RonBlog

Sunday 12th June, 2011 Pentecost

Sentence
Let anyone who is thirsty come to Me, and let the one who believes in Me drink; for out of Your heart shall flow rivers of living water. John 7: 38

Collect
O God, Who taught the hearts of Your faithful people by sending to them the light of Your Holy Spirit, grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore rejoice in His holy comfort, through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour, Who lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen

First Lesson Acts 2: 1 – 21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs--in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power."
All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others sneered and said, "They are filled with new wine." But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 'In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'

Psalm 104: 26 – 36

Lord, how various are all your works: in wisdom you have made them all, and the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the wide, immeasurable sea: there move living things without number, great and small.
There go the ships to and fro: and there is that Leviathan whom you formed to sport in the deep
These all look to you: to give them their food in due season
When you give it to them, they gather it: when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face, they are troubled: when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit they are created: and you renew the face of the earth
May the glory of the Lord endure for ever: may the Lord rejoice in all his works.
If he looks upon the earth, it shall tremble: if he but touch the mountains, they shall smoke.
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live: I will praise my God while I have any being
May my meditation be pleasing to Him: for my joy shall be in the Lord
May sinners perish from the earth, let the wicked be no more: bless the Lord o my soul, O praise the Lord

Epistle 1 Corinthians 12: 1 – 13

Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says "Let Jesus be cursed!" and no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit.
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord;
and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.
All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

GOSPEL John 20: 19 – 23

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "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."

© New Revised Standard Version of the Bible Copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the USA, and used by permission. All rights reserved

NOTES ON THE READINGS

First Lesson
Wherever does one begin with a passage as critical and formative as this. Familiar it may be, but rather too often familiarity leads a person to overlook either the obvious or the not so obvious. Hopefully we will cover both issues here.

They were all together in one place is really quite critical to see and embrace. That is the punch-line if you will, and all else proceeds from there. This remarkable event, however it took place in reality, was to point all who followed to see where being Christ’s disciples would take them. And it was together, and that meant reconciliation and fellowship. No room for division for that would be blasphemous. And how did the Church respond over the centuries, but in completely the opposite direction …. And often still does.
The symbols of wind and fire need to be understood too. Fire, of course, purges and refines metals to bring them to completeness. Wind (breath, spirit, even life) has the same breadth of translation in both Hebrew and Greek. Ruarch in Hebrew (רוח) or pneuma) in Greek.. To me that is a fascinating factor.

One of the odd things about some modern Christians is their penchant for miracle. This business of speaking in languages is not so much miracle, but a pointer (John’s sign!) for catching sight of the purpose. Here is the reversal of Babel, that creation saga about the division of people by the plethora of languages. The old divisions are removed by the Gospel, and that is the point of it all. The coming of the Holy Spirit is presented as the source of unity, just as the Three-in-One are one. This is the focus of forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration.

In a funny way, that mistake people there made thinking the disciples were drunk underlines, in its own inimical way, that there is not a large gap between what once may have been called ‘sacred’ things from ‘secular.’

Psalm
For anyone who wonders why this psalm was chosen for Pentecost, then please read the fine print, so to speak. How often do you see ‘spirit,’ wisdom’ ‘breath’ all in one psalm, and remember that this is Old Testament! It is a remarkable production in its width of vision of life, and even includes the sea (ocean) which has never been a favourite of Hebrew people. Remember Jonah! Mind you, the last verse in this psalm is a reminder that it stems from an earlier stage in the development of the Jewish Faith. Never miss the point that your faith, like theirs, developed and evolved like everyone else’s. And do NOT stumble over the use of ‘evolution.’ It has already happened to you physically, let alone intellectually and spiritually. If it hasn’t, then you must be dead in your tracks. Yes, I am being naughty but only to disperse a few nightmares.

Epistle
For anyone caught up in some common misunderstandings of the Faith, and in particular with matters of the Spirit, may I suggest that you spend some time reading –at one sitting, and then doing it again – Paul’s Chapters 10 – 13 in this book of his. And pay good heed to what Paul has to say. Apart from anything else, gifts are gifts are gifts – they are not my property, and they are for the betterment of all. I suspect there will be more along these lines anon.

GOSPEL
Now it may have shocked you a little just after Easter when this passage and a little more was under focus. However, when John wrote his Gospel, quite some period of time after the synoptic Gospels, he did some very different things and told some of the stories very differently. For instance, he has the cleaning of the Temple at the start of Jesus’ ministry – not because it happened then, but because it was a matter of emphasis for John. His telling of the story was not in chronological order, but theological. And John’s seven signs (not miracles remember!) not only told the story of those events but also pointed up the biblical and evidential emphases the author wished to stress.
It is not surprising then that John has the coming of the Holy Spirit very soon after the Resurrection. Now almost certainly, John would have read Luke’s Gospel and Acts before he wrote, and while he was not trying to call Luke a fibber, he was making his own emphasis.
Please note a couple of things: this epiphany was with just the disciples. It is not clear whether that was a big mob or just the Eleven. If they were behind locked doors, there would not be room for mobs of people, now would there?
Note also, that this ‘ordination’ for those there was to charge the disciples with the same role and ministry as Jesus. ‘As the Father sent Me, so I send you …..’ There was no room for holding this Gospel close to their chests; it is designed for all the world.
Note, too that the matter of absolution focusses high on the agenda. For some Christians, confession, absolution are not high priorities, partly because maybe they misunderstand the process. In Anglican worship, this features highly, and usually at the start of most services of common worship, Eucharistic or not. And the point is not, as others often assume, to ‘clear your dirty soul back to pure again,’ but in the light of forgiveness from God, to enable you to look back at those failures, not only repent of them, but also learn from them in order to avoid them in the future. It is only as I am free to examine my mistakes without fear of retribution that I can learn from them. And I learn best from my boo boos rather than from what I do well. N’est ce pas? I surprise folk from time to time when I say that it should be impossible to blackmail a Christian. If they have done what the blackmailer charges, all they need to do is to agree. ‘Yes, that was me.’ If other Christians cannot cope with that, whatever it is, then the problem lies with them – they are not sinless either now are they! If they did not do it, the blackmail falls to the ground.

NOTES FOR A SERMON

It is supposed to help if you begin a sermon with a funny story: this is a slightly loaded one, but you should get the picture easily enough.
It was very many years ago and I was involved with a Youth Group in Sydney that boasted the presence then of a stiff young man who was later to become a Federal Attorney General. Also in that group was a young man of enormous enthusiasm who, at a sort of mission run by the group, encouraged the congregation to ‘sing lustfully’ which amused my mother no end!!! Of course he meant lustily. That same young man was considering entering the ministry as it was then described, but saw absolutely no need to go through the totally unnecessary business of training, for he knew it all anyhow. Whenever he spoke (preached he would have called it) it was severely obvious that he really did have little idea, and would have led (some) people up all manner of garden paths. I never did discover whether he moved in that direction, but he would have been a disaster area if he had.

All that brings me to the point on this Pentecost Sunday. And that point is this, that one needs to approach Scripture with far more than enthusiasm when understanding what is being conveyed. And I have to add, in solid Anglican conviction, that the 39 Articles are quite right when they require Scripture to be understood by taking all of its writings into balance. That wide-ranging view of things is particularly necessary with today’s rune of readings.

I entered college sure that I knew it all, and it took but a couple of days to blow that perception right out of my mind. New Testament lecturers were responsible for that business of seeing Acts 2 as countermanding the Tower of Babel. Told that in lectures, it blew up in my head, as did most of the other information passed on. Four years of College was a remarkably steep learning curve. It has always been a sadness for me that not all parishioners have at least one year in Theological College.

Over the years I have had people hound me to be open to the gift of speaking in tongues. ‘Without it, Ron, you are outside the Kingdom’ I have been told – and my response is ever to point people to the group of chapters in 1 Corinthians 10 onwards, where, from Eucharist to tongues to love, the gifts of the Spirit fall under Paul’s purview. As I have said to many, when I have exhausted that gift of love, I will begin to worry about the others. That approach even silenced my charismatic brother many years ago.

As one studies both Old Testament and New, and is aware that the Old Testament has quite something to say about the Spirit of God, and by quite a number of names, one’s picture of what is going on takes a broader vision as well. From the (first) Creation story, the Spirit appears. The Wisdom literature of the Old Testament refers to what you know as the Holy Spirit as well, but not by that name. And the further one goes, it is obvious that the prophets were people of the Spirit, being inspired most remarkably in their ministry to people of their own day and age …. And to us centuries and millennia later. So it bodes us ill to try and compact down the work of this most remarkable person of the Trinity.

Most of all, I dare to bring this Spirit right into your view, particularly if you are not too sure what is being spoken or written about. We Christians are a little too hasty in limiting this Spirit to the People of God. From my experience, as well as those of Biblical times, it is a delightful surprise to find that people apparently outside of the Faith are ‘infected’ by the Spirit of God. Truth is far from being the monopoly of Christians, and sad to say, they are often least likely to hear or respond to truth! Like people of other persuasions, ideology gets in the way, and the result is not a pretty sight. But, as we humans all know, truth is truth is truth, and one needs to be open to the directions that open up as truth becomes more clear to us. And as I said to my brother all those years ago, I have enough difficulty growing in the love direction, to worry about what to me – and Paul! – are lesser issues and gifts.

Perhaps that is enough to think about for the present ………