Location: Oasis Academy Mediacityuk, Salford Date/time: 9/11/19: 10am – 4pm Price: £25 (inc refreshments and lunch) Booking is open now via Eventbrite: h<ps://bonhoeffer-salford.eventbrite.co.uk Pentecost Sunday, in one sense where the Christian story starts, needs reclaiming from those who, in my opinion, place too much emphasis on the individual’s so-called ‘spiritual’ experience. I was at a ‘Free to Believe’ Conference at Swanwick last year. If you don’t already know about this liberal and exploratory network, its website is freetobelieve.org.uk. In another room, by a considerable contrast, some church group I’d never heard of was endlessly praying and singing in tongues etc. The children present looked positively frightened. It went on for hours. Is that what a healthy Christian life lived in the Spirit of God looks like? Not the meaning of today for me.
Luke’s version of how the Spirit came is only one of the accounts of how the first followers of Jesus were empowered to share what they believed about him. (See for example John 20:22 and the additional ending to Mark 16). We are used to the regular liturgical pattern but Luke’s is not the only version of events. Every account of the life, death, teaching and resurrection of Jesus is a version ‘according to’ someone, or some community, not the version.
Pentecost was a Jewish celebration day Shavuot, a 24 hour vigil 50 days after Passover, celebrating the giving of the Law to Moses.
According to Luke, Jews from all over the known world, well, some of them, were gathered in Jerusalem. It’s a multi-national jamboree. This is the setting in which this writer chooses to launch his story of the early church, though it seems, like other NT writers, he thought that these were the ‘last days’ as well as the first.
And what is the event he describes? Nothing to do with ecstatic utterances or semi-trance-like states, (neither of which are uniquely Christian experiences anyway), but the words of Peter heard ‘in our own language’. Actual spoken languages like French or German. What is Luke saying? This Spirit is for every nation; it transcends all human boundaries and cultures.
He has Peter quote the prophet Joel: In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. (Joel 2:28) Unfortunately, Luke then seems to suggest that only the disciples actually had this experience, which rather misses his own point!
But in contrast to the way John also has Jesus talking about the ‘Comforter or Counsellor’ for the believers only in 14:15 and 26, this offer of the Spirit is for ‘all flesh’. Ps. 104:31: ‘You send forth your Spirit,…and so you renew the face of the earth’.
Presumably this includes everyone, or is this gift only for the Jews and now the followers of Jesus? To claim so suggests that we are in control of it, not that it is freely offered to all. The ‘spiritual’ dimension to life means transformation for the whole world. This experience puts right what the ancient story of Babel in Genesis 11 had outlined as the problem with humanity. We just don’t talk to, or listen to, each other. It’s a dialogue of the deaf most of the time. The Jews had forgotten that they were supposed to be a ‘light to the nations’, not a self-saving sect. Jesus’ Way offers a different dimension, not just another exclusive group who think that they alone have all the answers.
Why were there so many barriers between people? Why are there still? In these stories language acts as a symbol for division and confusion. When you can't understand what people are saying, and they can't understand you, our ability to co-operate and respect each other is undermined. The coming of the Spirit in the way that Luke describes it challenges all our prejudices about seemingly unavoidable distinctions of race and nationhood, and, in modern contexts, religion, gender, class, culture, etc. The Spirit unites; it does not divide. Surely this means that Christians must challenge those who try to put the barriers back again by calling for more emphasis on ourselves, our own nation or religion first, people like us? There is no 'us' and 'them' anymore. Just one common humanity, where each person is equally important.
We have to speak in a twenty-first century language about all this; one that fits with what people know to be true in the rest of their lives.
Which brings us to a very fundamental underlying issue. How do we conceive of ‘God’ who does this renewing and creative thing among us? Just saying that ‘He’ is ‘up there’ being God all day makes absolutely no sense. ‘He’ is not. It’s a big question but one that is rarely asked, just assumed. If we can’t find a vocabulary that works in the modern world no-one will take any notice.
Why should they? So much of what the Church says sounds so exclusive, not inclusive. An experience for us 'in here'; not a transformation of life 'out there'. 'God' is found when we encounter our deepest selves, not as an 'Other'. We may even say, as the NT writers did, that 'God is Love' and leave it at that, to express the significance of that inherently human value. Jesus used the term 'Father', as we may do, but that is also a metaphor, not a statement about biology or reproduction, couched in language that made sense at the time. A comparison, if a rather patriarchal one, from our own experience. 'Like a father', (or indeed a mother).
So what then is this ‘Holy Spirit’ that sustains the world, including, but not only, those who walk in the Way of Jesus? ‘The Holy Spirit’ implies so much that is not here in this story. I prefer to use the phrase, ‘a spirit of holiness’ to describe how human beings can relate to this idea of an empowering life that moves within us, as it did in Jesus. We need a range of images and comparisons to express this sense of an enabling and restoring Spirit; wind, fire, energy, breath.
They are there in both the Old and the New Testaments if you look for them.
The ruach (feminine in Hebrew: see Sofia 120) breathes through all creation and is the expression of what cannot be known. As the prophet says, this spirit is universal; it blows wherever it wills. It cannot be contained in creeds, doctrines, liturgies or sermons! Its source cannot be given a name that defines or describes it. YHWH was intended to be unpronounceable.
It sustains all that we seek to be. It stimulates our hopes and dreams; it gives us a vision of how things could be, not a judgemental despair at how things are. It gives us an ability to read the signs of the times and make prophetic statements that help to bring about positive change.
Wherever good is done, prejudices overcome, relationships healed, barriers broken down; there a spirit of holiness can be found. It is as if we are in tune with the underlying rhythm of the Universe; its breath lives in our breath. The temporal echoes the eternal. We are brought closer to the more excellent ways of love, peace and both a personal and communal fulfilment as this spirit of holiness fills the gaps between us.
It’s another way of carrying on with Jesus’ call to seek the ‘kingdom’ in everyday life. This Spirit is alive in us so we had better get on with it!
Ben Whitney's reflections are online at ben-whitney.org.uk