Sermon for Pentecost, Sunday 8th July
Pentecost 2025
I wonder if you can remember your 18th birthday. (If you’ve had one yet!)
I can, well, I can remember about 2/3rds of it, the rest is hazy, but I was away from home and I spoke to some of my family over the course of the day, but I particularly remember speaking to my grandma who said, ‘of course now you’re 18 you’re a proper grown-up.’ And I suppose I was. All of a sudden I could vote, I could get married without permission, I could buy and consume alcohol and cigarettes. I would be held accountable for my actions in a court of law. And yet I was no more grown up than I had been the day before, and I don’t think I was much more grown-up the day after.
We tend to think that there are moments that change us forever. We might refer to the time when we fell in love. It could be the day of becoming a parent or choosing a school, or making a lifelong commitment like marriage or civil partnership. But the more we think about those events, the more we realize these were, at most, waymarks in a much bigger process.
People become parents on the day of the birth or adoption of their first child, but they will spend the rest of their lives working out what it means. Our 18th birthday was just one day on the journey from childhood to adulthood, whether or not that’s something we ever reach.
I say all this because it is one dimension of what the Scriptures show us in the variety of accounts that we have of Pentecost, the birthday of the church.
You see the bible appears conflicted on this.
St Luke gives us a full 50 days of post-Resurrection appearances, instructions and waiting, before the disciples experienced their baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit. But according to St John, Jesus breathed the Spirit into the disciples straight after his rising from the dead, on the evening of the "first day of the week." Are we supposed to assume that these two accounts just don’t add up, that the disciples were a bit confused?
No. They’re pointing us to the fact that in reality, the Spirit's action in the disciples was a process that started when they met Jesus and deepened each time they acted in Jesus' name.
The Acts of the Apostles tells us that when the disciples began to preach, the people who had come to Jerusalem from across the known world were confused because they all understood what was being said in their own language. People who were accustomed to the boundaries that divided one group from another suddenly found themselves spoken to as one, the heard a message that transformed how they could think about themselves and other people. The old, easy separations fell away as a group of Galileans in from the country shared a message that all could understand.
And it was not an easy message to hear.
To return to St John’s account, on the day when the resurrected Christ first appeared to the disciples they were struggling to take in the fact that death wasn't what they thought it was, that Jesus was risen, and that he had come to them offering peace. In the midst of their confusion, Jesus said, "As the Father has sent me, so I send you." They who had betrayed him, fled from the scene of his arrest, not shown up to support him in the hour of his death, it was to them that he offered his forgiveness.
He was inviting them to share in his own relationship with God. And then he gave them the one command that would keep his mission alive in and through them: "Forgive."
That was it. No list of instructions, no institution; no orders, hierarchy, hymns or liturgy. Just forgiveness.
The symbol of multiple languages in the story we heard this morning represents everything that divides us.
One glance at the news shows us how good we are at building walls around ourselves, putting barriers between us and people that are not quite like us. Who did you vote for? Which part of town do you live in? What language do you speak?
Pentecost is the moment that breaks down these boundaries of time and culture, and most of all, of our settled and certain attitudes that are demonstrated in an unwillingness not just to forgive, but to be forgiven.
When Jesus said to enter the kingdom of heaven we must become like little children, he meant at the very least that we need to have the humility to admit wrong and seek forgiveness. A heart that is too hard for confession and forgiveness is a heart in need of the Holy Spirit because without forgiveness there is simply no space for God.
That’s why we need to celebrate this festival each year.
Just as at our 18th birthdays we weren’t suddenly adults, so Pentecost is a long process.
When we are baptised we receive the Holy Spirit, but that’s not the end of the story. God doesn’t just complete working in us all at once and then we’re fixed, forgiven, finished.
The Holy Spirit grows in us and we grow in it, not just each year but each week and each day as the barriers that separate us from God and from each other are worn away by the gifts that only the Spirit can give. That is what we are here for each Sunday. That is why we need to be here each Sunday. To acknowledge of our needs for forgiveness, for fellowship, for the gifts of the Spirit that must be renewed in us because without them we are wanderers in a thirsty land where there is no water. We are here to seek nothing less than the water of life.
So this Pentecost our prayer must be a simple one, prayed with hearts open to what we most deeply need.
Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.
Illustration: Mikhail Vrubel, Descent of the Holy Spirit on the Apostles, 1885, fresco at St Cyril’s Monastery Kiev, Ukraine