Tag: pentecost

Pentecost

sermons

The lectionary readings for Pentecost give us two contrasting stories of the Holy Spirit being given to the disciples.  The Acts reading is the familiar Pentecost story: dramatic, and public.  The John reading is the resurrection appearance to the disciples as they huddle in the upper room: it’s personal, intimate.

Each reading has something important to say to us. The reading from Acts celebrates the courage and passion and enthusiasm with which the Holy Spirit filled the disciples, how they became more than they had been, fulfilling their potential, becoming fully alive – it’s also about communication, the miracle of being able to find all the right words and have them understood.  The John reading is more like simply taking a deep breath and finding that you have breathed in that peace that passes all understanding, right into your innermost being, and that it has brought you to life.

I don’t normally talk much about the specifics of Greek words in the bible, but today’s an exception. The Greek word used for the Holy Spirit is ‘Paracletos’ – Paraclete, and it literally means, ‘one who comes alongside’.  The word shows how apt are the descriptions of the Holy Spirit as advocate, comforter, and counsellor. Coming alongside is both about the ability to find the right words, to speak in a way that communicates and is understood, and to listen in a way that enables you to understand, and it is about being a comforting presence to those who are most in need.

In the Holy Spirit we experience God alongside us. Remember what the early church would go on to face after the first pentecost: not only do we read of a church that was growing, thriving and inspiring, but also a church whose members were persecuted and killed for their faith. The Holy Spirit wasn’t just God’s way of empowering his people to do his work – continuing the work of Christ.  The Holy Spirit was and is God’s way of being with us and for us and in us, in our deepest griefs as well as in our joys, in our toughest challenges as well as in our triumphs.

Through the Holy Spirit, what we experience most of all is the overwhelming love of God  – the sort of love that infused creation, that was revealed in the incarnation, that shone through Jesus’ life and ministry, tested on the cross and proved to be the ultimately powerful force in the universe.  When Paul wrote in the letter to the Galatians about the fruits of the Spirit, love was the first that he named: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  These are the gifts of a comforter and a counsellor, of one who comes alongside and stays there. May we each – and all we know to be in special need at this time – know the comforting and strengthening love of God, and may we surround one another with that love, now and every day.

Ascension

church resources, sermons

‘Why do you stand there looking up to heaven?’
It’s no wonder the disciples were caught staring up at the place where their friend and teacher and Lord had bid them farewell, but the angels are right to point the disciples back to the world – we are not to be so heavenly that we are of no earthly use.

It seems to me that the ascension is, above all, a feast of the body of Christ. It’s the day when we remember the departure back to heaven of Jesus’ earthly, incarnate form, the day when his presence stopped being particular (tied to a specific time and place and material form) and started to be universal – present to all times and places ‘even to the ending of the age’ (Mt 28.20).

But the ascension is but one moment of this process of the particular becoming universal.  At the Last supper Jesus explained his own body in terms of bread and wine, which he then broke, poured out, and distributed.  On the cross the  his actual body was broken and his blood flowed.  At the resurrection his body was both physically real (which he proved by eating and drinking) yet also able to go unrecognised and walk through locked doors (a step up, perhaps, from walking on water?).  Now, at his ascension, that physical body disappears, and in its place we find a group of bewildered disciples left with the task of carrying on Jesus’ work.

By the time St Paul started writing his letters to the early church, he had started calling the christian community ‘The Body of Christ’ – something which we still do, and to which we continue to aspire.  There was one final thing that needed to happen before those early Christians could assume the role as Christ’s new body on earth: that body had to receive the Holy Spirit, the breath of life, which we can read about in the story of Pentecost (Acts 2) or indeed in the quieter version in John’s gospel where the risen Christ breathes his Spirit on his friends in the upper room.

So during the course of this process, the Body of Christ which begun as the incarnate Son of God, born as a baby in Bethlehem, growing up as a carpenter’s son in Nazareth, being baptised and undertaking a three-year ministry of preaching, healing and teaching, and culminating the cross and resurrection – that Body of Christ is transformed into the Church – established by Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit to continue his work in co-operation with God.  Thus, Jesus’ particular body (limited to one time and one place, two thousand years ago) becomes universal, filling the whole world, and for all time.

We talk about the universal church, but really is that what we mean?  In the end, to be true to the Christ whose body we try to be, we come full circle: in the Church, the body of Christ becomes not, after all, merely ‘general’ or ‘universal’ but particular again, incarnate in the individuals and christian communities in which the Holy Spirit dwells.  If we are, in Teresa of Avila’s words, “Christ’s hands with which he blesses people now” then our action in the world is particular, in the places where we find ourselves.  The church may fill the world, but if it is truly to be the Body of Christ, then it cannot be ‘general’ but must always be active in the places where it finds itself.  If we are the Body of Christ then we must be incarnate, too – through the ascension we will always have a heavenly life, but here and now our calling is to continue, in his name, the work that Christ began.