The Day of Pentecost 2007

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

Today we remember twelve men spilling out onto a Jerusalem street at nine in the morning, twelve men babbling aloud in twelve different tongues, twelve men praising God, telling of his mighty deeds, and causing such a disturbance that they were thought to be drunk. They were not born leaders, natural orators or seekers after fame– indeed in the weeks preceding this emergence onto the public stage they had been conspicuous by their absence, locked away, at prayer in an upstairs room.

Jesus had promised that his disciples would not be left lonely and helpless, but that they would receive a further gift, a baptism with something he called the Advocate, or Holy Spirit. We can perhaps enter the disciples’ world sufficiently to imagine their anxious waiting for this unknown and unknowable gift, and their nagging fear that before its arrival there might be more betrayals and further arrests: small wonder that they clung to one another and to the security of that upper room.

That changed on the day of Pentecost. Their anxiety was transformed into joy; their fear into confident hope; and they left behind them the introspection and self-absorption of their first-floor hideaway and went out with their heads held high to embrace the cut-and-thrust of engagement with the city’s streets.

In a lot of places this day that marks their transformation is celebrated as the birthday of the Church, the day when God acted with power to galvanize the men of Galilee, our ancestors and forebears in faith, and make of them a body capable, ultimately, of turning the world on its head. Before Pentecost they were anxious, fearful, and introspective: after it they were joyful, confident, and engaged.

Anxious, fearful, and introspective; or joyful, confident, and engaged: after two thousand years of history I wonder which adjectives best describe the Church, our Church, built on those Pentecost foundations and heir of that Pentecost tradition. I wonder which adjectives best describe our parish; and which best describe each baptized person, each latter-day disciple of Christ here this morning. Are we anxious, fearful, and introspective; or joyful, confident, and engaged?

Let me suggest that joyful churches; joyful disciples of Christ - hold before them continually what it is that God has done for them; their every prayer is a thanksgiving and their every moment is lived in hope and trust. They are as different and as irresistibly attractive as were the twelve that early morning. Yet Swinburne’s lines still resonate and bear witness to a locked-away, upper-room Church, to religious faith as something dutiful and joyless, without colour, passion or meaning. In his Hymn to Proserpine, he famously writes:

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

We too often make our faith the very opposite of joyful: we experience it as dull and life-denying, and in some quarters the modern critique of it as unthinking, intolerant and divisive would be justified.

Let me suggest that confident churches, confident disciples of Christ are happy to live with doubts and questions, sure of the God who has loved them and the whole of creation into being and will love them beyond the grave. There is no shortage of arrogant churches and arrogant Christians, but they are a quite different matter. Many will tell you in no uncertain terms what the true faith is: what are its rules; what Jesus actually meant; what God is really like. And there is no shortage of conditionally confident Christians, frightened souls who spend their lives trying desperately to please a God who they confuse with some half-remembered authority figure from home or school, believing that he will love them if they are good. But there aren’t many who exhibit a real confidence in God’s mercy and his justice, a confidence that might be described as serenity.

And let me suggest that engaged churches, engaged Christians throw themselves into the life and discourse of the communities in which they belong, never retreating from them, never seeing these walls as a refuge from their tainted and polluting air. In common parlance ‘they have a life’, and they certainly aren’t churchy. Their buildings are centres of community and their members are school governors, JPs, local councillors, charity shop volunteers. They don’t judge their contact with those outside the doors only by their strike-rate in getting them in through those doors; instead they seek to serve and, in serving, to transform.

The popular perception of our Church and of many of its members as we approach the middle of 2007 makes it look like the fledgling church of the days before Pentecost: locked away behind closed doors, perpetually anxious about its very existence; fearful that its faith will be diluted by the culture in which it is set; and preoccupied with notions of success that ought to be foreign to it.

I began with WB Yeats, who tells of the fiddler of Dooney, whose playing, in lines that I love, makes folk dance like a wave of the sea. He writes also of his worthy relatives, the priests, whose heads are stuck in their books. There are no prizes for guessing which of the three would have felt most at home in Jerusalem on the morning of Pentecost. The pious brother and cousin would have retreated to the upper room with their prayer books. But the fiddler would have clambered onto a soapbox, played his heart out and made that crowd dance as they had never danced before, glowing with the sheer joy and exaltation of the moment.

Will are we going to do - climb the stair and lock the door - or follow Peter and the others out into the streets, to join the everlasting dance?

Amen.