Pentecost sermon |
“Send forth thy Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth”
Congratulations on your 150th Pentecost after your consecration in 1859 and for celebrating in the proper style by building works - for the church must be always building.
Never was Britain a more overtly religious country than in 1859. It was of course also the year of the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Contemporaries might soon be agonising about the receding tide of the sea of faith on Dover beach. But we marvel at the flood of energy and the building spate which created a symbolic landscape in London in which the Christian faith in its many varieties was unignorable. Even railway termini were built in tune with the premier ecclesiastical styles of the times.
Probably too many churches were built. This was the view of Tait, the Bishop of London who consecrated your church. Tait’s predecessor Bishop Blomfield consecrated 198. Tait thought that church extension as an exclusive strategy was deficient, nevertheless he was still at work opening new ones. Arthur Burns the Professor of History at Kings in a remarkable recent lecture [in connection with the Diocese of London’s new history project in alliance with the Arts and Humanities Council] challenged the notion that counting church attendance was an adequate way of estimating the success of the church building strategy. He took arguably over-churched Bethnal Green as his example and was able to offer abundant evidence that even if the churches were not full by the late nineteenth century, Bethnal Green was transformed as a community at least partly through the agency of the church.
Such anniversaries prompt thoughts about what the nature of the church and what it might be for; the way we have come and what we are being called to now.
You have had heroic and devoted Vicars and worshippers here over the past 150 years, one of the best addressed you on Thursday but all were called to serve particular times and seasons of greater and less obvious challenge.
The 50 years after 1859 were the years of triumph and growth. The Catholic movement alarmed other parts of the church by its confidence and its zealous church planting. Parish after parish adopted the fashionable Catholic style of worship. It is perhaps deeply symbolic that you have decided to restore All Saints in conformity with the 1896 decorative scheme.
The next 50 years were the years of trial. The experience of the first world war in particular and the advent of a more populist media reduced the prominence of the church in social and cultural life – so much so that history written in this period largely edited out the huge significance of the church in previous centuries.
Then the most recent 50 years – the turbid years; a farewell to Churchill’s Britain in the social revolution of the sixties while in the church confusion and introversion reigned – fidgeting about liturgy and much ado about ministry. It is also symbolic that you have chosen to expunge the decorative scheme of 1958 in your restoration works.
At this season of Pentecost you have seen fifty years of triumph; trial; and then the turbid time.
What comes next as we assemble as they did on the D Day of Pentecost – all together in one place.
Pentecost - the fiftieth day in the Jewish Kalendar after Exodus when the Law was given to Moses on the Holy Mountain. Now on the fiftieth day after the resurrection “a wind filled the house where they were sitting”. Tongues of fire rested upon each one of them. They were filled with the Holy Spirit and the primeval tragedy of Babel was reversed and they began to speak in ways that the whole human race could understand as they proclaimed the megaleia, “the great things” of God.
The calling of human beings is to be inhabited by God. My deepest me is God. If the next fifty years is to be a period in which the church makes a contribution to building something new in this fragmented world, this world which “groans and travails in pain until now”, building something more Christ-like which reverses Babel, then this is where we start – awakened by the Holy Spirit to the mystery of being here at this time and in this place.
So start with ourselves. But the Holy Spirit is not given so that we may enjoy blissful interior states and spiritual highs as we pursue the higher selfishness, the church is called together to be always building, the business is not finished. The Holy Spirit is poured out to lead us into all the truth.
“When the Spirit of Truth is come he will guide you into all the truth.”
In church circles we are frequently told that we must be prophetic but the genuine article is very rare and only comes with the deep and simple prayer which dispels illusions about ourselves and give us clear sight.
I was profoundly truck with the truth of one such prophecy from a Russian priest who had experienced the horror of Stalin’s gulag. “Believers will be able to speak on the radio” he prophesied in the early 1980’s when the experts were all saying that the Soviet Union was here to stay. Then he added “but they will not know what to say.”
The Holy Spirit built the body of the risen Christ in the world and enabled those who had become members of his body to speak and to act in a way that was world transforming.
We are told continually that we must stand up and speak out. Amen to that. But there is all the difference in the world between speaking theoretical truths and communicating from the ground of the soul in a way that godly people whatever their tradition and language will recognize and experience as transforming. At the first Pentecost, some wisely said, “what does this mean?” but others, as always, scoffed and made a rude joke about their being sloshed.
Start with ourselves; tarry in the city until the power from on high is poured out; let us be all together in one place; ignore the chattering which comes from the shallow end; know and prepare for the truth that the deepest calling of human beings is to be inhabited by the Christ-like God.
This does not mean of course that we should simply devote ourselves to pious exercises. Just like the church in Acts there are widows to be visited among us and the hungry to be fed. In this wired up world our neighbours are in Sri Lanka and Dafur as well as in the Oxford Street Stores. All this is a preparation for what happens when Christ is born on the ground of our soul; we start with ourselves and then following him we take leave of ourselves and in everything that we do we are enabled to praise; to look for the megaleia of God.
This state of being able to see and praise God in all things gives birth to a world transforming eloquence when we are not so much speaking theoretical truths but we are speaking from and in the truth. Prophets before and since Christ have spoken truths only he is the Truth to whom the Spirit gives us access.
I hope that you are thinking and planning for the next fifty years, for the church must always be building but please God let none of us forget that above all this must be a place of Pentecost renewed where triumph, trial and the turbid time are succeeded by transfiguration.
