Nearer Than Our Own Souls: another sermon for Ascensiontide

Last Thursday was Ascension Day. I preached about the disciples gazing up into the sky that had swallowed Jesus up. There is absence in the cracks of that story, hints of bewilderment, even loss. Maybe faith often feels like that, I suggested, being left on our own, wondering if it was all as real as we had supposed, longing, waiting for what we don’t quite know, and yet we do know - waiting for what God may do.

But as I also said, there is a great deal more to be said about the Ascension. And it begins with what St Luke says about the disciples at the very end of his gospel. “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” So far from being paralysed by this crisis of Jesus being taken from them, so far from it being another crucifixion and another loss, there is joy. They worship him, this Jesus who has gone, this Son of Man whom human eye can no longer see. They are learning that where sight fails, faith comes into its own. They bless the one whose final act, on saying farewell, was to bless them.

I spoke about the imagery of the story, Luke’s picture-language of up and down, Jesus being released from his earth-bound existence into the heavenly realms of the skies above. The New Testament writer to the Ephesians helps us catch the sense of this way of speaking. His theme is how the Ascension leads to the bestowing of gifts upon the people who are left behind, like a Roman triumph where the victor rides through his city scattering gold and silver and precious stones to the crowds who acclaim him. He writes: “he who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things”.

This is a profoundly important insight. For it’s precisely as Jesus disappears, as he is lost to our sight, that he becomes the universal presence he is to the eye of faith, the one who fills all things. Out of emptiness and absence have come fulness and presence. Out of searching and loss have flowed discovery and joy. “O that I knew where I might find him!” laments the lonely sufferer in the Book of Job. But now the veil is drawn back. It is Christ’s day of enthronement when his kingship is declared to all creation. He is Lord of all. His glory and his love suffuse all things, all life, all people. He walks among us as our contemporary, our king, our friend. His presence is everywhere, like the air we breathe. He fills all things. We do not see him, and only faith can tell us he is there. But we believe, and therefore we worship, and our hearts are full of joy.

The poets come to our help as we struggle to make sense of these things. Here is a well-known poem by George MacDonald that charts the movement of the human heart from the sense of bewilderment and loss that I conjectured the disciples must have felt when they realised that Jesus had gone, to the discovery that he was among them all the while, closer to them than they could ever know. It’s called “Lost and Found”.

I missed him when the sun began to bend;
I found him not when I had lost his rim;
With many tears I went in search of him,
Climbing high mountains which did still ascend,
And gave me echoes when I called my friend;
Through cities vast and charnel-houses grim,
And high cathedrals where the light was dim,
Through books and arts and works without an end,
But found him not--the friend whom I had lost.
And yet I found him--as I found the lark,
A sound in fields I heard but could not mark;
I found him nearest when I missed him most;
I found him in my heart, a life in frost,
A light I knew not till my soul was dark.

This seems to me to be the kind of faith we should cultivate in these days after the Ascension. Perhaps preachers like me can fall into the trap of talking about faith as something heroic that will banish doubt, win the world for Christ, make sense of suffering and rise above the sheer ordinariness of human life. But as I grow old, I realise that the practice of religion in our common days is very much a matter of reaching out in our perplexity, fostering a deeper awareness, being attentive to what is around us, glimpsing meanings, feeling after God so that we may find him and know him and love him with quietened spirits and a heartfelt love. Isn’t this simply what it means to be a human being? “The unexamined life is not worth living” said Socrates. But to reflect on who and what we are, become attuned to the One who lives and moves and has his being around and within us – isn’t this to become more human, more the people God intends us to be? And yet I found him acclaims the poet – and you hear his voice catch with astonishment and joy. I found him – because he was there all along, nearer to me than my own soul. When I began to live the examined life, he was there!

The church is here to help us on this lifelong journey. The disciples were told to wait for the time when they would be “clothed with power from on high” says St Luke. This promised coming upon them of the Holy Spirit meant many things, but one of them was the conviction of knowing what God was calling them to do and to be in the world after the resurrection. So we ask ourselves, on this Sunday before Whitsun, how can we be good and credible witnesses to faith in Jesus Christ in our own day? One answer is: simply to practise our faith with genuineness and integrity, understanding its ebbs and its flows, its tides of absence and of presence, cultivating stability amid the changes and chances of this fleeting world.

And when the moment comes, being ready to speak about it with anyone who asks a reason for the hope that is within us. Our lived experience of faith is the best evidence for thoughtful Christianity that I know. Pray that the Spirit may give us all the confidence to live it and testify to it in these times when in matters of faith, there is so much hunger in the land.

Henshaw Church, Sunday of the Ascension 2018

Where It All Began: a Pentecost sermon in the church of my ordination.

It's good - very good - to be back here at St Andrew’s again. You’ll forgive me for being a little personal as I revisit this pulpit this morning where I first cut my teeth as a preacher. Forty-one years ago I was ordained deacon on this very spot, beneath the Norman Arch. I don’t know if anyone here today was in church that Sunday morning, 29 June, St Peter and St Paul’s Day 1975. Even if you were, there’s no reason why you should remember it though my memory is as vivid as if it were last week.

Last year I retired after twelve wonderful years at Durham Cathedral as Dean. Memory comes into things when you cross the threshold into retirement and look back on your working life. You try to identify themes, make connections, gather up fragments. My own working life in public ministry began here. So on this Day of Pentecost, let me try to think aloud about the significance of being in this place on this day and reflect, not on my own career but on the part remembering plays in our celebration of Whitsun and the gift of the Holy Spirit. After all, ordination is a sacrament of the Spirit and whatever the ministry we are each called to, we can only flourish as the Spirit equips and animates us in God’s service. 

In today’s gospel from St John, Jesus promises to send his disciples the Advocate, the Paraclete to be with them for ever, “the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be among you”. A little later on Jesus elaborates on one of the roles of the Paraclete. “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” So discipleship means learning and it means remembering. Together they constitute our formation as Jesus’ followers and friends. We learn what Jesus has to teach us: truth, grace, faithfulness, love, peace, wisdom and all the other virtues of Christian life. As Benedict says in his Rule, the secret is to listen and discern. And each step in that journey lives on in our experience and our consciousness as we look back and remember what Jesus has taught us and how he has formed us and made us who we are: those same virtues of wisdom and peace, love and faithfulness, grace and truth and the other gifts of the Spirit.

The eucharist is of course the act of remembering that lies at the heart of Christian faith. “Do this in memory of me” says Jesus in the same upper room that St John was telling us about. The kind of memory he is talking about isn’t “aorist” memory, something past and finished with. Anamnesis is in the perfect tense, past acts with present consequences. It lives on in our contemporary experience where we meet and know the crucified and risen Jesus in the sacrament of the altar. Like the Jewish Passover that lies behind it, the story of God’s mighty acts in incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost all belong to our present reality that transforms life now and gives us back our hope. So memory has a future tense as well. “We show forth the Lord’s death until he comes.”

By extension, all Christian memory is like this, the corporate memory of the church, our personal memories as God’s people. The Advocate, says Jesus, abides in our midst so that we can learn and can remember. For all of us, I guess, this church of St Andrew has been a focus of our learning and our memory. Some of you were baptised here, confirmed here, married here. Some of you will have said farewell here to loved ones at their funerals. Some of you learned faith here through Sunday school, adult learning or Christian outreach into the community. All of you have prayed here, heard the word of God here, shared in koinonia with your fellow Christians here, been fed and nourished here in this sacrament of the eucharist. Not many, I think, can say we were ordained here, but the principle is the same. This place, this “serious house on serious earth” to quote Philip Larkin, has played an essential part in the making of us all as Christian people. It is a kind of sacrament in its own right as all holy places are. “Surely the Lord was in this place and I knew it not” said Jacob at Bethel. But we do know it, or at least glimpse it. And if that eludes us, it’s safe to say that we are here because we feel after the sense of God’s presence on this day we are thankful for the gift of the Spirit. 

All this I began to learn in my first years of ordained ministry as a curate here. It’s not of course a matter of theory or book learning. It’s being a practitioner that teaches you, the experience of doing the work of God and the memory of it as you reflect on what it means and where God is to be found in it. Pentecost is one of those days when we look back as the church and recognise how experience has formed us and we have grown in the awareness of God, of one another and of the world. 

So I came to love this church and prize what it symbolised. I can’t exaggerate the influence St Andrew’s has subsequently had on my ministry and the style of liturgy, proclamation and spirituality I learned here. We are lucky if we can look back on our curacies so positively and so thankfully. But I needed to learn something else: that the church can never be the sole container of goodness, truth and beauty. We mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that this church, any church, the church is the only repository of the Spirit’s gifts. If Pentecost means anything, it is to prize open the church from the tiny, beleagured, inward-looking community it had been to a confident, outward-facing, global movement that looks for nothing less than the transformation of the whole creation. 

And this, I believe, is a dimension the church needs to recover today. It follows from our Pentecostal learning and remembering. Jesus goes on to speak about it later in St John. “When the Advocate comes, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.” To testify is to speak publicly about what we have learned and remembered. This means that in its words and actions, the church has a life-changing story to tell that is of global significance. In Acts, that first fiery rapture on Whit Sunday led to the expansion of Christianity from Jerusalem to Samaria and into the uttermost parts of the earth: it’s how Luke consciously shapes the narrative in Acts. 



And so must we shape our own story. In evangelism, in pastoral care, in apologetics, in social justice, yes and in liturgy and prayer most of all, we look outwards in imagination and in reality and see the creation as the theatre of God’s activity. It’s not that we take it there, more that we find it there already, so that by “testifying”, by bearing witness to what God is doing in human life, we interpret and articulate in ways that help us both to see and to recognise. As we do this, the story gets added to and enriched. There is yet more to learn and remember, yet more for which to be thankful, yet more that feeds our hope and prayer that God’s kingdom may come, and that we may one day know even as we are known. 



St Andrew’s Headington on the Day of Pentecost 2016. 
Acts 2.1-14, Romans 8. 14-17, John 14.8-17

A Large Room for Pentecost

This is my first Pentecost in retirement. Forty years ago next month, on Trinity Sunday, I was ordained priest in my college chapel here in Oxford. Balliol claims to have been founded one year before Merton in 1263, but we won’t let that get between us tonight.   Last year I retired after 12 wonderful years at Durham Cathedral as Dean. So this year it’s been necessary to learn how to inhabit a different human landscape with new rhythms, routines and opportunities. I’m having to redefine ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ and ask myself how best I can serve God in what they call the Third Age, and how to grow old gracefully. 

I’ve been haunted in this first year of superannuation by some words of the early 20th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.  He is speaking about ageing.  He says in one of his Letters to a Young Poet that our life is a kind of room, but as we grow older we inhabit a smaller and smaller part of that room, pacing up and down in front of the window, tracing and retracing our steps.  Ageing, he says, means contracting gracefully into a smaller space, pulling in our horizons both literally (because of our increasing physical limitations) and metaphorically (because we no longer think new thoughts and dream new dreams).  It means accepting and making friends with our own mortality.  

This could mean the depressing prospect of diminishing into nothingness.  But Rilke goes on to say: "we must accept our experience as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it." In other words, with the inevitable contraction of our physical and mental environment should come an emotional and spiritual expansion of horizons as when we were young.  ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space’ says Hamlet.  “Old men should be explorers” said Haydn in the last phase of an amazingly fertile life as great music continued to pour out of him, forever fresh and new. 

Today is the Feast of Pentecost, Whit Sunday. We are celebrating how God comes amongst us as Holy Spirit, is to be found at the heart of life as Paraclete, Holy Wisdom, Advocate, Comforter and Friend. We usually focus on Luke’s dramatic fiery story we heard from the Acts of the Apostles. But I find St John in tonight’s gospel rather closer to my own rather quieter experience of the Spirit of Truth whom the world neither knows nor sees, but who abides in us and is within us as the One who shows us the Father. 

There’s no limit to the number of ways we could picture the Spirit, so here’s one inspired by Rilke. It’s that of a large room, of space.  For I want to see Pentecost as the celebration of God-given space in which we can grow and flourish, a room generous enough for each of us and all of us collectively to discover and live out our humanity.  

Let me explain. The origins of Pentecost lie in one of Israel’s agricultural festivals, the Feast of Weeks when the first ripe grain was offered fifty days after the Passover.  So in Old Testament times, the feast was linked to the gift of a land, space to inhabit and settle and fertilise, rich, beautiful, well-watered, productive.  The land flowing with milk and honey, the land of safety and plenty and rest is a familiar image of redemption.  What is interesting about the language of ‘salvation’ in Hebrew is that it is closely related to the idea of space.  To be confined, hemmed in, imprisoned, when possibilities are closed off, is a kind of death.  Its opposite is to have room to grow and flourish and be truly alive.  

Now "Lebensraum" has its sinister shadow: most of the invasion of history have been driven by land-hunger, the competitive struggle for territory to occupy.  Yet the idea of space to live in is suggestive.  It echoes our basic human needs for shelter, warmth, sustenance and companionship, what we call ‘home’.  And the gift of the Spirit in the New Testament enlarges this image.  The story of Whit Sunday is closely linked to the mission of the church.  At Pentecost the disciples are in Jerusalem where the risen Jesus has told them to wait.  But after the rush of wind and fire, they learn that they must take the gospel out of the city’s confines.  "Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the uttermost parts of the earth": those are the expanding circles of the gospel’s influence that are acted out in the mission of the early church.  The Book of Acts begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome, as if to say: there is a new geography of the Spirit here, a new way of mapping the world.  It is space for the gospel to occupy.  It is claimed by the risen Jesus in the power of his Spirit.  It is God’s.  

We could say that the Spirit’s activity is always the creation of space in which to grow.  Perhaps the paradigm is the very first story in the Bible.  In the opening verses of Genesis, the spirit or wind of God moves over the face of the waters: the Hebrew word suggests a bird hovering over her nest.  It is the beginning of a journey that will see the chaotic flood pushed back into a place from where it can no longer threaten to overwhelm the world.  With the waters’ boundaries set for ever, space is created for the dry land to appear, and an ordered, coherent universe can begin to teem with life.  In Genesis, where the Spirit of God is at work, chaos is driven back, and pattern, order, structure, life and consciousness have room to emerge.  The cosmos becomes a home.  

Our reading from St Paul sets out a vision of what this transformed life is like, animated by God’s Spirit. “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” he says; not slaves to fall back into fear but the emancipated, the free who are heirs of God himself, “more than conquerors through the One through him who loved us.”  In another of his letters Paul says: “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”. We mustn’t collapse that glory down just to what concerns us and people like us. Paul means the destiny of all humanity, of all creation in its birth-pangs waiting for the promised new day. And this means a new way of seeing and of being, turning from all that oppresses and confines us, diminishes life and imprisons possibilities. 

So Pentecost opens up a vision of the broad, generous spaces we might inhabit as the Spirit makes a home among us.  The traditional images of the Spirit all imply space: without it fire goes out, water stops flowing, wind ceases to blow.  But as the Spirit prompts and propels us into inhabiting our salvation, occupying the space God gives us to grow in, are there any limits to what we could become in his service?  A church poised for mission in the world, like the first Christians in the Book of Acts.  Each of us transformed and renewed from within, galvanised by new reasons for living.  Our society and our world freed from all that holds it in thrall to chaos and death, and embracing the release and hope it longs for.  Rilke was right: ‘we must accept our experience as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.’  Pentecost is the portal. This large, generous, wonderful room is our home.  

Merton College Oxford, Whit Sunday 2016

Acts 2.1-14, Romans 8.14-17, John 14.8-17 

Veni Creator: the seven gifts of the Spirit

At the end of this service, we shall sing one of the best known of all Whitsunday hymns, our own Bishop Cosin’s Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire. It has the distinction of being the only hymn, in the modern sense, to be included in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer where it invokes the Spirit at the start of the ordination prayer for priests and bishops.

            Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire
            And lighten with celestial fire;
            Thou the anointing Spirit art,
            Who dost thy sevenfold gifts impart.

Cosin drew on a 9^th century Latin hymn of Pentecost when he wrote it in 1625. But the event he composed it for was not an ordination but a coronation, that of King Charles I. And in this his instinct was faithful to the biblical origins of this opening stanza. Its reference to the ‘sevenfold gifts’ takes us back to the lesson from Isaiah that we heard earlier. There, the prophet is looking forward to a new and glorious reign of the coming king who will emerge from the root of Jesse, the line of David. What kind of ruler will he be? Isaiah tells us. ‘The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord’. That makes six gifts. What about the seventh? That was added by the Greek translators of the Septuagint who included the spirit of piety or reverence.

In catholic moral theology, these seven gifts came to be seen as among the God-given lists that offer compass-bearings for the faithful as they navigate the spiritual life: seven deadly sins to avoid, seven virtues to embrace and live by, the four cardinal and three theological virtues, and the seven petitions that make up the Lord’s Prayer. So on this Whit Sunday, let’s reflect briefly on these beautiful qualities as gifts of the anointing Spirit to the Messiah, to the church and to us. And although they have moved some way from their original setting in the prophecies of Isaiah, John Cosin, an accomplished moral theologian who had read St Thomas Aquinas, would have understood this way of speaking about them.

Wisdom, sapientia, embraces all the other gifts; it means having the insight and capacity to place the spiritual above the material and transient and to see into the life of things. Understanding, intellectus, suggests the disciplined training of a Christian mind to think as God thinks, pursue truth as it is taught us by the Spirit of Truth, see through falsehood and illusion. Counsel, consilium, is right judgment or discernment to know right from wrong and make and follow the choice to live by what is good and true. Courage, fortitudo, is the overcoming of fear and evil and embracing risk to follow the way of Jesus Christ and publicly stand up for it. It is the virtue that emanates from a mind that is single-focused, set only on doing the will of the Father as Jesus obeyed him in his life and death. Knowledge, scientia, is one outcome of the second gift of understanding as the believer begins to grasp the meaning of God, not as the accumulation of information or doctrinal grasp, but as an aspect of Christian formation whereby we make the good choices of loving God and our neighbour.

Piety, pietas, is not simply ‘spirituality’, but rather the respecting and honouring the sources of our life and health: our parents, teachers and the church who together have shaped us, the public institutions to which we owe gratitude and loyalty, above all God himself whom we reverence as the author and giver of all good things. Finally, the fear of the Lord, timor Domini, stands for the gift of wonderment and adoration as we become ever more aware of the glory and majesty of God. The fear of the Lord teaches us that God is the perfection of all we long for: perfect knowledge, goodness, power, and love. Thomas Aquinas says this is not being afraid of punishment but rather a child’s fear of displeasing the parent they love. The Hebrew Bible says that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’, so it brings us full circle to that first and all-embracing gift of wisdom.

All this, says Isaiah, is true of the promised anointed king, the messianic ruler who will judge the poor with righteousness and decide with equity for the meek of the earth, in whose days the lion will lie down with the lamb, and children will play safely over an adder’s den, when nothing will hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. We cherish these promises and live by the hope they set before us, and are right to think of the reign of Jesus our risen and glorious Lord whose kingship we have celebrated in the days of Ascension and whose just and gentle rule we long for when we pray ‘thy kingdom come!’ And come it will, be it soon, be it late. We wait for it, we long for it, and because of it, we are always ready to give an answer for the hope that is within us.

Whitsunday invites us, not indeed to lose that long view but also to set our sights on the tasks and obligations of Christian living in the present. This, says Jesus to his disciples in the upper room, must be our daily concern when he is gone. It is for this that the Spirit of Truth comes, to lead us into truth, to give us a right judgment in all things, to impart the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit the hymn teaches us about. For in Christ, these are not the prerogatives of anointed messiah alone, but are for all who are anointed in baptism and sealed by the Spirit, for all of us whom Christian faith has made into the royal companions of the King of Glory. In St John, Paraclete is a word that glitters with expectation and is bright with promise: the Comforter, the Strengthener, the Encourager, the Advocate who both teaches and puts into our hearts the blazing fire and rushing wind and living water of God’s eternal love. Thy blessed unction from above is comfort, life, and fire of love. What would life be without the Spirit among us, between us and within us? What use would we be without the Spirit’s sevenfold gifts to make us fully human and perfect in us the image of Jesus? How can the church be a transforming influence in the world unless the Spirit’s gifts animate and inspire every breath we breathe?

Which is why I want to urge on the church the need to meditate on these sevenfold gifts. I see a church today that is at risk of panicking as it watches itself diminish in numbers and influence, as it wonders whether even Christian faith itself could be at risk of eclipse and a lingering, painful, sclerotic death. It’s understandable that our church is tempted to become busy and excitable, embark on great outreach projects with relentless energy, invest vast sums of money to try to turn this stately galleon Christianity round before it is too late. It is understandable. Like climate change, we can either pretend it isn’t happening, or engage seriously in mitigating its inevitable effects.

But the texts of Pentecost tell us that all the best-intentioned endeavour in the world will count for nothing without the Spirit of God and the seven gifts of an anointed people: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and the fear of the Lord. They give us a ‘values statement’ for the imitation of Christ. But they call for a deep and spiritual intelligence – ‘mindfulness’ - if we are to become life-changing agents of mission. These are gifts to make us into reflective practitioners, as they say, to foster wisdom before they are impulses to activity. The question at Pentecost must be: how do we cultivate the vocation of the church to practise mission with this kind of contemplative wise biblical insight? How do we make sure that in what we do and the way we do it, we are truly emulating our anointed King, and listening to what the Spirit is saying to the churches?

Durham Cathedral, Whitsunday 2015. Isaiah 11.1-9, John 16.1-15

FIRE AT WHITSUN

Note: this sermon draws extensively on T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’. However, copyright permission is needed to cite the 22 lines of poetry that are integral to this sermon (I am seeking it from the publishers, Faber & Faber, who I hope, given that this is a liturgical sermon, will agree to my including them without charge). You will therefore need a copy of the poem by you to make the best sense of this address. The omissions are indicated by ellipses (…).

If you come this way…

May is a white time in T. S. Eliot’s poem from the Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’.  His welcome to the whiteness of spring time draws on the memory of snow and the longing for release from winter’s captivity. This leads him to reflect on the four elements, earth, air, water and fire. It is the last, fire, the primal and ultimate element that is the theme of this great poem.

It was prompted by the searing experience of the Luftwaffe raids on London whose hellish wild fires costing so much in human life and property he saw as a symbol of sin and destructiveness. But as he scans the Christian memory for other fiery associations, he begins to enlarge his understanding. There is the fire of purgation that leads to repentance and a new vision of life that purifies humanity of base corruption and its propensity to embrace evil. And there is the fire of healing and redemption, the Pentecostal fire that renews and makes it possible for life to begin again. But the human race must choose between the fire of the Holy Spirit or Dante’s inferno which the bombing of London symbolises. It is the choice between being redeemed or being destroyed. God, says the poem, invites humanity to be redeemed, consumed by the fire of love and escape the living hell through purgation by the ordeal of fire. As Eliot says in the famous fourth stanza:

The dove descending…

The story of Whitsun in the Acts of the Apostles is rich in themes. One of them is how it marks the passage of time. In one way it is the end of an epoch: the last day of the Passover season when the firstfruits of God’s harvest were gathered up and offered (in the Jewish calendar, the Feast of Weeks celebrated the first cutting of wheat). Hence the apocalyptic imagery in Peter’s Pentecost speech about the sun being darkened and the moon turned to blood, familiar language about the last days which in Joel’s prophecy are linked to the outpouring of the Spirit upon all flesh. But in another way, today marks the beginning of a new epoch. In Luke’s story, so carefully constructed around the times and seasons of the year, it is placed not at the end of his gospel, part 1, but at the beginning of his part 2, the Book of Acts. He believes that Pentecost marks the birthday of the church, the inauguration of its mission to bring salvation to the world. So the tongues of fire that hovered over the apostles symbolise the launch of the acts of the Holy Spirit, the era in which Luke lived and we his readers still live.

But with fire, you can’t separate ends from beginnings. The very destructiveness of fire is also a purgation that leads to a new start. Many of the world’s primitive creation myths begin with fire: Prometheus who stole fire from the gods is but one. Eliot’s poem speaks about beginnings and endings, and how they merge in our experience of them:

 

What we call the beginning…

And this I think is at the heart of what Pentecost should mean for us as we celebrate it today. Eliot called his poem ‘Little Gidding’. This was the place where in the 17^th century a small Anglican community was founded by Nicholas Ferrar. His wish was to live with his family in simplicity, inspired by the spirituality of the Book of Common Prayer. The liturgy would be offered in the high church tradition espoused by King Charles I and the so-called Caroline divines, like our own John Cosin, Canon of Durham at this time, author of the Pentecost hymn we shall sing shortly: ‘Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’.  The turbulent times of the English civil war seemed to Eliot to echo the London blitz and to underline how humanity’s flawed understanding of life and turning away from God leads to the relentless cycle of warfare. So this small community living a common life of Christian prayer and service symbolised how the human race needed to repair itself, to purify its vision of life if it was to survive.  This meant understanding an ambivalent, conflicted, shameful past and embracing a renewed, God-given present and future. All this will be in the name of the ‘broken King’ whose coming is our healing and whose just and gentle rule, lived out through the Holy Spirit, is our salvation and our joy.

I see the church as just such a community. Our church in the west is not grand and powerful anymore, not visibly triumphant or successful if the recent statistics on membership are anything to go by. It is small, and fragile, and declining, and vulnerable.  Yet it is not the less beautiful for that, and no less beloved. Faithful unto death, its beauty is of the Spirit whose fiery presence purges it of what is corrupt, heals its sicknesses, repairs its breaches and mends its brokenness. She animates it to become inflamed, impassioned with all the energies of God at work in our world. Its mission is what it always was in the Acts of the Apostles and throughout Christian history: to bear witness to a God whose love declares that ‘all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well’ (Eliot twice quotes Mother Julian of Norwich’s great saying in his poem.)  For then, enlightened with Cosin’s celestial fire, and in that ‘condition of complete simplicity….’, the fiery tongues will be in-folded

                                    Into the crowned knot …

Durham Cathedral, Whit Sunday 2013

Acts 2

Whitsun: reconciliation and love

On Friday, the two bishops and I were in Coventry Cathedral where we were once all canons residentiary.  We went for the celebration of the Cathedral’s Golden Jubilee. When I went there as Precentor in May 1987, my first big service was the Silver Jubilee.  So it was good to be back to mark the first 50 years of this great 20^th century church building.  

When the Cathedral was built in 1962, thousands queued to get in and see it.  I was among them: my parents thought we should make the journey.  For me as a boy, driving up the newly opened M1 was the real excitement of the day.  Yet I vividly remember going into the Cathedral, taking in its light-filled space, gazing at Graham Sutherland’s tapestry of Christ in Glory and at John Piper’s kaleidoscopic baptistery window, and seeing my reflection staring up at me in the jet-black polished marble floor. I recall that I sat in the centre of the nave on my own while the crowds swirled round the periphery. I felt as though I had the Cathedral to myself.  Ever since, I’ve reckoned that large naves are the best places to sit, ponder and pray in.

Coventry is one cathedral in two buildings.  The shell of the old cathedral bombed in 1940 is as eloquent as any ruins in England.  It speaks poignantly of ‘war and the pity of war’, Wilfred Owen’s words quoted by Benjamin Britten in the War Requiem, commissioned for the Cathedral and first performed there 50 years ago this week.  But the ruins don’t only speak of sacrifice and death.  They speak powerfully of life.  At open-air eucharists in the early morning on Easter Day and Whit Sunday, it was as if the skeleton of that beautiful 15^th century church reached for the sky, a striking metaphor of resurrection as if we were in some great empty tomb.  It reminded me of Ezekiel’s dry bones: arid, dead, lifeless things which the Spirit brings back to life again. 

The focus of Coventry’s ministry ever since the war has been reconciliation.  Beginning with the rebuilding of friendship with Germany, this work has spread to many places of conflict across the world.  On Friday the Archbishop of Canterbury preached about it. He began with John Cosin’s hymn ‘Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’ which children from a local school had danced to while it was sung.  Enable with perpetual light the dullness of our blinded sight.  Reconciliation, he said, always involves seeing the other person or community in a new way. The Cathedral building helps us do this. You walk up the nave towards the image of Christ on the tapestry. Then you turn round and see the array of colour in the aisle windows that were concealed from you as you walked towards the high altar. At the west end you are aware of the Hutton glass screen with its angels and saints.  Beyond that you see the ruins, symbol of the wreckage and pain of humanity. This, he said, is how Christ on the tapestry sees the world: not as a lost and hopeless place but transfigured by God’s mercy symbolised in the coloured windows and the angels and saints on the screen. He drew attention to the diminutive figure of the human being held between Christ’s feet. From that safe place, held by Christ’s love, that figure is also looking out on the ruins, seeing it as Jesus sees it. This is you and me. If we see the world like this, reconciliation happens.

One of the meanings of Pentecost is that it promises the transformation of the whole of life, even in its darkest, most broken passages. The face of Christ has a gaze that seems to know you in a profound way, draw you upwards, put to you God’s questions, speak compellingly about grace and truth. Above him a shaft of light streams down on his head as if he were being baptised by a glow that pours over him from a window in the sky.  And right at the top is the origin of that light: a dove.  She is descending on that sunbeam towards Christ and towards us: the Holy Spirit of Christ the risen Head who animates the body of his church, the community of the baptised, the faithful of every age and the faithful of today. Us. 

The tapestry gives us an image of our reading from St John. There, the resurrection and the giving of the Spirit happen on the same Easter Day.  For John, the Spirit is the clue to Jesus’s public ministry.  At his baptism, John the Baptist quotes Jesus: ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.’  In the temple he invites all who thirst to ‘come to me and drink… Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’ and John adds that he says this of the Spirit which believers would receive.  And at the end of gospel, the risen Christ announces peace to his disciples and confers on them the gift of the new creation: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’.  But we must not miss what comes next.  ‘If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’  He is saying that the Spirit comes into the world to do work, God’s work.  We heard last week in St Luke how Jesus begins his ministry by announcing that ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me…’  For what?  ‘To bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.’  It is his calling and ours: the Spirit anoints the church so that we can continue God’s work of re-making the world, bringing justice, reconciliation and hope to all humanity. This is part of what John means by his language of forgiving and retaining sins: making real in human lives the grace and truth of Jesus and putting to the world the inescapable demand and invitation that the truth presents us with.  ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’

Let me go back to Coventry. I have a memory I cherish. In 1990 the city marked the 50^th anniversary of the Luftwaffe air-raids codenamed ‘Moonlight Sonata’ when incendiaries rained down on the city and burned its heart out, destroying the cathedral with it. One day an elderly man came into the ruins, and walked slowly up the length of the nave to the stone altar in the apse, tentative as though he was not sure if he should be there.  He stood for a long time gazing at the charred cross and at the inscription on the wall behind it, ‘Father, forgive’.  And then he began to sob: not in a self-dramatizing way, but with the honesty of a child who has been confronted with some personal truth that is too overwhelming for words. The Provost embraced him and they held on to each other for some considerable time.  That man had been a Luftwaffe pilot on that terrible bombing raid of 14 November.  In 50 years he had never been able to bring himself to visit the city.  But now he wanted to come before he died, and face the truth of what he and his comrades had done so many years before, the truth of ‘war and the pity of war’.  It felt like a moment of life-changing forgiveness and reconciliation. 

On Whit Sunday, white with the brilliance of God’s light and love, we should ask ourselves if we are genuinely Pentecostal Christians.  Not that we speak with tongues, or prophesy, or understand mysteries, or give away all that we own or even have faith to move mountains. St Paul tells us that there is one first-fruit of the Spirit’s harvest that we must covet above all others. Caritas is that fruit. Love is the only thing that matters: love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, love that never ends.  It is love makes us Pentecostal as we are illuminated by the Spirit, brought back to life by the Spirit, as we join in God’s mission to bring reconciliation to his world. The dove descending on that sunbeam on the tapestry reminds me why I am here: to learn how to see in a new way, and then to act on what I see. And then I know that in the power of God’s risen Son and his life-giving Spirit, anything is possible. 

Durham, Whit Sunday 2012
(Ezekiel 36.22-28; John 20.19-23)

My book on Graham Sutherland's tapestry: A Picture of Faith: a meditation on the imagery of Christ in Glory (Kevin Mayhew, 1995)