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

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