This Blog Has Moved

This blog is no longer being updated here. It initially moved to this location.

Subsequently it moved to https://bigcircumstance.com/. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Cheaper Digital Music part 2

Following my earlier post, Yahoo! have now announced their new service is coming to Europe. No news on prices, yet, though.

The Mystery Of Pentecost

I'm having to post this week's sermon that would usually appear on my main website here, due to technical problems uploading there.

To open the Bible passage in a separate window, hold down SHIFT and click here.

Introduction
There was once a family of mice who lived in a piano. They loved the music which flooded through their house day after day, but often wondered where it came from. Some said that you only had to hear the beauty of the music to realise that there must be a player who was making it. But others scoffed at the idea, and came up with alternative theories of their own.

Then one say a brave and very daring mouse decided to find out for himself where the music was coming from. He set out from their snug little den and explored the great, dark recesses of the piano's interior. And there he discovered the source of the music: it was the strings! He raced back to the family and told them of his discovery. Now they knew - or did they? Because of course some questioned whether the brave explorer was really right - indeed whether he was telling the truth.

So a little while later another expedition set out, this time consisting of several mice so that there could be no question of their honesty. Sure enough, they found the strings which the first mouse had described. But they decided to press on still further, and there they discovered the secret of the strings - the secret behind the secret. For what really made the music in the piano was - the hammers.

Now the mice understood everything. There was no longer any mystery about the origin of the music. And they laughed at the elderly mice who sometimes still told the old stories about the piano player. And, unseen by them all, the piano player played on.
[Simon Coupland, A Dose Of Salts, p17f #9.]

Mystery. You think you've got it taped, and then you discover you haven't. Sometimes you persist in thinking you've got something sussed, when the truth is much greater and far more mysterious.

I think Pentecost is a little like that. We can't pin down the Holy Spirit, but the language of his coming at Pentecost is mysterious and elusive, however direct and powerful the experience of the Spirit is. Let's look at four areas where that is found in Acts 2:1-13.

1. Wind
With all the disciples together in one place, the first sign of something unusual is that

'suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.'
[verse 2]

'Wind' is an evocative sign of the Spirit. Both the Hebrew word for 'spirit', ruach, and the Greek pneuma carry the connotation of wind or breath. It's something Jesus made a big deal of when he met Nicodemus. He told him,

'The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.'
[John 3:8]

We have to admit that we cannot understand the work of the Holy Spirit (we do not know where it comes from or where it goes) but we do know the reality of his work in our lives.

The author of Ecclesiastes said something similar:

'Just as you do not know how the breath comes to the bones in the mother's womb, so you do not know the work of God, who makes everything.'
[Ecclesiastes 11:5]

The work of the Holy Spirit is a divine mystery but a reality to be acknowledged, celebrated, and which should lead us to worship. We may not understand the work of the Spirit, but the signs that the Spirit is at work are as sure as the wind in the trees.

But maybe there is more: if the Holy Spirit is like the wind, whose coming and going is something we don't know despite the best efforts of the Met Office, then perhaps that means something like this. To be subject to the work of the Holy Spirit is not only a mystery, it is to be taken on a mysterious journey, an adventure. It's like parents promising to take their children on an exciting journey, not telling them where they are going. But the parents have the best interests of the children at heart, and so the journey is to a good destination. So too the Holy Spirit takes us on a mysterious journey. He takes us to places and into situations we wouldn't have dreamed of for ourselves, and quite possibly would have excluded. It may feel haphazard and dangerous at times, like a ship cast on the mercy of the storm and blown from port to port, but God has purpose in where he blows our lives by the wind of the Spirit. Is that something we will accept and embrace, rather than just complaining about where we've washed up?

2. Fire
As wind, the work of the Holy Spirit is invisible. But not for long:

'Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.'
[verse 3]

God appeared as fire in the Old Testament, and John the Baptist foretold that Jesus would baptise 'with the Holy Spirit and with fire' [Luke 3:16] - probably seeing the fire of the Spirit as a purging and refining fire. We don't see immediate evidence of this at Pentecost, but this would soon be known in the Early Church when Ananaias and Sapphira were confronted with their deceit in Acts chapter 5.

A clear sign that the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives is when we are being purified of the dross. It is not without cause that we call the Spirit the Holy Spirit. To welcome the Holy Spirit into our lives is to put ourselves on God's operating table. It's like the spiritual version of plastic surgery. But whereas vain people with more money than sense go to a plastic surgeon and say, "I'd like you to make me look physically like a particular famous celebrity", so we are saying to God, "Make me more like Jesus." Plastic surgery patients go under the knife: we go under the fire, so to speak.

(And by the way, although I'm being pretty negative about plastic surgery there, I do of course know that it has its positive uses, too.)

We read in Galatians 5:22-23 what the 'fruit of the Spirit' is. It is

'love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.'

Now don't those qualities sound exactly like the character of Jesus? Hear them again: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

This is the work of the Spirit by fire: to burn away all in us that is not Christlike and form us instead in his image. This can be painful. But it is essential. Perhaps the biggest problem the Christian Church has in the West is we don't look much like Jesus. Pentecost is a time for opening ourselves up to the cost of change.

The mystery of Pentecost is not only a call to an adventure, it is a call to transformation.

3. Tongues
Not just tongues of fire: the first sign the disciples are 'under the influence' of the Holy Spirit is that they begin to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gives them ability [verse 4].

At this point we are very deep into mystery for many people, Christians included. Terrifying mystery, in fact. The moment anyone raises the subject of speaking in tongues the fear barrier goes up in some Christians. It's spooky and scary. It seems irrational. We imagine people who have lost all sense of self-control, whose behaviour is erratic and maybe even self-indulgent. We don't want any of that, thank you very much.

But nevertheless speaking in tongues is seen several times in the book of Acts when people receive the Holy Spirit. In 1 Corinthians 12-14 Paul certainly regards it as a valid gift of the Holy Spirit. So we ought to reflect carefully before running away.

At heart, it is simply the God-given ability to speak or pray in a language we have not learned. But why would he do that? I answer along these lines: are there not times when you know you need to pray for someone or something, but you do not and cannot know what their needs are? What if God enables you to pray for their needs specifically, without you doing so? In the gift of tongues he could disguise their needs but you could still pray for them. Moreover, do we not know there are times when it would be unwise for us to have personal knowledge of another person's needs for reasons of privacy and dignity? Yet those needs still require prayer. Tongues enable us to do that. Indeed this was my own route into using the gift, because we had someone at my home church with desperate problems and I didn't know how to pray for him.

Or think of it like this. When two people are in love, do they not have to a certain limited extent their own private language of love? They have their own vocabulary for expressing their devotion to each other. Maybe the language of love for God has an equivalent in the gift of tongues. It is therefore not only a gift for intercession, it is also a gift for praise, and that is what the disciples did at Pentecost. They didn't use the gift of tongues to address the multi-lingual crowd: rather, the international crowd overheard them 'speaking about God's deeds of power' [verse 11], that is, recounting to God, just what wonderful things he had done. Which is rather like the language of love.

Please don't worry about the trappings that have sometimes gone with the gift of tongues. At root it is a wonderful gift from God to be welcomed.

In any case, what seems to be true throughout Acts is that whether or not people receive the gift of tongues, what every disciple who is filled with the Spirit receives is the gift of bold speech. It may be tongues, it may be prophecy, it may be brave preaching, it may be personal testimony. And that is something every Christian needs: the gift of bold speech. Are we among those who are not as courageous in speaking about Jesus as we might be?

This week's Methodist Recorder reports the following story:

A CHALLENGE to every Methodist to "engage in conversation about what their faith means to them" will be issued by the Methodist Conference in Torquay next month if a report from the working group on discipleship and Church membership is accepted. Within the framework of "Priorities for the Methodist Church", the report - "Time to talk of God: recovering Christian conversation as a way of nurturing discipleship" - says that enabling the recovery of "intentional Christian conversation" is a key way of nurturing mature continuing discipleship. It explores "blocks to honest conversation" at local church level and offers case studies of particular experiments to enable conversation. The report examines some Gospel stories which suggest models of discipleship and which offer "conversational models" of engagement by Jesus with a range of people. It also explores some Methodist teachings that have a bearing on discipleship and the ways in which it can be nurtured.

All this is good and encouraging. I just wonder whether what we also need alongside the 'models of discipleship which offer "conversational models"' is the power of the Holy Spirit. If we are to introduce people to Jesus, we certainly need that.

4. New Wine
It doesn't take long for the voice of sneering to come to the fore:

'They are filled with new wine.'
[verse 13]

And the sneering has never gone away. In 1994, a reporter on the Independent On Sunday called William Leith wrote an article entitled 'I knelt down and prayed that God wouldn't get me'. Against his usual habits, he has gone to church and he is terribly nervous that he might 'catch God' in the same way people are afraid to catch a disease from somebody they are visiting in hospital. He describes the worshippers as 'like the nicer characters in Australian soaps: calm faces, a permanent half-smile, slightly out-of-date inexpensive clothes'. Then there is chanting, which he describes like a Masonic rite, and then a baby is presented for baptism, which makes him think of tabloid stories about satanic abuse. The baptismal promises of the parents that they turn to Christ and renounce evil make him think of druids warding off evil spirits.
[Simon Coupland, A Dose Of Salts, p71f #60.]

We can be caricatured as soap opera characters and cult members. At the first Pentecost the charge was that the disciples had drunk too much new wine.

Well, they may not have been drunk - as Peter goes on to point out, it was only nine in the morning - but they were full of new wine in a different sense. Jesus had promised the new wine of his kingdom in the miracle of the wedding feast at Cana when he turned water into wine [John 2]. Now here it is - and the disciples are intoxicated, not with alcohol but with God.

Not only that, Jesus had talked about the new wine of his kingdom needing to be poured into new wineskins. No wine bottles in those days, but leather wineskins. But with age the wineskins became tough and inflexible. This made them highly unsuitable for the new wine, which was still full of gas, and which therefore required young leather, because it was flexible. It could stretch.

So the new wine of the Spirit fills us and makes us intoxicated with God. We are thrilled by him. But that is not easily contained within old structures that have grown stiff and inflexible. This at least in part explains some of the tragic history of division in the Christian Church down the centuries. People have been filled with the new wine of the Spirit but the institution has become stiff and unable to contain them.

Our church structures are often like the Pharisees who were so rigid about the Sabbath, and Jesus had to remind them that the Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the sabbath. Similarly, the institutional church is meant to be made for humans filled with the Spirit, not vice-versa. When our rules, regulations and limitations stand in the way of the Spirit, we need new wineskins.

Perhaps we need to remember who it was that did the sneering on that first Christian Pentecost. It was religious people. They were in town for the festival. But they sneered at the very thing they needed. That is a real and present danger for many of us in the Church. We can't bear these preachers and other Christians who keep banging on about the Holy Spirit. So we make snide remarks, while our spiritual lives remain in monochrome instead of colour, and our churches empty and close. Let's not sneer. Let's be filled with the new wine of the Spirit and be intoxicated with God.

Technology: The New Imperialism?

Google is in trouble with the French for wanting to digitise the world's books, according to Wired News. In the age of the Internet you no longer need a fleet of warships to be perceived as imperialist. It's the US versus Europe again and this isn't the Ryder Cup. If this one really flares up, it will be interesting to see whether the British Government has American or European sympathies.

Cheaper Digital Music

Wired News is reporting that Yahoo is about to introduce a digital download service that undercuts Napster and Real Networks by two thirds. Just USD60 for a year. It's not compatible with iTunes, which is one disadvantage. I don't know when it will extend beyond the States and reach the shores of dear old Blighty here, but why do I somehow expect that it will be priced rather higher here? Bet they'll do an iTunes then.

The Gates of the New Jerusalem

Went last night to see my friend Chris Collins installed as the priest-in-charge of 'the united Benefice of Cobham with Luddesdowne and Dode' (what an Anglican mouthful). The Bishop of Tonbridge gave a sermon that was too short. Yes, really. Only ten minutes, needed further unpacking. What he said was intriguing and deserved further exposition. How many times do you say that about a preacher?

In particular he referred to Revelation 21:25 where John says that the gates of the New Jerusalem will never be closed. He said that if the New Jerusalem in Scripture is the ideal city, then what model of church does that provoke for us? We need to be churches with 'open gates', but that isn't how we're always perceived. We look very 'closed' to many non-church people. He referred to a survey in Coventry Diocese in 2003 of people outside the church, asking them which was the one question they most wanted answering in life. The top six were ones many in the church also ask. The Bishop used this to raise the issue of how we go on a search in our culture for meaning in relation to these questions, as they are being posed in the arts and the media. The trouble is, he didn't give any tools to help his listeners begin on this quest. That's where I'd have liked to have heard more from him.

I turned up a Bible commentary on Revelation today which puts a slightly different light on the verse. The gates are open because there is 'no night', i.e., security measures are no longer needed because evil has been conquered. Maybe that in itself is a challenge to the witness of the church. There are areas in which we tragically do need gates in position - child protection is one issue that comes to mind - but our world is fast becoming a 'gated community' not always literally but metaphorically. That's the last thing the Christian Church needs to be.

The New Christian Tories

New Generation of Christian Tories emerges at the General Election, according to Ekklesia News. It's a real mixed bag - from Gary Streeter MP, who has been in Parliament for several years now and clearly advocates 'compassionate Conservatism' to the distressing news that Ed Matts, the failed Tory candidate in Dorset South who infamously doctored pictures of asylum seekers in his election material described himself as a 'committed Christian' in the same literature. No wonder we don't make a positive impression in the world when we stoop to such low tactics.

The Election Result

So Blair is back, with a similar majority to that which undid John Major in the post-1992 Parliament. He says that during the campaign he has listened to and learned from the public. Does that mean the focus groups didn't work, Tony?

Less cynically, I hope it does mean he'll cultivate more of a servant attitude as Prime Minister than has hitherto been apparent. See my newspaper column of last week for more thoughts on that.

Dog Collars

Maggi Dawn has an interesting discussion going about whether clergy should wear clerical attire in public. This is my response, just (belatedly) posted:

Well, here come some untidy musings from a Methodist minister who was once described as 'not so much low church, more like subterranean'. Perhaps we've treated clergy attire wrongly as a univalent sign when really it's a multivalent (maybe even ambivalent) symbol. To one, it is the helpful symbol of a uniform, and someone wanting an opportunity to talk about spiritual matters approaches (I resisted saying 'collars') someone in a clerical shirt. To another, the association with uniform is as unhelpful as the association with power, as often in pomo culture (notwithstanding pomo desires for mystery).

I've found that a dog collar opens certain doors, but maybe less so than it used to when I began in ministry thirteen years ago. On the other hand, I remember visiting a young couple who had lost their toddler to a brain tumour. The undertaker had contacted me, asking to conduct the funeral. When I arrived, I said, 'I'm sorry I'm not in my dog collar tonight: my clerical shirts are in the wash.' At the end of the evening they told me they were relieved I had come dressed like them. They were afraid of what it would mean to meet 'the priest'. So maybe that was a bit of accidental incarnation.

While I see that wearing the attire does make certain people feel they can approach us, I wonder what that also says about other 'non-ordained' Christians in the same arena. Is their faith invisible to their hurting friends? Is it all too visible but judgmental? Or has the institutional church disempowered them because they aren't 'Revs'?