Here I am, resurfacing only when posting a sermon! Preaching at Mattins is an interesting experience - quite different to the Eucharist, where the main point of the service is still to come; here it's hard not to feel like it's a bit of an appendix. But it was very good to have a chance to come at Pentecost from a different angle, wonderful though the Eucharist's readings about the first gift of the Spirit are.
In other news, I have survived the academic bit of my first year at theological college (though there's still two weeks of term left). Much contemplation to be done...
The readings were: Genesis 11: 1-9 (the Tower of Babel) and Acts 10: 43- end (Peter preaching to Cornelius and the gentile believers at Caeserea).
When I think about the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church, which we celebrate today, then I tend to only think about the famous story in Acts of how, at the Jewish celebration of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to the disciples in the upper room, and they were able to preach to the crowd, who understood them in their own language; that’s the reading we will hear this evening at the Eucharist. But the readings we heard this morning give us a slightly different focus, and remind us that our celebration of Pentecost is not just about a one-off event, but about the life of the church as a whole – but also about more than that, for today’s reading from Acts shows us God at work in the world outside the institutions of the church, and, sometimes, challenging our own easy assumptions about where God can be found.
The passage we read from Acts is part of a longer story, and we can’t really understand its full significance without putting it in that context. Peter is preaching to a group of gentiles who are lead by a centurion called Cornelius, described as ‘God-fearing’ and as being well thought of by the Jewish population. ‘God-fearing’ here is a technical term; they were gentiles who had been impressed by the Jewish religion, and who believed in much or all of its teaching, but did not convert for one reason or another - not wanting to be circumcised seems to have often played a role, as did the implications which observing Jewish food laws had for your relations to the rest of society. Before the passage we read begins, Peter has just had two unexpected experiences; in the first, he sees a vision of number of ‘unclean’ birds and animals, and is told to kill and eat. At first he refuses, but a voice tells him ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ Then, on waking, he meets messengers from Cornelius, who tell him that an angel told Cornelius to send for him, and Peter feels the Spirit prompting him to go with them.
So this is the context in which Peter begins his impromptu sermon by declaring “‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.” Peter has learned from his vision of the ‘unclean’ animals that, whatever markers we might set up to determine who we think are acceptable to God, God sees beyond that. The ‘unclean’ animals of the vision map on to Cornelius and his gentile friends. We know from elsewhere in the New Testament that the question of whether gentile converts to faith in Christ had to become Jews and receive circumcision and obey the dietary rules became a big issue for the fledgling church. And you can see, I think, why there was a debate about it. I've talked about it from the gentile side, but you can see why the Jewish believers struggled with the issue too. The laws that had been given to the children of Israel were, after all, of enormous importance: they were how you lived as one of the people of God, how you lived a life pleasing to God. And if these gentiles weren’t willing to sign up to that, well, you might ask, how committed could they truly be?
The ‘God-fearers’ had become stuck in a position where they were permanently second-class religious citizens; the Jews in Caesarea may have praised Cornelius as a good man and not the oppressive kind of Roman, but I imagine that the praise had a fairly large proportion of condescension in it. He was a good man – for a gentile. But he wasn’t one of the chosen people.
But God sees things differently, as the vision has just forced Peter to realize. God shows no partiality; God loves Cornelius and his fellow God-fearers just as much as he loves Peter and his fellow members of the church, and as Peter speaks to them, much to everyone’s surprise, the Spirit of God ‘falls’ on them, drawing them into the ‘inside circle’ and making it plain that, whatever anyone else thinks, God wants them to be part of the body of Christ.
The focus of the story, then, isn’t really about the ‘speaking in tongues’, or rather, the ‘speaking in tongues’ is only important because it demonstrates what’s going on. It is significant that it is demonstrated in that way, though. In the reading from the Old Testament, the loss of a universal human language, and hence the division of humanity into warring nations, is portrayed as a punishment for human ambition and a limitation on it. Humans, the story seems to say, are so flawed and wicked that they can’t be trusted with the gifts that God originally gave them. But the gift of tongues at Pentecost shows that the redeeming work of God seen in Christ’s birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension, and continued in the work of the Spirit, does something fundamental to human nature. In that gift, the curse of Babel is reversed; the barriers of language and nationality and race fall away, and all become one in Christ.
Well, you might say, that’s all very well, but what has it to say to us? If you look at the church today, you can’t help but be conscious of its divisions, the barriers which we set up between each other, the lines we draw. I don't just mean the boundaries between denominations, but the divisions within them too. And then there are the people we consider, for whatever reason, to be ‘not good’ enough to be part of God’s kingdom, even if we try to avoid using such crude language, even in our own heads. Maybe it's just me. But I know, if I honestly examine myself, that I’ve got lots of categories in the back of my head of people and viewpoints that I find unacceptable, and if I’m not careful, I find myself not only drawing red lines that shut people out, but also assuming that God draws the same sort of lines in the same sort of places.
In one sense, it doesn’t matter why we start assuming that someone’s views or actions make them unacceptable, whether we’re damning them for being a liberal or a fundamentalist, socialist or Tory, catholic or protestant. When we start assuming that God can only work redemptively in the right kind of people, the categories we approve of, we’ve got things wrong.
I’m certainly not arguing that it doesn’t matter what we believe or what we do; I’m not arguing that God doesn’t call us all to lead new lives that are more in tune with the kingdom of God, which means that all of us will have to change our attitudes and our actions somehow, and some people more than others. I’m not even arguing that we should never debate and even fight about things in the church, because otherwise there could be no challenge when the church as an institution is complicit in injustice, we could never recognise when we’ve gone astray. Sometimes that challenge and conflict can be part of the work of the Spirit.
But what Pentecost calls on us to realize is that there are now no boundaries to where God can work. We can’t assume that the Spirit is only given to people we approve of or would recognise as ‘people like us’.
God is at work outside the lines we draw, and outside the church, too. And we, like Peter, are challenged to discern where God is at work, and join in.
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