Pentecost! A good and fine day in the life of the Church

Today is a great and grand day in the church calendar; it is one of the splendid Christian feasts.  It is the day when we celebrate the power of the Holy Spirit present in the Church of Christ.

Last year, it fell on the fourth Sunday of the month, so (at 10.30) we had a Family Service, which involved making ‘flame’ hats to represent the Holy Spirit above the heads of the Disciples.  This year, the family Eucharist falls next week, on Trinity Sunday – I’m at a loss what to do for next week!  It could be fun!

Today is the start of that great season of Pentecost, where we can almost see the rest of the year stretching out before us.  Apart from Trinity Sunday, and some feasts of Saints, we are in the Pentecost Season until the 1^st Sunday of the Kingdom Season in November!

This rhythm of the seasons gives us a steady and solid beat with which to plan the year.  It allows us to prepare, plan and hopefully get things right for the festivals. 

We all love a bit of forethought and preparation – if clergy are able to sit back a few weeks before Easter or Christmas with all their liturgy, sermons and speeches prepared they are happy – there is an air of calm that descends when a sermon is completed – mostly because before sermon writing starts, most of us haven’t a clue what we are going to say.

This sense of all being good, and planning ministry is lovely! But it’s a million miles from what happened to the disciples that day. 

They were uncertain what was going to happen, their world turned upside-down.  A wind blew through the locked room, flames appeared and then they were literally speaking a whole new language, or languages.  The reading from Acts tells us;

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?

The next line of the reading after the Holy Spirit descending finds the Disciples outside in the streets, they were in the crowd, preaching, showing their faith, being ridiculed and berated – but they were there – DOING THE WORK OF THE CHURCH.

The reading doesn’t even tell us what they said after the Holy Spirit descended…

God had given them a gift too precious to waste.  They are up and out.

We then hear the sermon of Peter, who puts the whole thing in context, firstly by promising that they aren’t drunk!  And then he tells them what the Prophet Joel said concerning these things.  He tells them a horror story of the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood.  He tells them of the glory of the coming of The Lord to give salvation to all who call upon his name.

The Acts of the Apostles is an important book in the New Testament because it gives us snapshots of how the early church spread so far, so quickly across the world.

The visitors to Jerusalem took the faith back home with them, and soon there were Christians in Samaria, Ethiopia, Damascus, Sharon, Lydda, Joppa, Cyprus, Phoenicia and Antioch, and, with Paul’s conversion, Europe and parts of Asia.  The faith even came to Wales relatively early in its’ development.

And…just like at the beginning….the message was taken to people in their own language, speaking into their lives, about their worries, troubles, fears and their joys and happiness.  The stories have been transmitted in a thousand languages to millions of people, keeping up the tradition of that first Pentecost – the Birthday of the Church.

I’ve thought sometimes that calling Pentecost the Birthday of the Church is over sentimentalizing the whole event.  The terrifying event surely can’t really be similar to the church of today.

If it resembled the church of today, well, on the Day of Pentecost, there would be someone giving out a bulletin with events for the week, there would be tea and coffee after the service, and the children would have walked in just before the end.

But then again, perhaps it was just like the modern church!  The people who said;

·    “These people are drunk”, well they might have been the Pentecostals. 

·    The ones who disagreed and said “No, they can’t be” well, they must have been the Methodists. 

·    Then there were others who said “what does this all mean?” were the Baptists. 

·    The ones who insisted on making sure that the sermon was available in all languages so that no one was excluded were the United Reformed Church.

·    And then the one who categorized everybody into different nationalities, writing a list and making sure that each person could be categorized, so in the future when people would read what happened, they would understand a little of the history….yes, they were the Anglicans.

Right at the beginning of the church, we had all the usual characters.  Working Ecumenically together if you like.

It would take a few years for committees, organs, Sunday school and church wardens to arrive, but the main components of the modern church were there.

The beauty of Pentecost, is that we can see God tends to do things in a particular order.  The people of Jesus’ day hadn’t really understood what the prophets were telling them. 

That they were being blessed by God, in order to be a blessing to the whole world. 

No wonder Peter quoted the Prophets!

Pentecost expresses what God requires – that we, who are blessed, share in a world-wide mission, without fear, because God wishes to reconcile humanity.

The reading from the Acts of the Apostles about the birth of the Church, is a glorious connecting with God.  From their desolation and despair, their trust in the truth of God brought them to the will and purpose of God.  Wonderful Stuff!   For those gathered at Pentecost, it was a leap of faith, a jump into the unknown.  Would it be that we were as brave.