Sermons
27th May 2007 - Pentecost
On this great festival day we celebrate the outpouring of the Spirit upon the disciples, the birth day of the apostolic church, the day on which the Spirit of the risen Lord came to quicken into life his body on earth. The fact of the Lord’s risen life is among the disciples, the sound of his glory fills the house, as the flames of divine inspiration leap about the apostle’s heads and they receive power from on high; power to proclaim the whole extent of Christian truth to all nations, power to speak God’s word to God’s people, power to respond in truth to the Spirit of truth.
In the Old Testament the Spirit does not abide with God’s people, its presence is fleeting, descending to enable a great act of prophecy or bravery, and then departing. But at Pentecost the spirit is sent to the apostles to abide with them, and abides here now, the Spirit mediates the unchanging truth about God and that unchanging truth is present in his church. Shouldn’t then our spiritual lives be full of light and our knowledge of God’s truth complete? I would like to say a little about why it doesn’t feel like this most of the time, why, despite the presence of the Spirit, people’s lives, often people who are the most committed and active in the church, can become spiritually dry and why it can appear that the church, that unchanging body of truth, seems to develop and change over time, an illusion caused by our vantage point.
In agrarian societies and in the Old Testament rain is nearly always seen as a blessing. Rain makes the earth fruitful. In the presence of the spirit shouldn’t the landscape of our spiritual lives be continually blessed with the renewing rain from above? Yet there is often aridity. Most of you I am sure will have sat through a church service or two and, on returning home felt a real dryness, a real unsettling questioning. The springs dry up and there is no moisture to our spiritual lives, we become brittle and dangerously easy to break. How can this be when we are in possession of the spirit? Where I lived in Africa there were normally two possible reasons for dry soil. Man’s folly or God’s withholding of rain. Through negligence or through deliberate over-farming soil can be destroyed. There are many parts of Africa where the soil has been destroyed through man’s folly, and there are many other parts where the soil just waits for the blessing of rain. In the landscape that makes up our spiritual yearning for God there are also areas that are barren through our own folly, areas where a besetting sin is time and again an obstacle to the growth of new life that God wants to give. New life is just below the surface perhaps. But there are also areas where we must see the dry season through, those times are probably the ones where faithfulness in prayer, faithfulness in receiving the sacrament are the most important, and the most difficult. God will bring life again to the dry land in his time not in ours, and it may be that the land must lie fallow for a time to be renewed. Again our vantage point allows us only a limited view of the whole and the feeling of certainty that we have been abandoned is always more dangerous than patience.
This weekend, God is not flicking through his diary and thinking, ‘oh, Pentecost again, must send some spirit’. His spirit is with us, when that spirit feels most absent perhaps he may be too close for us to perceive.
This body, of which we are members, has an identity in which we must trust. The church of the apostles is here, gathered. The great outpouring of God’s spirit is our guarantee of the true identity of the body. With this sure hope, we may have patience to wait on the life-giving rain from above in times of drought.