Thoughts about Pentecost for 2018

When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:1-4a)

I was still thinking about the image of love as fire, which the Presiding Bishop built on so powerfully yesterday in his sermon before Prince Harry and Meghan. And I dare say it was because I was thinking of that that I was struck, as I looked at the proper for today, by St Luke’s use of the image of fire as he describes the apostles’ and the holy women’s experience of the Holy Spirit that first Pentecost.

In one way, of course, Luke was simply doing what the Bible had always done. Again and again in the Scriptures, where they speak of God’s presence in grace, redemptive power and glory—for example in the stories of Abraham, Moses, and Elijah—again and again they use the image of fire.

Think for a minute of that most remarkable of stories, Moses at the Burning Bush! (Exod. 3:1-10) Or, to be more precise, the story of Moses at the Bush that Burns but is not Burnt Up. It’s remarkable in several ways. For one thing, it tells us what Moses was thinking. Only very rarely do stories in the Bible tell us what anyone thought. As a rule they tell us what people said and what they did. As for what they thought, we have to decide that for ourselves. But the story of Moses at the Bush is an exception. Even then, the writer doesn’t actually say, “Moses thought”. The writer says, “Moses said”—but it’s clearly Moses thinking aloud, for there’s no one else there.

Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not consumed.’

Did I say there was no one else there? Well, of course there was someone else there, but it was evidently a surprise, even to Moses. God was there.

“Put off your shoes Moses, for you are standing on holy ground.”

God calls to Moses out of the bush. Again, let’s be more precise: as God often does to those who turn aside to take a closer look at something, God reveals God’s self to Moses, calling to him from the very thing to which he has chosen to pay attention. And indeed, it turns out in this revelation that God also has seen something, and God, too, has turned aside—

“ Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.”

And so to Moses in this moment is revealed the Name of God and God’s gracious good will to have mercy on God’s people.

We Christians, of course, believe also in a second and even greater revelation—that wherein the Word became flesh by way of blessed Mary, she whom we call theotokos, “God bearer”—or as our more homely English idiom has it, “Mother of God.” Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century speaks of her too, witness as she is to the grace of God turning aside and coming down to God’s people—she too is a burning bush—like the first, burning but not burnt up.

And that is one of the abiding truths of God’s breath, God’s dynamic, God’s life in us—for those things are all elements of what “the Holy Spirit” is. The abiding truth is that if only we are willing to be open to God’s breath, God’s life, it takes hold of us as it took hold of Jesus’ followers that first Pentecost. It takes hold of us “in tongues as of flame”—so that we too are on fire but not burnt up. For the effect of God’s fire is never to destroy us if we open ourselves to it, but rather to enable us to be ever more truly ourselves, the individuals God actually created us to be.

Does this really have anything to do with the Presiding Bishop’s sermon to their Royal Highnesses yesterday, or was what I experienced a mere co-incidence of words without serious implication? Of course it has everything to do with it! For Bishop Michael was quoting from the Song of Songs:

Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame. (8:6)

—the Song of Songs, which is—as the Old Testament scholar Ellen Davies reminds us in her wonderful little book Getting Involved with God—which is the only place in the Bible where there is a dialogue of love: the only place in this entire literature of the relationship between God and God’s people where we hear “one partner say, ‘I love you,’ and the other answer right back, ‘Yes, yes; I love you too.’”[1] And yet, if our faith is true, then coming to this mutual love—we for God and God for us, and on that basis we for others and others for us—is entirely what our life is really meant to be about.

Love means ecstasy—that is, standing outside of ourselves. And that may be costly and painful. Indeed, it often is.

Loves means intimacy—intimacy with God, intimacy with each other, intimacy with the whole creation. And that means being vulnerable: vulnerable to another. And that too can be painful, and often is.

And yet that ecstasy and that intimacy are the qualities of life for which we were made. The rest—even all those wonderful gifts and talents and clevernesses on which we pride ourselves so much—even the good things—they are transient. As Ecclesiastes and St Paul remind us, they will vanish away.

“הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל,” says Ecclesiastes (Eccl. 1:2). “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” is how we usually translate it—the only problem being that “vanity”, at least as we normally use the word, is not really a very good translation of the Hebrew הָבֶל—which literally means “vapour”. For what the preacher is saying is not that everything is “vain” or “vanity”, but that all things, even good things, are transitory, ephemeral. Only love, together with the faith and hope that invariably accompany love, will actually last. Love alone is the true fire that the Spirit, the breath, the life of God, will light in us and it will not destroy us. Love alone “is as strong as death, its passion unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame” (Song of Songs 8:6). Love alone is the fire that will burn in us and yet not burn us up.

In one sense we do not need to pray for this gift, for God offers it to us all the time: that is the message of Pentecost. Rather, let us ask God for grace that we may open our stubborn and cowardly hearts to it: for that is always the problem.

And now let us confess our faith…

[1] Ellen F. Davis, “The One Whom My Soul Loves” in Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (Lanham, Maryland and Plymouth, UK: Cowley, 2001).