St Mary, West Worlington

Pentecost (Whit Sunday) Acts 2: 1-21

John 17: 1-11

Sat outside and taking the sun. What an ideal way to spend some of Friday afternoon as we swelter in this quite untypical heat in May. That is just what Gill and I were doing. I confess I was on the point of nodding off when Gill suddenly came out with, “There’s always one”.

I came fully awake and tried to work out what conversation I had wandered off during so that I could make some meaningful comment in return. I gave up.

“What?” I said.

Gill went on to comment that a group of birds had just flown overhead but that, as was often the case, there was one who was straggling.

I leapt to my feet (well, struggled to my feet) and came inside to write this homily. Gill had given me an idea for my opening thoughts, and these I have now shared with you. To move on...

Do we find in life that there are times when we too seem to struggle to keep up? As we look about us we see others racing ahead taking opportunity and moving onwards. Are we the same in our spiritual life? Do we look at others thinking that their spirituality is far greater than ours?

Today is Pentecost, also known as Whit Sunday. Today, in the reading from Acts, we read of the gift of the Holy Spirit being given to the eleven disciples sat alone in a room. As we read for ourselves the events that were taking place what sort of images draw themselves in our mind? A scene is being described that took place two thousand years ago.

But here we have one of the problems of today. How do we describe the events of Pentecost? Now we might have a better understanding of what happened, or at least we might think that we do. But let us go back two thousand years in time when science was at its infancy, when people were living either in cities or in tribal communities. Probably more importantly they were living in times where language had not developed to that extent which exists today. In New Testament times their total vocabulary contained just a few thousand words, and that included exclamations akin to damn and blast.

We have a group of the disciples gathered together in a room. There was an atmosphere of uncertainty, of unknowing. When the gift of Pentecost arrived they were ‘out of their depth’. How could they describe what was taking place? Their vocabulary did not provide the words that would help them. The gift of the Holy Spirit was beyond anything that they could enunciate. They were speechless – that is how we could describe it, but we would also be wrong. The disciples were anything but speechless. They were talking in their own language, and also in the language of those countries around them, languages that were previously unknown to them.

There have been times when I have thought just how useful it would be to be proficient in other languages. When Gill and I hop onto a ferry or board an airplane a good working knowledge of German, Spanish, Scottish (Glasgow area – sorry, but I do struggle with the accent) would be a real advantage. Our disciples would manage all these with ease, and more besides.

They had been given the gift of the Holy Spirit to go out and to continue the work that Jesus had started. To make known to all people the love of God and also to accept Jesus into their lives.

The locals, not understanding the sounds, not having seen the Holy Spirit engaging with the disciples, assumed the disciples were drunk. Language problems all of a sudden become language problems of a different sort. The behaviour of the disciples was not something that the locals could understand.

Language – a problem, and not for the first time!

Until then, even God seemed to have experienced some language problems. Countless times in the Old Testament the Lord spoke to the human race, making promises, telling them how much their Creator loved them, calling them home. If only they would keep the commandments, love God in return and love their neighbours!

But people weren’t speaking God’s language; they weren’t getting the message. To the sinful human race, the word of love was losing something in the translation. So, God sent Jesus, the Word made flesh, who had been in the beginning with God, who was God. Even that didn’t work. Jesus came into the world, but the world would not receive him. We just couldn’t understand the language. We were starting to lag behind where God wanted us to be.

The translation failure was crucial: literally. The Word of God, the Word of love, the Word made flesh, was interpreted as a threat: Jesus was fully aware he would be put to death. But the cross was not the end. It was the beginning of a sequence of events we have been celebrating over the last few weeks: the mighty resurrection of Jesus, his glorious ascension, and now Pentecost, the arrival of the Holy Spirit... our interpreter, our means of catching up.

At Pentecost, the Spirit overcame all language barriers, not only between different races but between human beings and God. The Holy Spirit is in our hearts, busily translating the word of God for us, but we need to put on our headphones and listen: make space in our lives to be quiet before God, and let the interpreter, reminding us of all that Jesus taught the first disciples, guide us into truth.

Today, anyone who is working as an interpreter has to try to convey not just the meaning of the words that they hear but also any stressing or emphasis, any nuances that the words may contain. The Holy Spirit translates not just the word but the meaning, helping us to see things in context, and understanding that what was meaningful two or three thousand years ago doesn’t always translate easily into our very different world of today. The Spirit of prophecy has less to do with telling the future than speaking to the present, whether the present of first-century Palestine or of our world today.

The Spirit makes the living Word, Jesus, real in our hearts through prayer. The Spirit makes the written Word, the Bible, more meaningful as we study it, carefully and prayerfully. Old Testament stories of fighting, of wrath, of turning away from God, or New Testament teaching against associating with those who were not God’s chosen, may have made some sense in their original context, the original situations, the original social structures. Now they read like bad translations of the Gospel message. The Holy Spirit enables to see these as cultural issues of their time and allows us to give thanks for the progress that has been made over the centuries.

The role of the Spirit is to help us understand and communicate, with God and with one another. Regardless of whether we can speak other languages, listening to the Spirit will help us avoid the prejudice that spoils our relationship with people we don’t otherwise understand. The real meaning of God’s love for us, and for them, will come over loud and clear. No longer the straggler at the rear of the flock we will have our place with the others.

Collect for Pentecost

God, who as at this time

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 to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

St Mary, West Worlington

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