Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne
Acts 2.1-21; John 20.19-23
“…your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams…”
An old friend of mine back in Belfast, who died some years ago, had a girlfriend in the 1950s, when he was young. She was his first serious love, until she dumped him – for an Englishman! – a schoolmaster, who taught overseas in schools for British expatriates. She soon married the schoolmaster and accompanied him to his next job, in Lisbon.
Despite being jilted, my friend remained good platonic friends with his ex, and they corresponded for some years. To keep her in touch with her home town, my pal sent her copies of the Belfast Telegraph. Portugal had by then been under the grip of an authoritarian dictatorship for a quarter of a century, the Estado Novo of António Salazar. While it avoided the worst aspects of fascism and certainly couldn’t be compared with Nazism, it was hostile to free expression, and its secret police, experts in the use of psychological torture, suppressed anything and anyone that smacked of liberalism, socialism, or secularism.
Now, the 1950s Belfast Telegraph, the paper of the Ulster Unionist establishment, wasn’t exactly a well of liberalism, socialism, secularism, or any other form of racy radicalism. Still, my friend’s ex-girlfriend would receive her copies of the Belfast Telegraph with many holes cut in them, stories Salazar’s secret police would rather the Portuguese didn’t know about.
By the 1970s, Portugal was caught up in a quartet of bloody end-of-empire wars in Africa and its main export was its people, yet the Estado Novo continued, seemingly secure, just like Franco in next-door Spain. Then one April night in 1974, a group of army officers, fed up with sending young men die in unwinnable and cruel wars, launched a coup. The radio told people to stay at home, but instead they came out onto the streets to celebrate with the soldiers, pushing carnations into the barrels of their guns. The Estado Novo fell without a shot. Portugal then had a bumpy spell of brawls and even riots between socialists and conservatives, but eventually left-leaning and right-leaning parties found enough common ground to manage a transition to a free democracy, and eventually to prosperity. And nobody saw it coming – not the experts and not anyone else.
We never really know what is around the corner. I could have told a similar story about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Less positively, we could all share recollections of the way that coronavirus crept into our news bulletins and then crashed into our lives in the first months of 2020. But there are always plenty of people telling us to worry about the ways our lives and the state of the world might change for the worse. We sometimes forget that things do often get better, in dramatic ways that nobody predicted, often when things seem to be at their darkest.
Pentecost is the feast of things getting better in dramatic and unforeseen ways. Pentecost is a story about two things – about the Church, and about God.
At most a few dozen gathered in the upper room in Jerusalem were the entire Christian world when the Holy Spirit came and gave birth to the Church. While their faith was real – they had just elected Matthias as the replacement for Judas among the apostles – that faith was for the moment outweighed by fear. In a world of mighty empires, enormous temples, and powerful men willing to kill to protect their positions, they must have felt utterly inadequate. How could a dozen Galilean fishermen and petty bureaucrats, and a handful of women, change the world? Yet here we are this morning, more than two thousand years later, more than two thousand miles away, commemorating the moment when they became the Church.
Immediately, they turned from fear to confidence, through the action of God the Holy Spirit – the wildest and, at least on the surface, least human person of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Spirit is love, the love that flows between the Father and the Son, love as a person in its own right, and love as God. The Holy Spirit is also flame, and wind, and noise, and advocate, and teacher, and guide: and convictor of sin. Yes, the Holy Spirit is often the inflamer of our conscience, the nag that tells us that we are living on the backs of others, or abusing the gifts God has given us. That, too, is love – the love that loves us enough to challenge us when we wallow in the mire of doing things we hate. The Holy Spirit is the love that calls us to repent from sin.
‘Repent’ has negative associations for some of us – but it simply means to turn around; to stop doing bad things and do good things instead. Turning your life around is the journey of a lifetime – a process, not an event, and one that will keep us all occupied until our dying day.
If that sounds depressing, remember that this should be a process that makes us more at ease with ourselves, giving us a life that is happier and richer in all the ways that matter.
And when we confess our sins and repent, we receive God’s forgiveness. We expect some sort of debt to be worked off, but startling as it seems, God’s forgiveness is free, available any time we wish to ask for it with a genuine spirit of trying to change for the better. And it is our duty to share that forgiveness with others.
When Jesus gives the disciples the Holy Spirit in our Gospel reading, he gives them this awesome charge, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Just as we are forgiven our sins by God, we are called to forgive sins in His name. The power to retain sins is, frankly, frightening – at times I’ve been tempted to exercise it, against people who seemed happy to have done me wrong. But I recoiled – I think rightly – not least because I wish to be judged mercifully.
But also because nobody is excluded from the possibility of God’s forgiveness. At the end of his great speech – the first sermon in the history of the Church – St Peter said, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord is saved.” Everyone – no exceptions. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, left or right, gay or straight, rich or poor – the Father wishes to receive you back into His arms and the Holy Spirit is always seeking to drive you towards that. It doesn’t even matter if you are my enemy. God can forgive what is beyond my capacity and yours to forgive. One of the reasons why the Church matters is that it should be a community where people support each other in the task of forgiving, especially when it hurts or seems impossible.
The Holy Spirit is God, and God frequently does what seems impossible to us – be it reconciliation with those you have long found impossible to forgive, or a peaceful revolution out of the blue. The Holy Spirit is always working to make the Father’s kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven. So don’t stop dreaming that things will get better, in your life and in this terribly troubled world. As the poet Seamus Heaney wrote:
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
The movement of God the Holy Spirit that started on Pentecost will keep going until it delivers us to that further shore. Pray that it may move us as powerfully as it did St Peter on the day the Church was born.
And now praise, glory, and honour be to the God who is love, and the God who is fire, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
