(David H)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to SGTM Talks. We hope you find this encouraging and inspiring.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

And now I'm going to do the next reading, which is from the book of John, chapter 20, verses 19 to 23. On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood amongst them and said, Peace be with you. After this he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, Peace be with you, as the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. And with that he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

If we haven't met, I'm David Hilborn. I'm on the ministry team with Joe here and our rector, uh Jamie, and also Peter, who's away like Jamie for this weekend. And it's a privilege to be able to open up God's word with you this morning on this very special day in the church's calendar. Because today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, the Feast of Pentecost. Now, this is important as we'll see in relation to our reading from Acts chapter 2, a reading that takes place on the Jewish festival known as the Day of Pentecost. But for me personally, the word Pentecost has a resonance which is really profound. In a couple of weeks' time, I shall be jetting off to Calgary in Canada, representing the Church of England, the denomination to which this church belongs, to be part of the fifth round of annual meetings of the International Pentecostal Anglican Commission. Notice that word Pentecostal, right? That's linked in a way I shall unpack to the word Pentecost in Acts chapter 2. And then in November, because I've got a bit of a thing for this, I shall be also representing the Church of England and the Anglican Communion on the World Council of Churches joint consultative group on Pentecostalism. Yet another variant on that word that we find in Acts chapter 2, in the reading we heard just earlier. Some of you will know that I'm academic dean at the London School of Theology, and as part of that role, I have to engage in scholarship and research. And one of my key research areas is the way in which the Church of England and Anglicans around the world who trace their origins to the kind of Christian expression that the Church of England represents, the way in which that tradition interacts with the tradition that takes its cue from that word that we heard read again in Acts chapter 2, the word Pentecost, the Pentecostal tradition. There's a particular personal story behind these commitments for me, because when I was a student, a fairly young Christian, who didn't know a great deal about how the Holy Spirit of God fitted into a relationship with Jesus, because that wasn't my own local church's tradition. When I was a student, I got to know other Christians in other traditions, including that tradition that again takes its cue from our reading in Acts chapter 2, the Pentecostal tradition. And as student Christians often do, we visited each other's churches. And so I found myself one evening near Christmas in my first year as an undergraduate a long time ago, I won't tell you quite how long, standing in an Assemblies of God church, which identified itself as a Pentecostal church. And we were singing, and the lot was being made of the gift of the Holy Spirit that we see on display in our reading from Acts chapter 2. The gift of being able to speak in other languages or tongues and interpret other people speaking in those languages, even if you yourself have not been schooled in them. As we'll see, there's a lot of debate in New Testament studies about the way in which the gift of tongues may come to people, whether it's a private prayer language which isn't translatable into another human language, or whether sometimes it can actually be what the apostles seem to experience in that reading from Acts chapter 2, a natural human language that you might not have learned, the understanding of which is given to you miraculously by God. But the point is that around me people were speaking languages I didn't, or tongues I didn't recognize. And here's the thing, folks: I was an undergraduate in linguistics. I loved languages at school and I carried them on at university. Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, loved it. Absolutely fantastic. But this was blowing my mind apart that people could be speaking in other tongues when they apparently hadn't learnt them or they didn't appear to me to be a naturally occurring language. And then with all my rationality and all the lack of teaching about the Holy Spirit in my own local church congregation, something amazing happened. In the middle of a chorus, as we used to call them then, a kind of Christian folk song. I live, I live because he has risen, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. I found myself singing in a tongue I didn't recognize and couldn't parse as a linguistic student. And I had to spend a long time processing that, as you might imagine. So you might wonder how this attachment of mine to that tradition of Christianity called Pentecostalism relates back to our reading in Acts chapter 2 more specifically. And it relates back to it because actually, when we're talking about the day of Pentecost, we're talking about something that goes not just 2,000 years into Christian history, but even further back. Because this day of celebration, this festival that Luke writes about at the beginning of his book of Acts, the story of the church after Jesus' resurrection, this day of Pentecost was not a ceremony invented by Jesus' disciples. As so often, Jesus adhered to the Jewish calendar. Jesus, and it cannot be said strongly enough, in an age where antisemitism extraordinarily is still with us and still toxic and pervasive in our culture, Jesus was a Jewish rabbi. Jesus was steeped in the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, the law and the prophets of the Jewish tradition. And the day of Pentecost for Jews was a festival of the grain harvest. It was a thanksgiving to God of the fact that after their great festival of Passover, when God had redeemed Israel from the grip of Pharaoh and led Israel across the Red Sea. If you don't know too many Old Testament stories, you probably know that one under the leadership of Moses. Let my people go, he said to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh eventually had to let them go. So they celebrated the passing over that the angel of death did for the children of Israel, sparing them the fate of the Egyptians. They celebrated that, and then 50 days later, seven weeks or so later, the grain harvest would come, and that was their next great celebration in their liturgical calendar, in their spiritual year of festivals, celebrating God's goodness towards the Jewish people, towards Israel. Jesus was faithful in his adherence to these festivals. So faithful that at Passover, in what would turn out to be the last year of his earthly life, he went up to Jerusalem, knowing actually that something gruesome was going to happen to him because the Father had spoken to him about that series of events. He rode in a hero, you remember on Palm Sunday, everybody hailing him as the Messiah, the promised king of the Jews who would redeem it, the Jewish nation, from the grip of the Roman Empire at the time. And he ended that week on a cross, which we of course remembered on Good Friday. And then three days after that, he was raised by the Spirit of God from the grave and raised to draw others to himself and to offer them eternal life. So they were the events of what we call Easter, but rooted and grounded in a Jewish festival, the festival of Passover. And then the next great festival in the Jewish year was this festival, this harvest festival, this festival of the grain yield, sometimes called the Feast of Weeks, that took place in Jerusalem. And the disciples are gathering. As Luke sets the scene, when the day of Pentecost came in verse 1, they were all together in one place. The they first and foremost in that first verse of this text are the disciples who've been following Jesus most closely in his inner circle, the twelve disciples. Judas, you'll remember, has betrayed Jesus, and he's been replaced in Acts chapter 1 by Matthias, because Judas has taken his own life, because he cannot live with the fact that he betrayed Jesus to the authorities to be handed over to the cross. They're all together in one place because they've gone to Jerusalem as the good Jewish folk they are to celebrate that Jewish festival of thanksgiving to God for his provision. They've been touched by the life of Jesus. They are on fire for Jesus. We know that they are gathering and praying and they've begun tentatively to worship, but they're also afraid. Jesus was crucified after all. Peter had denied that he knew Jesus. So there was a lot to be afraid of. And they had seen Jesus resurrected. They had hope in their hearts that there was life beyond death, and that they must take this good news to the ends of the earth. Jesus has appeared to them a number of times in his resurrected state and promised them in verse 8 of chapter 1, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. So they have that vision and that promise and that hope in their heart. But they're meeting in an upper room, not quite sure how this is going to unfold. Jesus, again in Luke in Acts chapter 1, has left them to go back to his heavenly father on what we call the day of ascension, 40 days after he died. But now in Luke, in Luke's account, in Acts chapter 2, we're up to 50 days beyond. The feast of Pentecost, so-called in Greek, because the word in Greek means 50 days or the 50th day. So seven weeks and a day, or seven weeks and a day since the end of Passover week. And so for these Jewish followers of Jesus, great anticipation is in their hearts as to what might happen next, the promise of Jesus that the Holy Spirit would come, fear that they may still be persecuted as Jesus was, and uncertainty about what lies ahead next. And in the midst of all this, we read in verse 2. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. But we're told in chapter one again that in fact those who were gathering for that feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem in these days numbered around 120. Jesus' own mother, Mary, was part of that apostolic band. So they were a little bit stronger. They had attracted more to them in that period after the resurrection, and that community of followers of Jesus was growing. But there was something else that was going to supercharge this embryonic church, and it was the coming of the Holy Spirit. And wow, what a momentous coming it was. A sound like the blowing of a violent wind. First and foremost. Do you remember how the whole of creation came into being? You remember perhaps that God breathes upon the waters at the very beginning in Genesis chapter 1. The Spirit of God, the breath of God, is on the face of the waters, and life comes from that life breath of God, and creation is sparked into being. You might remember in the prophet Ezekiel, in Ezekiel chapter 37, this great visionary dreamscape that Ezekiel is given by God of a valley of dry bones, Israel struggling with its decline after exile into Babylon and its deathliness, being brought to life again by the breath, the Spirit of God. The word breath and spirit in Hebrew is one and the same. So these Jewish followers of Jesus knew the significance of the Spirit of God, breathing new life into the people of God. But here it is given a massive new dimension by the fact that God has revealed Himself fully and finally in the person of Jesus Christ. And it's Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, Jesus the King of the Jews, Jesus the Redeemer of Israel, who has promised that this Spirit would come upon them. And it comes upon them, Luke tells us, in what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. You might remember, if you know your Old Testament, even the purple passages, that in Exodus 19, as we lead up to the giving of the Ten Commandments, Moses goes up Mount Sinai, and what does he see as God descends and gives him the law, the word, the set of instructions that Israel would live by, that Jesus would live by, that the disciples would live by. Moses saw all around him what? Fire. Fire and smoke are massively important symbols of the presence of God in the Old Testament. So these Jewish followers of Jesus would have recognized the resonance of what was happening, but boy, they still couldn't have entirely fathomed what they would experience. All of them, all of them were filled, says Luke in verse 4. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Why was this important? Well, as we read on, we realize that to be a Jewish person in this period under the awesome yoke of Roman imperial rule was to have been part of a people that had been mercilessly persecuted by successive emperors and rulers of the Roman Empire, but also going further back at the hands of the Greeks, at the hands of Persians, of course, we know very profoundly at the hands of the Babylonians and the Assyrians going centuries before. It was the fate then, and it has remained the fate of the Jewish people to this day, to live under that shadow of persecution. Simon Sharmer, the great Jewish modern historian, speaks in one of his histories of the Jewish people that he's written and presented on television actually, that there is this saying among Jewish people to always keep a suitcase packed because you never quite know when the next pogrom, the next persecution will come, and you have to flee. Well, the community that gathers in Jerusalem is not just Jews from Galilee. The disciples of Jesus were Galileans. Jesus was a Galilean, they were local to Jerusalem. But Luke goes on to describe the fact that to be a faithful Jew, one would have to come to Jerusalem for these great festivals, sometimes from way beyond that city. From cultures where Jews had been dispersed under successive persecutions, cultures that would be speaking as their main language a whole host of different tongues. And he enlists them in verse 9: Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs. And here's the thing. With all of that diversity, with all of that linguistic plurality, with all of that fragmentation, you might say, socially and culturally, that had occurred among the Jewish people for centuries, here amazingly, is a reunification. A reunification not just physically as they come and gather for that festival, but spiritually and linguistically, of course. Because The next revelation here is when they heard this sound, the crown came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. Being spoken by these disciples, this 120 strong, but still quite fragile and small band of followers of Jesus who had been gifted with this capacity to speak in languages that this diaspora, that's the word that's sometimes used to describe the Jews, this diaspora had been speaking in all its variety. Not only do the disciples, do the 120 speak languages that these folk can understand, they hear those languages and they make sense of them. So there is a kind of shared experience here of speaking miraculously and hearing miraculously, which is about dialogue, cooperation, understanding, and reconciliation under the Spirit of God, the miraculous Spirit of God who gifts people beyond their natural gifting, who gifts people beyond their natural skills. And the extraordinary thing about that reunification in language under the power and the influence of the Spirit of God. The Spirit who Paul tells us in Romans 8 raised Jesus from the dead, the spirit who conceived Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the spirit who came upon Jesus at his baptism by John in the Jordan, the Spirit who drove Jesus into the wilderness, the spirit that he gave up to the Father as he died and said, Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit. This spirit has been with Jesus from the very beginning. This spirit has been with Israel from the very beginning, even before Israel's formation, from the beginning of creation, as I've said. And yet there is more to come from this ever creative and ever-fulfilling spirit. And it is this, and this is why this is so extraordinary as well. Do you remember the story of the Tower of Babel? Also in the book of Genesis. The story goes there, as we're a few chapters into that book, the first book of the Biblical canon, that humanity had become confident enough in its own abilities given by God that it felt it was right to build a tower reaching up into the heavens. A kind of overbearing, kind of arrogant claim almost to be so powerful that God could be emulated in that tower. And what was God's punishment for that arrogance, that pomposity, that overreach, that idolatry? It was, as the text puts it, to scatter them to the four corners of the world and to scatter their languages. So here again for Israel is a sign that through Christ and the Spirit of God working through Christ, there is a way back to unity. But it must come through the Son of God, the King of the Jews, the Messiah given in the person of Jesus. And unity is a big theme, in case it hadn't been obvious of this passage. The amazement that those who are gathered on that day experience under the power of the Spirit of God is an amazement that in their disparate, diverse, fragmented form, under the Spirit of the living Jesus Christ, resurrected and ascended, it is possible to be one, to be one with God, to be one with each other, to be one under Christ the Savior. And that unity, that message of oneness through the Spirit of the living Jesus who defeated death itself, is a message as resonant today in 2026 as it has ever been. I don't need to spell out how fragmented our modern world is, how riven with conflict, how fractured, and how not at peace it is. And yet here in Acts chapter 2, in the account that Luke gives of that day of Pentecost miracle, is the world's greatest hope for unity and reconciliation, not only across people groups, across language groups, but also within the church, because our church doesn't always model this unity brilliantly either. When I stood in that Pentecostal church at the age of 19, singing that song that suddenly moved into a language I didn't understand, I was hit between the eyes by the fact that there is always more to be gained from God. God is an endless giver, endlessly gracious, always wanting to take us beyond where we are in our Christian life. He wants to take the church into greater unity. He wants to take the church and the world into greater reconciliation across nations and tongues and tribes and people groups. But the clear message of this passage is that the hope for the world lies in Jesus Christ risen from the dead. Not in any human scheme. There are plenty of human schemes that may be informed by the Christian faith, by scriptural understanding, which is great. But any scheme that doesn't recognize that the power for unity and reconciliation comes from God Himself through Christ is doomed to fail. Amazed and perplexed, some of the people on the day of Pentecost asked in verse 12, what does this mean? The answer to that question is unfolded in the rest of the book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament. We're privileged 2,000 years on to have all of that repository of wisdom to draw upon. What it fundamentally means is that this life is not the only life. Because of the power of the Spirit of God that raised Jesus from the dead, you, if you don't know Jesus, you, if you're confused by the course of your life, have a plan, have a hope that you may inherit that same promise that Jesus declared. The promise that would spread from Judea through Samaria to the ends of the earth, the promise of new life in him. It may be that you've been a Christian a long time, but you still struggle with this business of the work of the Holy Spirit. Here in this text is a reminder that there is the opportunity, as occurred for me when I was younger, to go deeper into God through understanding more about the Holy Spirit. It may be that you are a seeker after truth. You are still struggling even with the concept of following Jesus. Here in this passage is the promise that the whole hope of the world resides in him. Because he, his whole life, was infused with the life of the Holy Spirit. So wherever you are in your journey, I trust that this passage gives you tremendous encouragement to go deeper into exploring who Jesus is. And when you do that, you understand, as the disciples did, that so much of it is integrally linked with the power of the Spirit of God who gave Jesus birth, who drove Jesus on in his ministry, who raised him from the grave, and then whom he poured out on his beloved church that we may know the truth and share it with others. Shortly we're going to share around the table, which reminds us of the meal that the first disciple shared with Jesus before he died, the Last Supper. And we will be calling down the Holy Spirit to make the bread and the wine of this ordinary meal for us, the body and blood of Christ, the transforming of ordinary life into something extraordinary. This is what the Holy Spirit of God does every day all around the world. This is what the day of Pentecost means.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

And this is your hope, my hope, the hope of the church, and the hope of the world.sgtm.org.