A New Language: the Revd Barry Hill's thoughts for Pentecost Sunday

If there is one point which the author Luke seems intent that the reader captures in this Pentecost account (Acts 2: 1-21), it is that the Galilean disciples, most without any formal training and certainly without far reaching linguistic skill, empowered by the Spirit of God, speak the wonders of God in a wide enough variety of languages that the many people in Jerusalem from a multitude of places all hear in their native tongue. Luke makes this point in several different ways in an attempt to underscore its significance.

What, we may ask, therefore is so significant? Miraculous, sure, but to what is it pointing? There is clearly much going on, but personally, I think the especial significance is that the first thing that happens when the Spirit of Jesus is sent to reside permanently in His disciples is that communication is redeemed. It stands in difference to communication in the early days of human life, where we read, in Genesis chapter 11, that the whole world is speaking one language and yet how is this common understanding used?  They try and build a tower – the tower of Babel – in attempt to reach heaven so that they might “make a name for themselves”. God’s punishment for this act of humans trying to usurp His power and strength was the confusion of language.

However, critically, at Pentecost God doesn’t change it back – creating a new super language known and understand by all. He doesn’t make a new thing, but makes all things new. He redeems language such that they can understand each other declaring the wonders of God in their own tongues.

I find this especially encouraging because I think one of the biggest problems in church growth today is vocabulary. In so many places we have lost a vocabulary to speak of the things of God. Often we want to be able to share our faith with others, but feel we don’t know what to say. We want to be able to reach out to all cultures, but the myriad of sub-cultures is daunting and we often feel we don’t have the vocab (in the widest sense). And yet the first thing that our God of understanding and revelation provides by His Spirit at Pentecost is a vocabulary to express the wonders of God.

We may be hesitant to speak of our faith, we may feel we don’t have a vocabulary, we may think we are not one of those extroverts for whom it seems so easy. But at Pentecost God offers us the kind of help that we cannot create in ourselves. He offers us a connection with others deeper than humankind can muster, a redeemed vocabulary. May we follow the disciples in trust and prayer (Pente (50)-cost reminds us of the 50 days of prayer and connection with the risen Christ the disciples had known before the giving of the Spirit). And, empowered and equipped by the Spirit of Jesus within us, may we take small steps in speaking more bolding of the things of God with others – not so pews, rotas or collections are fuller but so that many more may come to know the redemption, love and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Thoughts on Pentecost Sunday: gifts and fruits of the Spirit

What a splendid Pentecost Sunday! The sun shone all day, and we were pleased to welcome our preacher for the morning service, the Revd Barry Hill, Diocesan Mission Enabler, and his family to our church. Our prayers that the Holy Spirit would ensure that our service was truly memorable were answered. And in the evening, we had the musical delight of the joint choirs and their friends singing ‘Saints’ Alive!’ by Roger Jones. A truly uplifting day and thanks to all who contributed to making it so.

During the morning service we distributed the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit among members of the congregation. The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord (Isaiah 11:2). The 7 gifts are to be distinguished from the ‘fruits’ of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23: these are ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control’. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are interior qualities, the fruits of the Holy Spirit are external signs of the workings of the Spirit.

Thought from Ascension Day: a private house of prayer

I begin by recalling the Archbishop of Canterbury’s words in a sermon delivered last Ascension Day:

…today, Ascension Day, the friends of Jesus face the fact that they are going to have to get used to living in a world without Jesus – or at least, living in a world without the Jesus they have known. After those frightening and exhilarating few weeks of Easter, when – amazed and confused – they have almost got used to the possibility of meeting Jesus in unexpected faces and places, he is now saying to them, ‘It’s going to be different. Don’t expect to see me around in the old way.’ They must have felt deeply disoriented, even fearful.

…The friends of Jesus are called … to offer themselves as signs of God in the world – to live in such a way that the underlying all-pervading energy of God begins to come through them and make a difference.  If we are challenged as to where God is in the world, our answer must be to ask ourselves how we can live, pray and act so as to bring to light the energy at the heart of all things – to bring the face of Jesus to life in our faces, and to do this by turning again and again to the deep well of trust and prayer that the Spirit opens for us.

We are in a different position from the first disciples of Christ. They had got used to living with Christ personally, in an intimate and close relationship of sharing bread, prayer, and teaching. We do these things without the personal presence of Christ except in the spiritual sense: the Holy Spirit is with us, as Jesus promised, at all times. We know, as Peter’s sermon in the second chapter of Acts reminds us, that Jesus himself has been ‘exalted at the right hand of God’ (Acts 2:33). The right hand of God is the place of authority and power.

The Archbishop had begun his address with these words, which are particularly pertinent in Christian Aid week:

Plenty of people look around and say, ‘This is a world without God’. It’s a world where, moment by moment, children are dying in poverty of preventable diseases, where tyrants are planning to secure their power over suffering populations, where men and women are struggling to put their lives back together in the wake of natural disaster and where people are dying in loneliness and living in anxiety all around us. Any Christian with a shred of intelligence will surely understand why so many are driven to say, ‘Well, it feels like a world without God’ – and perhaps in secret they agree that, for quite a lot of the time, that is indeed how it feels for them too.

Reflecting this week on the place of prayer in the Church, I can see why it feels as though it may be a world without the presence of God working through the Holy Spirit. That it sometimes seems so is not just because of the role of structural poverty and evil in the world. It is also because of the weakness of our own prayer life.

Whenever I go through my own period of ‘spiritual dryness’, or difficulty in prayer, it is because I have forgotten to use that most wonderful of manuals of prayer, Leslie D. Weatherhead’s A Private House of Prayer (1958). What is so good about Weatherhead’s prayer technique is that is relatively simple, but divides up prayer into its separate aspects. If we clump these separate aspects of prayer together the result is that we will tend not to pray effectively, because these different aspects represent different things.  

Leslie Weatherhead imagines 7 rooms, each with a distinctive purpose. Do not rush through all the rooms looking for God, he tells us. He can be found in every one. The order is important. He wants to assert first the Divine Presence and realize the fact (and preferably the feeling) that there is ‘Someone there’ to pray to. All through the Bible, God asserts his presence with his people, and it is real prayer to remember the sentences which recall this to our mind. Our Lord not only promised ‘Lo I am with you always even until the end of the world’, but also the Holy Spirit ‘that He may be with you for ever’. In this first room I repeat those great words ‘with you’.

Having recognized that God is present, that there is ‘Someone really there’, in the second room we can move on to praise, thank and adore him. ‘It is a good thing’, Weatherhead encourages us, ‘to imagine this room full of morning sunshine: it is the room of thanksgiving. Each of us has something for which to praise and thank God. Indeed it is a revealing thing to write down a list of those things for which we should thank God. We should adore him for all he is in himself – and as we do so, we should call to mind his attributes and remember his love, his splendour, his power, his beauty, his wisdom, his holiness.’

Doing so makes us terribly conscious of our own unworthiness, so we turn then to forgiveness and the unburdening of our hearts. Room 3 is ‘rather dim and shadowy as we enter but brighter as we move across it to the window. It is the room of Confession, Forgiveness, and Unloading. Here we confess our sin, not just in a general way but really being honest. Most of us are sometimes jealous, malicious, unkind, proud, irritable, intolerant, impure. But God is always ready and willing to forgive us. We can move toward the window, pull up the blind, and let the streaming light of loving forgiveness and acceptance flood the room. We are loved, understood, forgiven, and accepted.’ Before we leave this room, too, we must make sure that we are ready to forgive others who may have sinned against us.

Cleansed by forgiveness we are ready now to receive from God in room 4, the room set aside for affirmation and reception. As Weatherhead puts it, ‘We are no longer to dwell on the depths to which we have fallen but on the heights to which God will lead us. God is waiting to give. Jesus put the matter in an unforgettable sentence: ‘What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.’ (Mark 11:24.) Psalm 23 is suitable furniture for this room. ‘It does not ask, “O Lord, be my Shepherd”. It affirms that he is. It does not ask for guidance. It rests in the affirmation that the soul is being guided.’

By the time we reach room 5, the place for purified desire and sincere petition, if our previous experience of the earlier rooms has been successful, then ‘we want to love more deeply both God and our fellows and promote God’s interests even more than our own. We stop saying, “Give me”, and start saying, “Make me” and “Show me” and “Use me”. This is the place where we ask for renewed trust and stronger faith and more tolerant love for those who differ from us.’

Room 6 is the room of prayer for others. ‘Some may think it odd to put intercessions for others so late’, Weatherhead observes, ‘but it is when [we] have [ourselves] got nearest to God and asked him in petition to do things for [us] and in [us] that [we] can be of maximum help to others.’ In our prayers for others it is enough ‘to say the name of the person slowly, calling him to mind in as vivid a picture as possible, and then imaginatively watching him or her emerging from his or her difficulties, being made well – if we are praying about his health – being made confident, courageous, serene, joyous, or whatever it may be.’ Avoid negative emotions such as pity or fear, which may hinder rather than help the prayer for others. ‘The conquest of grief lies not in suppressing it but in holding our minds still before the Lord (to use an old Quaker phrase) till we are filled with the realization of His Life and Power. Then, and only then, is our longing to help the other and lighten the burden made possible of fulfilment.’

The seventh and final room is imagined as a big room at the top of the house (or in a bungalow, a large room with a view of the garden), which is set aside for Meditation. ‘Here we sometimes take an incident in the Gospels and try to do what Ruskin said he did, ‘to be present as if in the body at each recorded act in the life of the Redeemer’. ‘In this way, imaginative communion with him can have – as nearly as possible – the results of being with him in Galilee. That communion is surely the strongest transforming power in the world. What it did for Peter and John, it can do for us.’

There is no one magic formula for prayer in each and every circumstance, or to meet the spiritual needs of all of us all of the time. I can only say two things in recommendation of the system advocated by Leslie Weatherhead. If you experience dryness in prayer, try it for yourselves. You will be refreshed. And when we have forgotten about it, as sooner or later we will, because our attention spans vary, then come back to it. Each time you experience it you will be renewed. Best of all, get hold a copy of his book yourself because his meditations on scriptural passages are often profound. For a reminder of God’s presence in the world, in spite of apparent evidence to the contrary, the prayer method advocated in A Private House of Prayer takes some beating. As one reader expresses it, ‘This has been my “Desert Island Discs” book for over 20 years, second only to the Bible in usage.’

Last Sunday's thought: on the distinction between believers and disciples

   ‘I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name’ (John 15:16).

         Are we just believers in Christ or are we disciples of Christ? There is an important distinction to be made between the ‘believer’ and the ‘disciple’. It is true that we would like there to be as many believers in Christ as possible. It is much preferable for there to be many genuine believers rather than just notional believers. St Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5, ‘Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creation: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new’ (2 Cor. 5:17). Or as the New Living Translation of 2007 has it, ‘The old life is gone; a new life has begun!’

         And yet Jesus makes this distinction between believers and disciples. Every disciple is a believer, we may claim. However, not every believer is a disciple. Being a disciple is something more. There is a greater maturity; there is a greater commitment; above all there is greater knowledge and with it, greater understanding of the issues at stake. There are, it has been suggested, at least four distinctions of a disciple: (1) abiding in the Word; (2) loving other disciples; (3) bearing fruit, and (4) being prepared to pay the price of following Jesus.

         ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples’ (John 8:31). You must know and live in His Word to be His disciple. A Christian who does not know and abide in His word is a believer, but not a disciple. Some authorities (e.g. Andreas J. Köstenberger in The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization [2011], i. 694) emphasise that discipleship refers to ‘a person’s life commitment to a body of teaching as exemplified by the teacher [or rabbi] himself’. By being in a privileged group around Jesus, the first disciples came to know ‘the truth’, and that the truth would make the believer free (John 8:32). For a disciple of Jesus, profound knowledge of, and reflection upon, his teaching is the starting point.

         As for the second distinction of discipleship, many Christians love one another in word but not in deed: they pay lip service to the command that ‘all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John 13:35). The self-giving or agape love taught by Jesus requires fidelity and sincerity. As Paul observed, we must ‘be devoted to one another in brotherly love’. We must ‘honour one another above ourselves’ (Rom. 12:10). Our attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:5). We must cease being self-centred and become Christ-centred.

         A believer in Christ may nevertheless be a fruitless believer. A fruitless disciple is a contradiction in terms. ‘By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit, and so become – or prove to be – My disciples’ (John 15:8). The branch abiding in the vine and bearing fruit in John ch 15 is the believer becoming a disciple of Christ. Paul declared to the Romans that he wanted to ‘reap some harvest among’ them as he had ‘among the rest of the Gentiles’ (Rom. 1:13).

         The final distinction between a Christian and a disciple is a particularly hard one, and one where most of us fail: the Christian puts his family first, while the disciple puts Jesus first. Jesus made it clear that His disciples must put Him first above their own families or they could not be His disciples (e.g. Luke 18:29-30). There is no discipleship without cost, Paul says: we have to make ‘a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’ (Rom 12:1). ‘…none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all’ (Luke 14:33) – that is, it is suggested, ‘all claims to human relationships, self, and possessions’. We are required to be good stewards of what God leaves us with, but we must remember it is on loan for His glory.

         For a time our primary duties may be to our families, because we have a duty of care for sick parents or we have to care for our children. As one pastor puts it, ‘... As God has added more children to my “quiver” (Psalm 127:5), it has become all the more important that I “redeem the time” – not merely “balance” time between family and work, but prioritize my family and in particular seek to share with my children the good and gracious things of the Lord.

But we are not called to do this all our lives. Our children grow up and leave the nest. In large measure we have discharged our duty of care. Then, we are no longer called to remain believers. Jesus calls each and every one of his believers to press on to meet that fourth test, willingness to accept sacrifices, in order to become His disciple.

‘Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing…’ ‘My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.’ In so doing, we receive Christ’s grace or love ourselves. A new life has begun and we move on to strengthen our common life in church, accepting one another’s failings in a spirit of love, and working towards change to the new life for the whole people of God. 

We remember that each one of us has been given a special gift. ‘Each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.’ The ‘measure of Christ’s gift’ in Eph. 4:7 is rendered in the Revised English Version as a ‘due portion in Christ’s bounty’. This is what we all receive through the love of Christ. It is not for us to hide that gift under a bushel. For us to ‘bear much fruit’ in becoming God’s disciples, it is for us to discern that special gift which each of us has and use it here and now in his service, in the mighty task of trying to build up God’s kingdom in this world and not the next.

Thought from Friday Morning Prayer: English Saints and Martyrs and Ecumenism

         On Friday 4 May, a small group of local ministers from our ecumenical group, the South Leicester Christian Partnership, gathered in St Guthlac’s for early morning prayer. It is our custom to move around some of the churches in the partnership and to meet once a month on the first Friday at 8 am. On this occasion, we met on the ‘lesser festival’ when we remember the English Saints and Martyrs of the Reformation era. We prayed together the Collect for the Day: ‘Merciful God, who, when your Church on earth was torn apart by the ravages of sin, raised up men and women in this land who witnessed to their faith with courage and constancy: give to your Church that peace which is your will, and grant that those who have been divided on earth may be reconciled in heaven, and share together in the vision of your glory…’

         In ecumenical terms, the rival services on 4 May could become a somewhat uncomfortable experience, because since 2010 both Catholic and Protestant victims of the Reformation era have been remembered in separate services of the Catholic and Anglican Churches. In the Catholic case, those who are remembered are the 40 martyrs canonised under Paul VI in 1973 (previously celebrated on October 25), together with the 85 beatified Martyrs of the Reformation and the other martyrs of the 16th and 17th century canonised by John Paul II in 1987. Yet the Catholic church was doing no more than finally ‘catching up’ with what had been official policy of the Church England since an order of Convocation in 1571. This required that Foxe’s Book of Martyrs – the supreme work of Protestant martyrology in England – be chained beside the Great Bible in cathedrals, select churches, and even several bishops’ and guild halls. Selected readings from the text were proclaimed from the pulpit as if it were Scripture. And the martyrs, of course, were all Protestants, chiefly at the hands of the Catholic queen, ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor.

         In his 1987 homily at the time of the beatification, John Paul II mentioned the prayer at the previous service in 1973 ‘that the blood of those martyrs would be a source of healing for the divisions between Christians. Today we may fittingly give thanks for the progress made in the intervening years towards fuller communion between Anglicans and Catholics. We rejoice in the deeper understanding, broader collaboration and common witness that have taken place through the power of God.’ And we should all say amen to that.

         The reading for Morning Prayer on 4 May was from Luke ch 4, where Jesus announces his mission in the synagogue, but is confronted by unbelievers who, in the end, threaten to kill him: ‘They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way’ (Luke 4:30).

         Just two days earlier, on 2 May, Benedict XVI had delivered an address on Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who is too often forgotten about by many of us because he is commemorated on 26 December. ‘We may ask ourselves’, the Pope reflected, ‘where did this first Christian martyr find the strength to face his persecutors and in the end to attain to the gift of himself? The answer is simple: from his relationship with God, from his communion with Christ, from meditation on the history of salvation, from seeing God’s action, which in Jesus Christ reached its summit. Our prayer, too, should be nourished by listening to God’s Word, in communion with Jesus and his Church.’

         Our ecumenical prayer sessions are about Bible reading, formal prayer, open prayer and meditation. On this occasion we concentrated on the cost of martyrdom and the difficulty of forgiveness and reconciliation. Our final prayer was the one found on a piece of paper in the coat of a dead girl at Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1945. ‘O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill will. But, do not remember all of the suffering they have inflicted upon us; instead remember the fruits we have borne because of this suffering – our fellowship, our loyalty to one another, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart that has grown from this trouble. When our persecutors come to be judged by you, let all of these fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.’ O that we could forgive others for offences, which compared with those meted out at Ravensbrück, seem petty and trivial. Amen.