8 am Holy Communion and 11 am Sung Eucharist Sunday 28th May 2023

Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour

Acts 2.1-22, John 7.37-39

A sound like the rush of a violent wind; tongues, as of fire; and in our Gospel, living water flowing from a believer’s heart. Our readings for today, this feast of Pentecost, are full of elemental imagery. Wind, fire and water, all depicting the coming of God the Holy Spirit as a rush of energy, dynamism, vitality.

No wonder the Creed, which only speaks briefly of the Holy Spirit should describe this person of the Godhead as ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life’. Life is the point here. Pentecost is Gospel, Good News, really good news, strength and encouragement for each one of us, strength and encouragement for our cathedral community, for the whole Church, for our society and our world. Strength and encouragement for Rosemary, our new Anna Chaplain, for those confirmed here last night and making their communion this morning.

But I can’t help set this our Pentecost readings against the news released a fortnight ago of a new study showing that for the first time less than half of us believe in God. This is an agreement with earlier studies which show a sharp decline in belief since the 1980s. We have become one of the most godless, secular countries in the world. I have to say that there is little evidence, at least so far, that throwing off belief in God has made us feel happier or more free.

Instead morale seems low in our communities, in our institutions and in society as a whole. There are so many long-term sick, people who have removed themselves from the work force. There is a crisis in mental health. There is an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Our health service, schools and police all seem to be in trouble, there are long term worries about global warming, and then potholes! A general feeling that we are stuck. There is lots of rhetoric and anger and accusation and blame, but nothing much happening.

Meanwhile the study on religious attitudes shows that younger people are much more likely to believe in hell. Perhaps that’s not surprising. Physically, psychologically, spiritually our society - and sometimes our church - seems to be in a state which is often described as burnout. And what most characterises burnout, as you will know - if you have ever been diagnosed with it – is a depletion of energy and resources, leading to a fundamental lack of hope, Of course, for many of us, believing and praying, reading scripture and receiving the sacraments is where our hope is sustained. Belief in the love and power of God gives us a horizon beyond ourselves, a source of potential renewal.

Yet going back to our reading from Acts, I wonder whether perhaps the disciples of Jesus were burnt out. After all they had lost Jesus once in the shame and scandal of the cross, then there had been the visions and appearances of the resurrection, and then a second departure at the ascension, more mysterious this time, as Jesus ascended beyond their sight and knowledge, urging them to wait and pray.

And then there is this elemental experience, the descent of the divine, a happening which could only be described in metaphors. It was like the sound of a violent wind, like fire. Tongues of flame and new tongues. A form of speech was beyond the understanding of those who spoke. Yet a form of speech that was heard by the listeners in their mother tongue, in their native language. This is how the Holy Spirit descended as the Lord, the Giver of life.

Note how the Spirit is received here. Not, on this occasion through the powers of the intellect, or even through the emotions, but through the senses. God comes down as wind and flame, stirring those who spoke and those who listened at their most physical, bodily level. There is an echo of this in our Gospel, where Jesus speaks of living water flowing from the believer’s heart. Yet if you looked up these words in the King James Bible you would find the word we have as heart is actually ‘belly’, ‘guts’.

And yet even as I say that I realise it is wrong. We are still talking metaphors, images. The flame of the Spirit does not turn those who received it to ash, the wind does not batter them to the ground, the water of life that Jesus promised in the Gospel does not drown us. Instead the Spirit brings life, it revives, recreates, reorientates us.

And if this is true then those of us who do believe in God, or even want to believe in God, we have a huge hope and a huge responsibility, because in some way we are carrying for other people as well as for ourselves the longing and desire for wholeness, for the fulfilment for which God created us. It is rather misleading the way we speak of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit – as though the Spirit is an afterthought, the bit of God we remember after the second ‘and’. The reality is that without the Spirit we would not be here at all, we would not be able to respond to God in our native language, in the language of the heart.

I don’t think that, without God, we would necessarily be discontent. We would potter about doing what we do, accepting that we can’t change much and that some things are awfully sad. We would accept our fate accept our hopelessness, as how things are. It is perfectly possible to live without God as at least 51% claim to do.

Yet as St Paul says in Romans 8, the Spirit does not leave us alone. There is this groaning through nature, this sighing, this striving for fulfilment, and we ourselves groan as we wait. We see it in the earth itself in all its shakes and strains, we see it in the violence and pathos of animal life. Think of our domestic pets who cannot speak but still suffer without words. Paul speaks of the Spirit praying in us, interceding for us, speaking through our inarticulacy in the language of the heart; even taking our anxiety and forging it into prayer, seeing though our depression to our spiritual poverty, lifting our frustrations into yearning. We can’t receive until we want, until our desire for God is kindled. For some, the coming of the Spirit us an experience, for others a hope, for others merely an intuition that God wants something more for us and for our society and for our world.

If we live today in sad times, difficult, confusing times, I think we should recognise in all this the world’s prayer for its salvation, which is answered today, at Pentecost in imagery that springs from nature and yet points beyond nature to nature’s source. I cannot help but quote from the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who looks at the damage we humans have wreaked on our world and on ourselves and yet insists:

‘And for all this nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness, deep down things; and though the last lights off the black West went, Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward, springs – because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods, with warm breast and with, ah! Bright wings.’

What is in short supply in our time is hope. Hope is not irrational or deluded or eccentric. Pentecost reveals that hope goes with the grain of reality, which never runs out because it is sourced by the ultimate reality, God himself. We may feel there is very little we can do, our means are limited, our circumstances challenging, our history and our failures determine our view of ourselves. But there is that freshness deep down things. And deep down in our native language, in the language of the heart God and in our ‘gut’ experience, God speaks to us and calls us. Here is the living water, there is the fire of new life. Come, eat, drink, receive.

Canon Angela Tilby