NewCreation

Homily for Pentecost Sunday, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the Sunday of Pentecost, the great feast in which we celebrate the coming amongst us of the Holy Spirit. The readings we're given for today are the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which show the scene of Pentecost as experienced by the disciples in the Upper Room, with all the references and allusions that that conjures up. A reading from Galatians on the difference between being run by the Spirit and being run by the flesh, or as some translate it, by self-indulgence. Neither of those is a good translation really, but never mind. And then the Gospel reading, where we have the choice today between either John's version of Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit into the disciples, or the one which I've chosen — just because it's one I haven't commented on recently for you — which is the promise of the sending of the Advocate. And we'll look at a little bit of what that means. First of all, I want to stand back a little and think of something just of the feast in itself. We're inclined to think of the Holy Spirit as being something that is sent. You know, God the Father did something and then Jesus did something, and they, between them somehow, sent the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit then gets to be, if you like, a third thing, something sent. And I want us to stand back just a moment from that and say: no, there is something about the sending of the Holy Spirit which makes the word "send" very inappropriate, because we are talking not about a messenger — we're talking about God. We're talking about the protagonism that is God, the one who sends us, the sender. If you like, when Jesus talks to the disciples in the Upper Room in John's Gospel, he says: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you," and then he breathes the Holy Spirit upon them. The breathing of the Holy Spirit is the sending. There is all the dynamism and protagonism of God. God is the starter, the initiator, the beginner of all this. We are all secondary in the light of the Holy Spirit, when we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that we become the captors, as it were, of this particular nice gift, the gilded cages in which this wonderful bird sings. No, it means that we start to be taken over by the creative Spirit of God. In other words, we become sent. I want to bring that out because it helps us understand something of the amazement and the excitement and the oddness of what's going on in the Pentecost reading from the Acts of the Apostles, which is that Jesus had told them that something was going to happen. He told them about power coming from on high. He told them about the promise of his Father. And yet what came was a form of protagonism, a form of initiative that was vastly outside and beyond anything they could possibly have come up with. It was enormously more powerful. It was not only turning them into the beginnings of the new Temple – which meant the sign of the coming in of the new creation, because the whole point of the Temple was that it would be a sign of the Creator completing creation. The whole point of the Rite of Atonement was that it helped inaugurate the new creation. All of this – the sign of the coming in of the Creator, the complete undoing from within of everything that had screwed up human togetherness by the undoing of Babel, the unconfusing of tongues. Babel just means confusion. Here in the Gospel text and the text from Acts, where it says they came together and were bewildered – actually, it says they came together and were confused – this is Luke's pun. This is the undoing of the confusion of Babel, and they're discovering the non-unitary, the wonderful diversity orchestrated together of language, in which each of us from within our mother tongue can learn how to speak the truth, and how God can in fact speak the truth through us and speak us into being from every nation, culture, tribe, without any over-against. This is a huge initiative by God that's gone on: the undoing of a falsely entrapped creation, and it's being opened up into the fullness of creation. So that's something, dare I say, that we usually forget. We usually talk about the Holy Spirit as though it were something somewhat less than God, a kind of tame version of God. And what I want to say is: no, it's us being introduced onto the inside of the life of God as humans. In other words, God having agreed to be God's self at human level for us – that's what Jesus had achieved. That's why Jesus is so keen that we understand that the only access to the Father is him. Everything that is in the Father he is bringing to us, and everything that he is bringing to us is now available to us at the Spirit level, on our level, sideways, horizontally. That God, the dwelling place of God, is with humans. This is now not simply God sitting amongst us prettily, but God actually taking us over, if we'll allow ourselves to be taken over. "Moved without being displaced" is the term which I like to use, because God is not in rivalry with us. So God can move us without displacing us. Any other form of spirit, any other form of way of being together, we usually move each other by displacing each other. That's the world of rivalry, that's the world of flesh and self-indulgence, where it's actually discovering ourselves moved without being displaced. In other words, actually being created, becoming more through our being moved. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. That's the work of the initiator who is the creator, the spirit that hovered over the world at the beginning has come into the midst as now working amongst us at our level. Then there's this word "advocate" that I want to look at. Παράκλητος – defense counsel, the one who is alongside us on our behalf. That's what a defence counsel is: the one who stands alongside you on your behalf. And it's interesting that Jesus talks about sending us the advocate. And the advocate is not simply someone who is going to play second fiddle to us in our defence. The advocate is the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father. In other words, there is something here – excuse me, a bit of dog hair in my eye – there is something here about the reality of creation being opened up for us by one standing alongside us. The truth from the Father, who brought everything into being, is enabling us sideways to work through and discover what really is, and who is aware that we live in a world in which coming into the truth will look like blasphemy to holders of sacred order of different sorts. Which is why in one of the verses which actually comes immediately after the first verses of our Gospel reading – which the Church cuts out, so as not to make the Gospel reading too long – it says: "I told this to you so that you wouldn't be scandalized, because you will soon be thrown out of synagogues," any equivalent religious meetings, "because anyone thinks they will be serving God by killing." In other words, because I'm undoing the sacrificial mechanism from within, undoing the mechanism by which people make themselves good through sacrifice, you will find yourselves running the risk of being sacrificed. And you shouldn't be scandalized by this. This is how you will be led into all truth: by learning to bear witness to me, by living as I did, by understanding that that's how it was from the beginning. This is not just the beginning of the time I, Jesus, spent with you, the disciples – in other words, from the time when I met a couple of you by the Sea of Galilee and took several more of you to the wedding at Cana in Galilee. But what you have noticed by being with me is that you have been in the presence of the one who was at the beginning, meaning the beginning of all things, creation. That is what is being brought into being. And the Spirit is actually going to open out truthfulness. You're going to find yourselves being able to be witnesses to that, being witnesses to what I've been doing, undoing the world of sacrifice from within, even though that will often be painful and you run the risk of being scandalized by it. But this is in fact a friendly thing. It is because the reality of creation is friendly to you, is good, is real, is on your side. that the Father actually loves me into loving you, into doing this for you so that you can discover what a good thing it is to be alive on the inside of all this, to be bringing alive the truth, not to be despaired by how overwhelming the truth about all the awfulness is, but actually discovering: no, the truth of creation is that it is good for us and that we are called into becoming resplendent with it, alive with it. That ones who received him gave them power to become children of God, sons and daughters of God. That's what all this is about. So the advocate is the defence counsellor, the one who is going to enable us to resist being run down by the accusations, by the sense of having done something contaminating, something sacrilegious, by telling the truth, run the risk of becoming whistleblowers – all the things that enable what really is to become clear, so that we as humans can learn to take greater and greater responsibility for it, because all this has been put into our hands, so that what we forgive is forgiven and what we retain is retained. No other outside God is going to sort this out for us. Now God has come to work at the level of our desire, to turn us into the witnesses and signs of God. There are some rather beautiful parallels, as always in John's Gospel. One of the reasons he's so difficult to understand is because he gives very subtle quotes of himself. So earlier in John 15, he said something which is not in today's Gospel but which we had a few days ago: "I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father." Everything I have made known in your society – I've opened up knowledge to you, I've opened up the knowledge of what really is for you. "Everything that I have heard from my Father." And then today, just a little later on, which does come in today's Gospel: "He will not speak on his own" – the Spirit who's coming upon you, it's going to be the same initiative as mine, which is the same initiative as the Father's – "but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you." So I have spoken to you what I have heard, what I made known to you I've made known to what I've heard; he will speak whatever he hears and he will declare to you the angelē. So what we're getting is, if you like, the continuation of Jesus making things known to us through the Spirit, which is bearing the whole of Jesus's life and death, keeping that whole dynamic alive for us to share in and live in. And that this is what is being made available to us as something friendly, just as a master doesn't tell friends what it's about but friends share what they've heard and share what is true about what they've heard, so as to open up For other friends. That's what this talk of hearing means: that this gift of the Spirit, all the power and glory of God coming at the level of us, is a friendly gift, opening up the reality of creation, of everything that is, as something profoundly friendly to us. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.