York Minster

Pentecost, Liberation and Change

Date: 11th May 2008
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Dr Jonathan Draper

My age crept up behind me this week and caught me out; and it wasn’t because I played badminton twice with the re-constituted Old Gits Badminton Club either, though I have to admit that has taken its toll. You see, until now I had thought of myself as the father of three children; but on Tuesday the youngest of those children turned 13. I am now the father of three teenagers, one of whom is about to go to university. I had no idea I had become that old.

But I have to say that having all these teenagers around the house, plus all their hangers on, is a very nice thing and probably stops me getting even more grumpy than I already am. They are interested in everything – except, obviously, the things that I think are important, and, of course, they know everything which is handy as I come to realise that I know less and less as I get older. But not even the teenagers could help us as we came face to face with that most formidable of modern mysteries - the government form, this time for student finance. Maggie and I only have about 8 degrees and qualifications between us, and Maggie works professionally with benefit claim forms. But could we fill it in? Not on you nelly. In the end I had to seek professional help from an accountant who cheerfully claimed that the form was so complicated that he didn’t bother to do it himself. No wonder gazillions of pounds of benefits go unclaimed every year; few people on earth are capable of understanding them and most people, I guess, simply give up.

But even this is as of nothing compared with the obvious difficulty of finding a suitable gospel reading for Pentecost. There are two options given in our lectionary and neither is very satisfactory. The first, which wasn’t read today,  comes early in St John’s gospel and has Jesus speaking about giving the thirsty believer ‘living water’ which will, ultimately, flow from within them; the writer of John’s gospel then says that this living water refers to the Spirit, but that the Spirit had not yet come because Jesus hadn’t yet been glorified. This is not much out of which to make a sermon for Pentecost.

The other reading, which we did have this morning, comes right at the end of the same Gospel but, in the story, soon after the resurrection, but before ascension. Here Jesus appears to the disciples, who were still in a dazed state after his death, and offers them his peace. He then breathes on them and says ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained’. From this story, my guess, then, is that Jesus being glorified, which is referred to, you’ll remember, in that earlier passage, actually means his resurrection in John’s gospel, though generally speaking in the NT, Jesus being glorified means ascended to the Father (though confusingly, sometimes Jesus seems to refer to his crucifixion as ‘being glorified’). In any case, John’s gospel doesn’t contain an ascension story so resurrection appears to be it. This isn’t a very satisfactory story for Pentecost either. It’s as if someone thought we must have a gospel reading so let’s find one that at least mentions the Holy Spirit.

The real truth here, and the difficulty with finding a gospel reading, is that Pentecost does not belong to the gospels, as it were, but is an event of the church. It really does belong in the Acts of the Apostles as the foundation of the church, the foundation of their mission, the foundation of their self-understanding and all that they do. I hope I won’t be misunderstood when I say that in the chronology of the NT the Holy Spirit picks up where Jesus left off.

But that really won’t do either. Nothing is more important to the life and ministry of Jesus than his sense of being filled with and empowered by the Spirit of God working in him. As soon as he is baptised he is led by the Spirit into the wilderness where he learns to resist the temptation to use his power and authority to serve his own ends. After he returns from the wilderness he goes to his home Synagogue at Nazareth and defines his whole life and ministry with words from Isaiah: ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me’. The Spirit of God moves over the face of the waters at creation bringing life to a barren world; the Spirit of God burns in the bones of the prophets like a fire they cannot contain until they speak God’s word. The Spirit is God active in the world and in God’s servants whoever they may be. So while the Spirit may well define and seem to belong to the time of the church, the church does not define, limit or control the work of God’s Spirit in the world.Pentecost, for the earliest Christians was both a new and surprising thing and something with ancient roots. The word ‘pentecost’ simply means the ‘fiftieth day’ and in the OT it defines the time between the Passover, the liberation from Egypt, and one of the Hebrew pilgrim festivals which celebrated the wheat-harvest, often known by the name of the Festival of Weeks. In Judaism this festival is also associated with Moses receiving the tablets of the Law on Mt Sinai. So the symbolism of Pentecost, for the first Christians, would have been very powerful indeed. As the old covenant, begun in the Exodus from Egypt was ratified and completed on Mt Sinai at Pentecost, so the new covenant, begun in the cross and resurrection of Christ was ratified and completed at a new Pentecost when the power of the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples. No wonder the early Jewish Christians began to see themselves as the New Israel of God. And understanding this can help us to appreciate the great distinction St Paul makes later in the NT between the Law given at Sinai and the Spirit given at Pentecost.

So Pentecost really is the great festival of the church. At Pentecost the earliest Christians began to forge a new identity as the Spirit of God, now also and importantly the Spirit of Christ, took up residence with them; not only, or even simply in each one of them, but primarily among them as they began to learn how to be God’s people. Not only did those who followed Christ begin to forge a new identity, they also found that they were given gifts by God through the Spirit that would enable them each to contribute to the life and mission of the church as they sought to follow the will of God in Christ. And as they began to work out what it meany to be the people of God empowered by the Holy Spirit in them, so St Paul began to develop a theology which saw the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as the animating force of the Church which was underpinned and understood as love. He also saw that the Spirit liberates the Christian as he or she matures in faith from a simple and slavish following of law to a more challenging life of active, purposive love.

One more thing, if I may, about Pentecost before I end. The gifts of the Spirit which are often associated with Pentecost are not primarily about the bizarre, even though some might try to make you think that; but they are about the extraordinary. The Spirit of God may have all sorts of effects on people depending on the kind of person they are and the depth and power of the experience they have. But as St Paul showed, in one of the most profound passages of the NT, all manifestations of the power of the Spirit in the life of believers are nothing but noise if they aren’t based and founded and driven by love. This is the extraordinary thing about Pentecost and the gifts we are given. The gifts of God are given to set us free and to empower us for the liberation of others. In part that is about how we work to help people understand that in Christ they can be set free from sin and death and set free to follow God. But it is also in part about how we move beyond simple throwing off the shackles and how we work towards the real flourishing and development of all people, how we unlock their potential to be what God created them to be. This is the purpose of the gifts of the Spirit and the purpose of our calling in Christ.

Pentecost is our great festival of liberation and change. God’s Spirit blows through our lives in order to cleanse and transform them so that we can, in turn, help to transform the world.

Amen.