Evensong Sermon 31st July 2022

Genesis 50.4-end
1 Corinthians 14.1-19

Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour

‘Now I would like you all to speak in tongues, but even more to prophesy’. Our New Testament reading this evening, from 1 Corinthians 14, follows directly on from one of the most famous passages in scripture, I Corinthians 13, St Paul’s great hymn to faith, hope and  charity, the greatest of these being charity, love, a passage often read at weddings.

But 1 Corinthians 13 is only part of a larger argument that Paul is having in this letter about spiritual gifts, and especially the use of spiritual gifts in worship. I don’t know what our more text-bound Church of England forebears made of this passage. Speaking in tongues and prophesying had no obvious place in the Book of Common Prayer or in any Anglican context that I am aware of until comparatively recently.

Yet throughout Church history there have been those who claimed to have a special experience of the Holy Spirit, manifested in prophecies, healings, expectations of the end of the world and ecstatic utterance. In the century after the Reformation we had all kinds of religious, revolutionary and mystical groups, Puritans of various kings and odd names like Shakers, Ranters and Diggers. The only ones which survive today are the Quakers and they’ve quietened down a bit since then. But in the 18th century there was the Evangelical Revival and the rise of Methodism with a new emphasis on emotional prayer, powerful preaching and ecstatic worship. The Church of England’s attitude to such trends was often summed up in what Bishop Butler is reported to have said to John Wesley: ‘Enthusiasm, sir, is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing indeed’. But enthusiasm did not go away. And that is hardly surprising. The root meaning of enthusiasm is ‘inspiration of the essence of a God or, of God’. Those who believe in and seek God expect to experience God in some way or another.

In the 1960s and 1970s a succession of mostly American preachers and evangelists began speaking of a new age of the Spirit. Various Church of England clergy began to spread the message. In my teenage years I had a number of friends who spoke of ‘the baptism of the Holy Spirit’, or of a ‘second blessing’, a deep personal experience of the love and power of God.

There was worship which included manifestations of healing, physical and psychological, and special words from God being given to individuals and even prophecies. All this was part of what has become a global phenomenon, Pentecostalism, which is producing the fastest growing churches in the world, especially in Asia, Africa and South America. Here in the Church of England we have domesticated the phenomenon a bit, with initiatives like the Alpha Course, a remarketing of a course in basis Christianity that has deepened and intensified many people’s faith. The climax of the Alpha course is a weekend where individuals are invited to pray for a personal experience of the Holy  Spirit in which they may speak in tongues, cry, laugh, fall over or have a sense of personal healing. Quite a lot of churches not far from here will include speaking in tongues, prophecies and healings in their worship.

So it is interesting to note that in tonight’s passage from I Corinthians 14, Paul seems to take speaking in tongues for granted as a gift to individuals, while encouraging the Corinthian Christians to value the gifts that built up community, like prophesying.

This talk of spiritual gifts in scripture and in the experience of the Church comes as a bit of a challenge to me, perhaps to you. I was slightly caught up in the charismatic movement in the late 1960s and yes, I did have an intense experience at one point and as for speaking in tongues, yes, just open your mouth and something comes out. Ecstatic speech is a natural phenomenon. St Paul would have known it from pagan shrines and syncretistic mystical movements which flourished in big commercial cities like Corinth. Yet while he is happy to boast that he speaks in tongues more than anyone in the Corinthian congregation he worries about tongue speaking being too individualistic and potentially divisive. After all, you either do it or you don’t, and perhaps too many people were coming to Church and babbling away loudly and competitively and creating mayhem. His chief concern with the Corinthians was always to build up the Church as a community. So he says:

‘Those who speak in a tongue do not speak to other people but to God…they are speaking mysteries in the Spirit. Those who speak in a tongue build up themselves, but those who prophesy build up the Church’.

But look at those words again and you see something you might have missed. Paul expects people to speak ‘mysteries in the Spirit’. In other words, he expects them to have a personal relationship with God, or what we might call a mystical dimension to their prayer. His problem is that their personal prayer is at war with the prayer they have together. They are concentrating so hard on their inner lives with God that they are constantly arguing and being disruptive in Church.

And here we sit this evening, good conformist Anglicans as we are, not prophesying loudly or competitively but quietly taking part in Book of Common Prayer Evensong. Yet I wonder what happens to that inner dimension, that spiritual mysticism which Paul takes for granted?

The theologian Sarah Coakley believes that there is in all of us a streak of longing for a direct experience of God, an experience which goes beyond the formality of words. Ecstatic speech is a kind of babbling, it makes no rational sense. Yet the fact that it goes beyond words suggests to her that it is akin to what Christians of other traditions would call contemplation, that wordless prayer in which we are simply present to God and God to us. This is something you may know through nature, through music, through sitting still with scripture, or a phrase of prayer repeated again and again.

I suspect one reason why Pentecostal enthusiasm breaks out from time to time is that we ordinary Christians have simply neglected to be present to God through regular quiet contemplation, we have neglected our call to be sons and daughters of God, praying ‘Abba, Father’ as Jesus did. And you don’t necessarily need a special personal Pentecost to do that, though for some this may provide a breakthrough.

What you need is a sense of expectation, trust and patience, to bet your lives on the transparency of all things to God who is in all and through all and beyond all, a hope in Jesus Christ, God come to dwell among us who died and rose and lives for ever, a willingness for God to lift us into his presence, to become real for us, not only here in Church but in the day to day texture of our lives.

It’s all there in our Evensong texts: My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. Let us beseech him to grant us true repentance and his Holy Spirit. I believe in the Holy Ghost…..Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Make thy chosen people joyful. Take not thy Holy Spirit from us. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. The fire is all there contained in the texts we use, waiting to break out in our lives.

Angela Tilby