Pentecost is the Church’s birthday. The Christian church came into being on one  astonishing day in Jerusalem, with the events described in our reading from Acts (Acts 2:1-21). The coming of the Holy Spirit in tongues of fire created something coherent out of a rag-bag of human beings, giving them a common understanding and purpose, but more than that, filling them with power and hope that felt more than human. They were literally ‘inspired’, filled with the breath of God; ‘enthused’, feeling the power of God within them.

Today is my Christian birthday as well: on 25^th May 1983, 38 years ago, I was baptized and confirmed in Great St Mary’s in Cambridge. I remember that as being a wonderfully joyous occasion after years of doubt and muddle about what I really believed. Our reading on that day was the one we heard last week from the book of Ezekiel: ‘ A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’

Pentecost is a day for celebration. The best Pentecost service I ever went to was maybe 20 years ago in Exeter Cathedral, when the church was filled with orange, red and gold banners and ribbons, and a large congregation sang with gusto and practically danced in the aisles.

St Mary's on Sunday was a bit low-key by comparison. While quite a few of the congregation turned up wearing red and orange, it was horrible not to be able to sing on such a day, and of course the delightful spring weather doesn’t really help. It’s not surprising that we’re finding it difficult to hang out the bunting after the trials of the pandemic, struggling to get excited when the goalposts keep changing and the threat of yet another variant lurks round every corner. ‘Cautious hugs’ don’t exactly seem like the outpourings of the Holy Spirit, do they?

Last Sunday’s collect, after the spiritual bereavement of Ascension, was a plea to God ‘not to leave us comfortless’, a phrase echoed in Jane Kenyon’s beautiful poem, ‘Let Evening Come’, which closes with the lines,

Let it come, as it will, and don't

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

 If it’s hard to muster inspiration and enthusiasm, what is it that Pentecost promises us in the coming of the Holy Spirit? Above all, a Comforter, and an Advocate. Someone or something to be beside us, no matter what. The title of the Holy Spirit in Greek is the ‘Paraclete’, which means literally ‘the one who stands beside you’. In the setting of a court of law, the Paraclete stands beside you to defend you, to say the things on your behalf that you are unwilling or unable to say for yourself – hence, the ‘Advocate’. And when life gets on top of you, the Holy Spirit is there to stand beside you. In the original Greek, that sentence from the Beatitudes which we usually translate ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted’ literally means ‘blessed are those who mourn, for they shall know the presence of the Holy Spirit’. Hence, the Comforter.

As a church, the church that was born at Pentecost, we are beside one another in a very unusual way, not united by a common interest or hobby or stage of life, but as people with a shared belief – a belief in life in all its fullness, a belief that God will not leave us comfortless. We are united by the joy of being an Easter people, who believe that life and love are stronger than death.

So at times when it’s hard to feel excited, ‘enthused’, ‘inspired’, what is our fallback position? The fallback position of salvation history is memory – what God has done in the past – and hope – for what God may do in the future. The central story of our faith is the Exodus, when God delivered the Israelites from slavery in the land of Pharaoh; the shared meal of the Passover reflected and echoed in the Last Supper. Our weekly Eucharist reminds us of the Easter victory, definitively restating that deliverance from the oppression of evil, promising a better world.

I’ve found myself thinking that in more recent history, one of the greatest outpourings of the Holy Spirit was to be found in the music of the Negro spirituals - songs written by an oppressed people whose daily reality was slavery, ill-treatment and violence. The stories of the Exodus and the Easter victory were both memory and hope for them.

So if we’re feeling daunted by the process of getting back to normal, still more by changing ‘normal’ to something closer to the heart’s desire – fighting for our planet, fighting for an end to poverty and exploitation – we might remember the power of those spirituals. At the end of my address our organist Stephen Taylor played a splendid improvisation on the spiritual ‘Go down Moses’. Moses didn’t feel brave at all when God called him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt – in fact he tried quite hard to get out of it – and getting to the Promised Land was very far from being a walk in the park; but in the process he was privileged to meet God face to face. 

Read on to part II to hear some thoughts about how the Holy Spirit might be moving in St Mary's...