experience but how surprisingly often we get a glimpse into the heart of things, of that which Rudolf Otto called the ‘mysterium tremendum’, the numinous.

It need not be explosive – indeed it can be the opposite. The Baptist minister Mike Dales was a student at Baptist College in Bristol. One Wednesday night they had a Taizé communion service. They sat or knelt, chanting, with the only light a solitary candle. For a moment the presence of God was almost tangible. When it was over, everyone just continued to sit there silently in the near-dark unwilling to let the moment go. When eventually they made their way it turned out that they had been sitting silently for something like 45 minutes – all sense of time had been lost.

Such experiences are not unambiguous. They need to be reflected on critically and related to what we have learnt from faith and reason. May I point you to two features of the Pentecost story that will help us to do so?

Firstly, that day in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit knocked down walls with a mighty gust of wind and built bridges of understanding among people of different backgrounds and cultures. Out of it came a Church in which Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free, were all one. Today, we live in a world that is rapidly being torn apart by people who speak different languages, have different values, different religions, different visions for humanity — they all seem to be shouting at each other, yelling, but not really listening. Now as then the Spirit gives us the capacity to transcend all that makes us different from each other – race, class, language and culture – and to enjoy a rich fellowship with each other.

William Sloane Coffin writes:

It seems to me that in joining the church, you leave home and hometown to join a larger world. The whole world is your new neighbourhood and all who dwell therein—black, white, yellow, red, stuffed and starving, smart and stupid, mighty and lowly . . . all become your sisters and brothers in a new family formed in Jesus. By joining the church, you affirm community on the widest possible scale. ⁴

Secondly, the Spirit inspired the disciples to take up the cause of the Kingdom of God. In some way the same will be true for us. Eugene Laubach, who for many years was part of the ministry team at New York’s Riverside Church, tells of his friend visiting her grandmother in a little town in the American south and attending a very emotional religious service, where people expressed their feelings by jumping about and shouting. It was a completely new experience for her and she asked her grandmother if all the activity really meant that people were being touched by the Spirit or whether they were just having a big emotional release. Her grandmother’s reply was simple but profound: “Honey,” she said, “it doesn’t matter how high they jump up, it’s what they do when they come down that will tell you if it’s the real thing!”

Pentecost is the promise that God will continue to fire the imagination of the church and give us impatience and power and energy for the work we have to do. It’s the promise of God at work in the world. As the old Appalachian folk song says:

The lone, wild bird in lofty flight,Is still with Thee, nor leaves thy sight.

The ends of the earth are in Thy handThe Sea’s dark deep and far-off land.

And I am Thine!I rest in Thee.Great Spirit, come,and rest in me.