Isaiah 44.1-8,
Ephesians 4.7-16

Canon Angela Tilby

‘I will pour out my Spirit on your descendants, and my blessing on your offspring’.

The ten days between Ascension, last Thursday, and Pentecost, next Sunday, are a season of waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit.

You may well ask, what exactly are we waiting for? In our first reading the Spirit is promised as blessing for the future, on the holy land, and the promise is addressed to the Jewish exiles in Babylon. In our second reading the ascended Christ sends gifts to build up the Church. The 16th century apologist for the Church of England, Richard Hooker, spoke of the gifts and graces of the Spirit naturally tending towards what he called the ‘common peace’ and we might call the common good, well-being, flourishing.

We have our own particular cultural context. What we share with the Jews who first received this prophecy was that we too, in a sense, are exiles in our own land. England is no longer really Christian. Our relatively affluent but increasingly unequal society seems very unclear about its spiritual and moral grounding. Our established church is haemorrhaging regular worshippers while trying hard to assert its continuing relevance. What can we hope for, what can we pray, for from the Holy Spirit? What gifts does the Spirit bring to you, to me, to our common life as worshippers, neighbours, and yes, as subjects of our deeply Christian Queen in our constitutional monarchy? Where is that ‘common peace’ which Hooker thought so important?

It perhaps doesn’t help that there has been a tendency in recent years to think of the Spirit in terms of disruption and revolution in tune with the imagery of wind and fire in Luke’s account of Pentecost in Acts. So: Sweep through us, Holy Spirit, Set us on fire, Change us so we can change the world. The ambition is vast, the prayer is urgent, the impetus to speak out against so many things, for so many changes, is irresistible. Noise gets us noticed. And we see sometimes in the utterances of our leaders a passionate intensity that the Church should be a more powerful agent of God’s transforming kingdom. Come Holy Spirit, indeed.

And then I think of a conversation I had many years ago with Mother Thekla, an Orthodox nun in a tiny community in Whitby near the abbey. I think she disapproved of me in a charitable kind of way. I was at the time a TV  producer en route to ordination and I don’t think she had much time either for television or for women priests. I remember her scratching the wooden kitchen table of the monastery with a fingernail as she said, ‘The trouble with you western Christians’, scratch, ‘is that’, scratch, ‘you think the Holy Spirit is always inventing new things’. Double scratch. She was the spiritual director of the composer John Tavener, and had an interesting past. She had once been suspected by MI5 of being a Russian spy. I felt she saw right through me, but without an agenda, I felt a kindness coming from her as well as questions. She lived the Christian life you see, in very small particulars of dress and habit and speech and silence and ceaseless prayer. She had no use for flattery, publicity or success. She knew her little community would probably die out in a few years, and she was quite content to leave all that with God.

Remembering her makes me ask myself again? What do we mean when we pray, ‘Come Holy Spirit’? ‘Come gift of the Father, come Spring from the fountain of God’s very being, flowing from the heart of Christ our Ascended Lord?’ Is it more evangelistic initiatives? More diversity and inclusion? More ‘speaking truth to power’?  A more effective presence on social media? 

During the hundred years and thirty years it took the Church of England to get to a reasonably settled state after the English Reformation, say between 1534 and 1666, there was a great deal of political and religious conflict. So many who were convinced they were right and others wrong. And the executions, the burnings, the persecutions, the Civil War. When the Book of Common Prayer was restored in 1662, ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord’ was perhaps its most heartfelt prayer.

There are reasons why the Book of Common Prayer does not over-emphasize wind or fire or charisma, or social upheaval when it speaks of the Holy Spirit. Look at the Collect for Pentecost. We’ll used a modern version of it next Sunday: ‘God who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them of thy Holy Spirit: grant us by the same Spirit, to have a right judgment in all things, and ever more to rejoice in his holy comfort’. That follows on from today’s Collect, ‘Leave us not comfortlessness, but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us’. Comfort means strength, not a soft cushion. 

So two things to ask for from the coming of the Holy Spirit: ‘right judgment’ and ‘strength’. Right judgment is linked to the Christian gift of discernment, that is, an ability to see through appearances, to distinguish truth from falsehood, propaganda from reality, pretence from humility. And strength to go on doing so and to refuse to be content with anything less.

I cannot think of a divine gift we need more. Today we are so driven by our own needs and fears that what pours from us is a constant energetic uptalk, including sometimes a selective presentation of facts. Think the Partygate scandal and its ongoing consequences. Think endless Safeguarding issues in the Church with justice neither for victims nor, sometimes, for those accused. Think of cover-ups and lack of transparency in our institutions and businesses. All this provides a field day for journalists and lawyers and PR agencies and spin doctors and reputation managers.

We need the Holy Spirit to bring us back to reality, to wisdom, to truth. Because the Holy Spirit does not come down upon us to satisfy our cravings for novelty, our need to be noticed, our sense of entitlement or resentment; but because the Spirit is the living fountain that flows from the Father’s heart, the gift of Ascended Christ to us now.

Many years after I had met Mother Thekla I attempted an English translation of an ancient sequence for the coming of the Holy Spirit: Veni Sancte Spiritus, written by the 13th century Archbishop Stephen Langton. This is it:

Come, Holy Spirit;
send down from heaven’s height
your radiant light.

Come, lamp of every heart,
come, parent of the poor;
all gifts are yours.

Comforter beyond all comforting,
sweet unexpected guest,
sweetly refresh.

 Rest in hard labour,
coolness in heavy heat,
hurt souls’ relief.

Refill the secret hearts
of your faithful,
O most blessed light.

 Without your holy power
nothing can bear your light,
nothing is free from sin.

 Wash all that is filthy,
water all that is parched,
heal what is hurt within.

Bend all that is rigid,
warm all that has frozen hard,
lead back the lost.

 Give to your faithful ones,
who come in simple trust,
your sevenfold mystery. 

Give virtue its reward,
give, in the end, salvation
and joy that has no end.

  Common Worship: Daily Prayer, © The Archbishops' Council 2005