Acts 2:1-21; John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15
Come Holy Spirit, kindle our hearts with the fire of your love.
Such is our prayer on this Day of Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit of Jesus. We make that prayer with our hearts rooted in our Easter experience, of suffering and glory, work of Jesus.
Fifty days have passed since many of us gathered here in this Cathedral, in the cloisters, in the dark before dawn, to kindle the pascal fire, lift high the Paschal candle with cries of the Light of Christ & Alleluia, welcoming as our own story the discovery that the crucified Jesus has risen from the dead and dies no more. In the darkness of that third day, beyond the sight of human eyes, without the need for our help, that act of new creation we call resurrection, called forth though the might act of Father by the Holy Spirit. Beyond hope, beyond reason, love overcomes deaths, suffering is enfolded in life. Women tell the disciples to go home to Galilee where it all began to meet with the Risen Lord, to begin again. Remember.
Come Holy Spirit, kindle our hearts with the fire of your love.
Our prayer today also calls us also to have our hearts rooted in our Ascension experience, that Thursday festival that is the most overlooked yet we cannot come to Pentecost without Ascension. The Risen Jesus, exalted to the right hand of the Father, opening the way to the Father, interceding, Lord, still marked by scars of thorns and nails and spear yet Lord, suffering and glory held in God.
This is what Stephen before the Sanhedrin in Acts 7 sees heaven opened and sees ‘the glory of God and Jesus – Jesus at the right hand of God’ – and he cries out what he sees and it costs him his life. He sees the truth that sustains the early Church, that should sustain us in our own times and struggles. Jesus who the Father, ‘has put all things under his feet and has made him head over all the church’.
When we look up in prayer this is what we should imagine. Angela Tilby writing in the Church Times many years ago wrote, ‘the ascension is a cosmic gospel, a gospel to be preached in heaven and on earth and under the earth; a gospel addressed to the powers, whether benign or evil. It is the ultimate assurance of the triumph of the good and the ultimate challenge to the foolishness and violence that threaten our world. It can help us look on the barbarism of our age without being overwhelmed by despair’.
The Ascension is the act of the Father by the Spirit, beyond our imagination, and is pure gift to us. Jesus says, ‘It is to your advantage I go away, for if I do not go away the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you…He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason, I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you’. What a promise, revealing to us the heart purposes God, drawn into heart life Trinity.
Come Holy Spirit, kindle in us the fire of your love.
More waiting - after ten days waiting with the disciples, waiting for the power from on high, waiting for the promised Spirit, making this story our story. The coming of the Spirit in Acts is wild, fire and wind; it is the appearance of God on Mt Sinai – fire that cannot be quenched and wind that blows where it choses, that cannot be controlled. The mighty power that the Father put to work in raising Jesus from the dead now dwelling, filling, coursing through ‘all flesh’, ordinary men and women, witnesses to the salvation, life found only in Jesus, dreaming dreams, living hope, the Lord the Giver of life gift beyond measure, has come, is come, will come. Could I, could we, bear such wildness, such intimacy in our careful lives and plans and church?
Willie James Jennings’ book on Acts calls Pentecost, ‘the revolution of the intimate’ – ‘this is God touching, taking hold of tongue and voice, mind and heart and body’. This is joining, unprecedented, unanticipated, unwanted, yet complete joining.’ ‘untamed grace’ – Joining, Easter, Ascension , enable joining lives, our lives with God’s life, intimacy as Mary experienced in Incarnation, sang out in the Magnificat, the joining Jesus experienced in in voice and dove after baptism, our lives joined to each other as new family, the joining Paul would write of in image Body Christ – joining so radical, ‘no longer Jew Greek, slave free, male female’. In whatever divisions time are, ‘for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’, joining where each ‘in our own language, mother tongue, we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power’.
This is how God sees us and sees the Church, this is the gift given today, every baptism, every confirmation, every prayer for the Spirit. We so struggle, caught up in our divisions, our struggles, our feelings of scarcity. Yet Pentecost is when we look up and remember and see who we are once again and how gifted we are.
Come Holy Spirit kindle in us the fire of your love asks that that cosmic gospel of Christ, coming kingdom, cost Stephen and countless others their lives, may be experienced in our ordinary lives and live, lived through the suffering and struggle, joined radically with people who not like us, may not want to be joined with us, witnesses for others.
So this is the gift offered today. Pray afresh for the gift of the Holy Spirit, for this Cathedral community, Diocese and the Spirit who knows us will know whether to come in simplicity and gentleness, or power and untamedness. Do not be afraid, but where the Spirit is there is freedom and life. Amen.
Rt Revd Sarah Clark
19 May 2024