Pentecost 8^th June 2025

 Acts 2. 1-21 Day of Pentecost

Gospel John 14. 8-17

Living God, Take these all too human words and anoint them with your Spirit so that in their hearing we may each encounter the living Word, Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.

What a selection of texts we have today. It’s overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to begin. One of the challenges with this selection is sometimes we leave talk of the Spirit to days like Pentecost and the preacher feels they have to say it all in one go. That would not be possible or helpful.

There is a prior question, though, why don’t we talk about the Spirit more? Sure, we make reference to it frequently but why don’t we talk about who the Spirit is or what the Spirit does as much as Jesus?

There could be lots of reasons for this, but I think one of the main ones is that the church has always had a bit of an uneasy relationship with the Spirit. Concepts like Father and Son are easy for us to compute – but Spirit, which in Greek means wind – is much less tangible or less obviously relational. It evokes a sense of freedom and newness which is hard to pin down.

How to gender the Spirit has also been difficult. Often the Spirit is given female pronouns, but some feminist theologians have argued that this reinforces the maleness of the father, and of course Jesus, over and against and leaves us with two blokes and a bird. They argue for a more fluid recognition that there is no gender in God, God is Father and Mother. There is a strong medieval tradition of talking of Jesus as a mother also. Much more could be said about this, but the point is the Spirit doesn’t fit our categories as easily.

Throughout the history of the church, the Spirit has often been a cause of controversy. The sense of freedom and newness means talk of the Spirit can be vulnerable to nefarious claims for new action by God, which are harmful. There have been numerous heresies declared in the name of the Spirit.

This speaks to the fragility of discernment but this freedom, this risk, is also fundamental to what is to be church. Without the newness and freshness of the Spirit the church would be a historical reenactment society, we’ve got the fancy dress box for it for sure. And the bible would become a rule book to be copied out to the letter in every situation, regardless of relevance – is this sounding familiar?

It is the freshness wind of the Spirit that keeps the church alive and gives it breath fresh life. It’s what makes it possible for God to say something new. But this new thing must be consistent with the Gospel, the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of love, if it is to be truly of the Spirit. The Spirit is, most fundamentally, the Spirit of Christ. So, if a claim contradicts what we know to be true of Jesus then it is not of the Spirit. However, we can still be challenged as to whether we’ve understood Jesus by what the Spirit is saying or doing – do you see the challenge?

In our Gospel passage, Jesus talks about going away but that the Father will send another, the Spirit of truth, who will be – the Greek word is Paraclete. This is sometimes translated as comforter, sometimes as advocate, helper or intercessor. The Spirit fulfils the same role Jesus did in his earthly ministry – the Spirit is God close to us, with us, closer to us than we even are to ourselves. Again, without this, Jesus is gone, and the Bible is about the past. The presence of the Spirit means God is with us and the pages of the Bible breathe, they are about today and tomorrow as much as about the past.

We see in our reading from Acts that what the Spirit does it does publicly – as Jesus did. This is not the private spirituality of the modern imagination. This is not spiritual but not religious. It’s free and open but it’s a fresh interpreter of a tradition, a way of life – the way of the people of God. It adopts people into that family as Paul says in our Romans passage.

Our Acts passage is one of the most famous passages in the New Testament and the whole bible. Unlike John, it doesn’t tell us who the Spirit is, it shows us what the Spirit does. The whole passage is an echo and inversion of the Tower of Babel story from Genesis 11. This time, multiple languages do not bring confusion, instead, diversity brings unity within the Spirit.

People could hear the good news for themselves in their own culture. They didn’t have to give up who they are to hear from God or become Children of God. This is the fulfilment of Joel 2:28-29. It’s a barrier-breaking moment, God spoken through whatever language was necessary to communicate the good news. There is obviously a lesson here about our own assumptions about where and how God speaks and to whom. We all have biases after all. A clear implication of this passage is that differences of culture or ethnicity, or indeed other types of human difference, are no obstacle or barrier to God and are actively embraced by God. And this again is another reason why the Spirit has sometimes been perceived as threatening and shied away from in the Church. The ‘Spirit blows the B….. doors off’ and interrogates who we think are in and out.

There is a kids’ song that goes, Our God is a great big God…’ It’s always bothered me because God obviously has no physical mass. God is neither Big nor small. God is close. But beyond that pedantry, it makes God sound scary – a great big God might be a bully. But our God is a dangerous God and a surprising God. Our world is turned upside down, we may end up doing what we least expect – a few weeks ago, we heard how God sent Anais to break bread with Paul, who was a persecutor and enemy of Christ and the Church. What we know is that we don’t know where the Spirit will lead, and nothing is out of bounds – so our only choice is to get comfortable with uncertainty and to pray for courage to follow.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Amen