Sermon preached at St John’s Bexley: 19th May 2024: Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21: Romans 8:22-27:John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.”
Three years ago at Pentecost those words stung.
They stung because in the aftermath of a tumour diagnosis, the fixation can be very much on flesh: On a particular lump of flesh that’s grown in a place it shouldn’t – in my case, where the inner ear meets the brain.
And so to hear that the Holy Spirit would be poured out on all flesh, means that it must also be poured out on that blob in my head; A lump of flesh that I resented, that I feared, that I just wanted rid of.
Because if the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh, it must also be poured out on the flesh we don’t like. The flesh that we’re ashamed of, the flesh we hate, the flesh that, if it were up to us, would have no place in the Kingdom of God: But it’s not up to us, is it?
Not up to us, to determine which flesh, or whose flesh is worthy of the Holy Spirit.
Back in the Fourth Century, someone called Donatus declared that clergy needed to be morally faultless in order for the sacraments we celebrate to be valid.
Thankfully the Church promptly declared that position as heretical (imagine the recruitment issues) and it’s why, if you have a look in the Book of Common Prayer, the Church of England’s Thirty Nine Articles of Faith include the clause the unworthiness of ministers hinders not the effectiveness of the Sacrament.
This works because Sacraments don’t come from Priests, they come from God, and so no matter how flawed, how reprehensible I might be (don’t all rush at once), you can still come to the altar with the reassurance that with the Holy Spirit being poured out on all flesh, even the vilest of vicars can still provide you with the Body and Blood of Christ.
And that’s just the clergy: If the Holy Spirit has been poured out on all flesh then we can apply the same logic to anyone else who isn’t a Priest as well – and say that everyone no matter who they are, or what they’ve done, is able to bring something Holy into the World?
There were a lot of people present in Jerusalem that Pentecost, coming from a diverse range of backgrounds and cultures: In any large crowd, not everyone’s going to get on: Personalities clash, misunderstandings occur, people grate on each– but still, they were all there, hearing the Apostles (who were by no means perfect either), in their own languages. The Holy Spirit was being poured out on them too.
It’s all part of being human that in any community, there are people we dislike, and who dislike us – we may not even like ourselves! We may have neighbours, colleagues, even family members whom we consider as welcome in our lives as the lump in my head, but their place in the World isn’t our’s to approve, and no matter how much we loathe them, and how justified we might be for that, it’s also not our place to give a sign off to God’s work in and through their lives.
I spoke to the late James Brokenshire at one point about online trolls: Those people who pop up with hateful, often threatening remarks on social Media Feeds – something that MPs get a lot.
James said when people spouted hate towards him online, he held on to the idea that, if he met them in person, they would be perfectly delightful and charming to his face.
It can be a difficult thing to have faith in, especially when the trolls are really laying it on: But it’s about having the grace to trust that perhaps the Holy Spirit really is poured out on all flesh, because there’s so much of these people we don’t see.
Like ducks, two thirds of an iceberg is underwater, and the same certainly applies with people: Even moreso online, where a character limit doesn’t just mean the number of letters you can type, but how much of the person we can see: And in real life there are character limits too – we form our judgements based on the contact we have with each other, but that’s by no means the whole person, and with some grace (which isn’t always easy to find), we can be open to the possibility that they have pounds and pounds of flesh, through which the Holy Spirit be working, even if we’re unable, or unwilling to see that aspect of them.
It takes so much grace, sometimes more than we can find in an Earthly lifetime, when someone’s hurt us, or when we’ve cast an extreme judgement over someone else, to believe that God might work through their lives… But that’s not our call to make, and thank goodness, because perception always comes with character limits.
Three years on, the tumour’s still in my head: It doesn’t seem to be growing, and the nature of the procedures mean it’s easier to leave it in there than do anything about it at this stage.
We’ve got a very different relationship these days, tumour and me (regular visits to the MRI scanner mean a lot of time spent with God). Could you call it reconciliation? I don’t know, but I do think I’ve come to learn a lot about the scope of the Holy Spirit’s outpouring…
And if the Holy Spirit is poured out on all flesh then what or who could God be working through, who we might be overlooking?
‘In these last days it will be, God declares that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, whether you like it or not, and the sons that never call and the daughters who keep asking for money shall prophesy, and the facetious young men shall see visions, and the cantankerous old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon the slaves that don’t meet our expectations, the men who anger us and the women who frustrate us, in those days I will pour out my Spirit and they, yes, even they, shall prophesy.’
Fr. Edward 