Last time I preached here, in January, the lectionary drew attention to Jesus’ baptism. You may recall that after he was baptised Jesus spent some time alone in prayer and the Holy Spirit came upon him in the form of a dove. I suggested that this imagery of the Spirit as a dove tells us that Jesus’ experience was private and deep, quiet and tender, with the Spirit welling up and touching him to the core of his being. In his solitude Jesus heard the voice of God affirming: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” The experience transformed Jesus’ life and empowered him to preach a radically new gospel. The Holy Spirit had opened a new way – a surprising way, a revolutionary way. The way of a God who is love.

It may be coincidence, but here I am back with you preaching and it is Pentecost Sunday. Again at the heart of the lectionary is the Holy Spirit. The working of the Spirit at Pentecost is I think a direct continuation of the events at Jesus’ baptism – except that here the manifestation is very public, very dramatic.

What an amazing image. The awesome power of the Spirit is the reality the Pentecost narrative broadcasts, and the text transmits the story in the most expansive way possible. All the stops on the literary organ are employed: a heavenly sound like a rushing wind, descending fire, patterns of transformed speech, and the like. It is as if not even the most lavish use of human language is capable of capturing the experiences of the day, and that is undoubtedly one of the emotions the text wishes to convey. The experience is so powerful it is beyond words to adequately describe. And with the infilling of the Spirit came new life – sudden, unmerited, irresistible new life! Wow, what a birthday for the church.

Let’s put it in context. Pentecost was an important Jewish festival celebrated each year to mark the end of the celebration of the spring harvest, which had begun at Passover, and during which the devout offered praise for God’s grace and bounty. It also marked the beginning of a period in which the first fruits of the harvest were sacrificed to Yahweh. For some, it was also a time to renew the covenant with God, year by year. It is thus both an end and a beginning, leaving behind what is past, and launching forth into that which is only now beginning to be. Pentecost is not a time of completion – it is a time of rebirth and renewal.

Luke records in his gospel (Luke 24: 49) that Jesus had instructed the disciples to wait in Jerusalem and promised that they would be “clothed with power from on high”. The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost fulfills that promise in a manner far surpassing the expectations of even the most faithful disciples. The experience is amazing and wonder-filled, and so overwhelming that some observers sneered and suggested they were drunk.

And no one is excluded from this display of God’s grace – everyone is included. The tongues of fire rest upon each of the disciples (Acts 2: 3) and a moment later the crowd comes surging forward because each one (v6) has heard the disciples speaking in his or her native tongue. That which happened at Pentecost was no inner mystical experience, but an outpouring of God’s energy. It touched every one who was there.

So, as I see it, there are two main strands to the Pentecost account as recorded in Acts – empowerment by the Spirit, and the use of the language of inclusion. Through the working of both came the creation of a new community and the birth of the church. It is unfortunate that the church has not always lived up to the hope of its origins in empowerment and inclusion.

The account of what happened at Easter and through Pentecost is so familiar that I think we sometimes fail to grasp the amazing transformation that was wrought by the Spirit. Jack Spong (in Jesus for the Nonreligious) has put it this way:

Obviously something happened after the death of Jesus that had startling and enormous power. Its power was sufficient to reconstitute a scattered and demoralized band of disciples. Its reality was profound enough to turn a denying Peter into a witnessing and martyred Peter, and to turn disciples who fled for their lives into heroes willing to die for their Lord. The experience of Easter [and Pentecost] was so intense that it created a new holy day, the first day of the week, and in turn a new liturgical act, the breaking of bread, turning both into a celebration of the presence of the Living Lord in their midst. It was of such power that [devout] Jewish disciples – taught from the time of their cradle that God alone was holy, that God alone was to be venerated, prayed to, and worshipped – such disciples, now could no longer conceive of God apart from Jesus of Nazareth. They could also no longer look at Jesus of Nazareth without seeing God. … Jesus had transcended death and was therefore ever present to the disciples through the animating Spirit of God.

At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit touched each one personally and their lives were transformed. They were empowered with a new understanding of God. In fulfillment of Jesus’ promise, as Paul puts it in Romans, the Spirit made them children of God. They were brought into a new relationship and enabled to call God Abba/Father. And so it is with us too. The same Spirit makes us children of God.

And so it has been throughout history. The fundamental insights of every tradition are from time to time subjected to fresh imagination in a series of “reformations” through the Spirit. What might otherwise be a dead tradition becomes the base for a continually renewing spiritual sensibility. It seems to me that in the present day, we may be at just such a time of reformation, as the Spirit prompts us to strive for a new understanding of God. An understanding that speaks authentically to the modern world.

In her book, wonderfully entitled Like Catching Water in a Net, Val Webb discusses the great variety of human attempts to describe the divine. And just in case, you don’t get it – trying to capture the Divine is like catching water in a net, almost all of it inevitably slips through. Val Webb points out that our Divine images matter deeply because “they drag along cultural baggage”. She describes Theism as an understanding of God as transcendent, that is, it sees God as “out there” interacting with creation from without. Pantheism sees God and the world as the same entity, with nothing beyond – God is the sum total of our experience of the Divine. On the other hand, Panentheism, her preference, sees God not only as transcendent but also intimately revealed in and through this divinely created Cosmos. God is seen as being “involved in the world … in such a way as to influence, lure, persuade, and empower it, but not to control, coerce or manipulate it.”

Val Webb’s book resonates with me because I have long struggled with the image of a male, all-powerful, and all-knowing God, out there somewhere. For such an image involves one who sees suffering in the world, could intervene and yet inexplicably refuses to act. How can this be true? It does not fit with my experience of God and simply provides plenty of ammunition for critics like Richard Dawkins. No, at this time of Pentecost, for me the metaphor of God as nurturing Spirit is more helpful. One who seeks to persuade, to encourage, to draw us into deeper relationship, but still allows our choices to be our own, even when they lead to pain and suffering. And yet, I realize that an image of God as Spirit is itself a limited metaphor. For God is in all and through all, the very ground of our being, and what we experience of God does not exhaust the reality.

There was a conference on progressive religion recently in Melbourne called Common Dreams II – the first Common Dreams conference was held in Sydney about 3 years ago. Mae and I joined hundreds of others at the St. Kilda Town Hall to hear a number of excellent speakers, including Val Webb, and to participate in various workshops. Margaret Mayman, a Minister from New Zealand, presented one of the sessions that I found particularly helpful. She spoke of the importance of honouring our heritage while reaching out in contemporary ministry. She described it as combining the poetic and the prophetic.

I like the phrase “poetic and prophetic” very much because it speaks to me of the importance of rediscovering the language of the soul – the mystery, the awe and the wonder of God – things not seen with the eyes but experienced in the heart. It speaks of the importance of honouring the scriptures – those sacred accounts of people’s encounters with God – while taking seriously the contemporary stories of our own journey, yours and mine. It speaks to me of interpreting our heritage (the poetry) in order to act and speak authentically for God in the present (the prophetic).

Today’s gospel reading (John 14:8-17, 25-27) is part of Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples. As with the Pentecost account, it too speaks of empowerment for authentic ministry. I want to very briefly draw attention to two of its features:

The term rendered as Advocate is often, and probably better, understood as Counselor. The promised Spirit is God’s powerful and nurturing presence, given to the disciples in the wake of Jesus’ departure. The Counselor enables them to keep his commandments – to undertake concrete deeds of mercy and faithful obedience.

The Spirit teaches – it is the Spirit of truth. The Spirit enables the community to remember its links with Jesus. It forces a reality check – prodding, needling, and cajoling the community to embrace its true mission as the people of God.

These two elements – Spirit and truth – appear in every vital Christian community. The accents and styles may be different, but both are present wherever authentic Christian testimony is practiced. The same Spirit that animates all life inspires the community. Whether felt as the fire in the heart or as a gentle prompting to be honest, God’s Spirit enlivens all true testimony and all true worship. Any time we gather in the togetherness of the Spirit we bear witness to God’s transformative power in our midst.

Margaret Mayman puts it this way – religion does not transcend life, it transforms it. Isn’t that a great phrase – religion does not transcend life, it transforms it. God is in the here and now, encouraging, uplifting, consoling and transforming life.

Which brings us to another way of understanding the church’s mission. I believe a primary mission for the church today is to provide a safe place for people simply to be. A place where they can have real conversations about the faith, where their particular journey is honoured, where alternative images of the divine can be explored in honesty and without fear, and where they can be brought into a continually deepening understanding of the loving heart and mind of Christ. In short, where they are offered “the bread of life” and “living water”.

Let us pray:
Send once again, O Holy Spirit, those ancient tongues of fire upon this gathering. And just as at Pentecost you brought forth a new creation, so now help us to be a transformative movement, not a static institution. Touch our tongues that we may always be speaking the language of the gospel – which is love. Amen.