Sermon: A Large Room for Whitsun

Yesterday I blessed the opening of the Weardale Railway extension.  You can now travel by train from Bishop Auckland to Stanhope, which means that Upper Weardale, where I have a personal interest, is once again connected by rail to the rest of England and indeed Europe.  I dedicated an 0-6-0 industry tank engine from 1954, renumbered 68692 for George Gently in imitation of an older J72T class, and a train of blood-and-custard carriages.  I thought not for the first time how archetypal a steam locomotive is. Fire, water, earth and air all play a vital part in fuelling and powering it, and it was not difficult to make connections with the elemental energies of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit.  I don't know whether that would be a theologian's take on the legendary love affair clergy often have for steam engines. 

However, this year another image has come into my mind, not so much a picture of who the Spirit is as of the consequence of the Spirit's activity.  I was reading some words of the early 20^th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.  He is speaking about ageing, a matter close to my heart having last month crossed the last round-number threshold of my working life.  He says in one of his Letters to a Young Poet that our life is a kind of room, but as we grow older we inhabit a smaller and smaller part of that room, pacing up and down in front of the window, tracing and retracing our steps.  Ageing, he says, means contracting gracefully into a smaller space, pulling in our horizons both literally (because of our increasing physical limitations) and metaphorically (because we no longer think new thoughts and dream new dreams).  It means accepting and making friends with our own mortality. 

This could mean the depressing prospect of diminishing into nothingness.  But Rilke goes on to say: ‘we must accept our experience as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.'  In other words, with the inevitable contraction of our physical and mental environment should come an emotional and spiritual expansion of horizons as when we were young.  ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space' says Hamlet.  So the Pentecostal image I have been toying with all week is that of a large room, of space.  For Pentecost can be the celebration of God-given space in which we can grow and flourish, a room generous enough for each of us and all of us collectively to discover and live out our humanity. 

Perhaps I should explain.  The origins of Pentecost lie in one of Israel's agricultural festivals, the Feast of Weeks when the first ripe grain was offered fifty days after the Passover.  So in Old Testament times, the feast was linked to the gift of a land, space to inhabit and settle and fertilise, rich, beautiful, well-watered, productive.  The land flowing with milk and honey, the land of safety and plenty and rest is a familiar image of redemption.  What is interesting about the language of ‘salvation' in Hebrew is that it is closely related to the idea of space.  To be confined, hemmed in, imprisoned, when possibilities are closed off, is a kind of death.  Its opposite is to have room to grow and flourish and be truly alive. 

Now Lebensraum has its sinister shadow: most of the invasion of history have been driven by land-hunger, the competitive struggle for territory to occupy.  Yet the idea of space to live in is suggestive.  It echoes our basic human needs for shelter, warmth, sustenance and companionship, what we call ‘home'.  And the gift of the Spirit in the New Testament enlarges this image.  The story of Whit Sunday is closely linked to the mission of the church.  At Pentecost the disciples are in Jerusalem where the risen Jesus has told them to wait.  But after the rush of wind and fire, they learn that they must take the gospel out of the city's confines.  ‘Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the uttermost parts of the earth': those are the expanding circles of the gospel's influence that are acted out in the mission of the early church.  The Book of Acts begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome, as if to say: there is a new geography of the Spirit here, a new way of mapping the world.  It is space for the gospel to occupy.  It is claimed by the risen Jesus in the power of his Spirit.  It is God's. 

We could say that the Spirit's activity is always the creation of space in which to grow.  Perhaps the paradigm is the very first story in the Bible.  In the opening verses of Genesis, the spirit or wind of God moves over the face of the waters: the Hebrew word suggests a bird hovering over her nest.  It is the beginning of a journey that will see the chaotic flood pushed back into a place from where it can no longer threaten to overwhelm the world.  With the waters' boundaries set for ever, space is created for the dry land to appear, and an ordered, coherent universe can begin to teem with life.  In Genesis, where the Spirit of God is at work, chaos is driven back, and pattern, order, structure, life and consciousness have room to emerge.  The cosmos becomes a home. 

So it is for us who follow the way of Jesus Christ.  In our second lesson St Paul elaborates on the Old Testament story of Moses asking to see God's glory.  He concludes that precisely this is the gift of the Spirit as with unveiled faces we not only see the glory of the Lord but are ‘being transformed into his image from one degree of glory to another'.  ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom'; that is to say, this new way of seeing and of being means an end of all that oppresses and confines us, all that diminishes life and imprisons possibilities.  ‘Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God' he says, and it is boundless for God's grace abounds without end.  It's of a piece with the huge spaces which today's psalm sweeps across as it tries to do justice to God's hesed, his loving kindness: ‘thy mercy, O Lord, reacheth unto the heavens: and thy faithfulness unto the clouds.  They righteousness standeth like the strong mountains; thy judgments are like the great deep.'  There are the sources of true confidence. 

Pentecost opens up a vision of the broad, generous spaces we might inhabit as the Spirit makes a home among us.  The traditional images of the Spirit all imply space: without it fire goes out, water stops flowing, wind ceases to blow.  But as the Spirit prompts and propels us into inhabiting our salvation, occupying the space God gives us to grow in, are there any limits to what we could become in his service?  A church poised for mission in the world, like the first Christians in the Book of Acts.  Each of us transformed and renewed from within, galvanised by new reasons for living.  Our society and our world freed from all that holds it in thrall to chaos and death, and embracing the release and hope it longs for.  Rilke was right: ‘we must accept our experience as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.'  Pentecost is our portal to a vast and unprecedented experience of God-given life.  And this large, generous, wonderful room is now our home.