Day of Pentecost 2025

James preaches on the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost — the rushing wind and tongues of fire that transformed a frightened group of disciples into a fearless, boundary-crossing community of witnesses.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

And so, Heavenly Father, on this day of Pentecost we pray, send your Holy Spirit as we open your words together, that we may be conformed to the image of your Son. Amen. One of the great challenges in sermon writing on Pentecost, although I suppose you could say this for most Sundays in the church's calendar, is that the uh the the metaphors and the images and the pictures stack one on top of each other and inform one another so beautifully that it's often hard to know how to talk about anything without talking about everything, and you find yourself uh kind of into the three-hour mark and we still haven't gone home. So I'm not going to subject that to you uh this morning. But because of that, what I'd like to do is just take one very specific element in our um thinking about Pentecost this morning and kind of use that to crack open the nut and we'll go from there. I'd like us to think specifically about language and about communication and about what it might mean that when the Holy Spirit fell on those first disciples in Pentecost, they were able to communicate across language divides and what that might mean for us this morning. So if you want to follow along in your Bibles, you can open to Acts 2, which was the first reading in our order of service. That's where we're going to spend most of our time today. Little known company, tech company called Google, had its uh developer conference about 10 days ago, it was sometime last week. Uh at this point in the year, all the major tech companies are having their developer conferences. They're a very specific kind of conference where the uh the tech industry speaks to the people who are writing the code and developing the kind of background software upon which the uh the stuff that we see actually functions. And the other thing that Google does at its developer conference is reveal some of the upcoming technologies that it's either created or is in the works that they think will be out at some point in 2026 that they're particularly proud of and that they want people to be engaged with going forward. It's a really fascinating show. I should say it's fascinating if you're a geek, but you know, please don't feel you have to be fascinated by it. Uh there are two particular technologies that I was interested in as I was watching the the developer conference uh last week. The first was, and I'm sure we're all familiar with this, even if we've not used it before, you might not be a techie yourself or even own a laptop, but you must be aware of this developing conversation that's going on around AI and around large language models and the capacities for commute for computers to talk or at least look like they're having genuine conversations with the humans interfacing with them. It's quite amazing the technology that they're developing. And more important than the technology itself, I think, is the in idea that is being talked about in culture that computers can now really talk to us and with us. And then the second technology was uh this translation interface that Google have created that means that they can now, in real time, translate a conversation between two speakers of different languages. So you imagine you're on Zoom and you're talking to someone in Spain and they can only speak Spanish and you can only speak English. Google has a technology now that means you can have a conversation, just like you and I would have a conversation in Czechs and Grays, but the software will do all the translating back between Spanish and English. We're entering a world of science fiction, and it may be soon that to use a different literary reference, if you've read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we'll all just have a little babelfish in our ears translating everything for us so that we never have to worry about uh language divides ever again. One of the reviewers of this conference said this, and it caught my attention. He said, Now that they've realized this technology, Google's next task will be to build a tower that reaches to the heavens. So direct reference to the story in Genesis chapter 11, where the people uh in Babylon, who are all speaking with one language, decide that they're going to build a tower to the heavens. They say this come, let us build a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we can make a name for ourselves. And then God, rather than allowing that to happen, uh confuses their languages and scatters them across the face of the earth. It's a mythic story designed to explain or answer the question: why are there so many tribes and languages around the world in Genesis chapter 11? There are some fascinating parallels, though, between the story of the Tower of Babel and our Pentecost reading in Acts 2 today. Let me just offer you some parallels and some thinking about the way that the story in Acts chapter 2 recapitulates or redeems the story of the Tower of Babel. In the Tower of Babel, they start with one language, they end up with many. In Acts chapter 2, there are many languages represented, and yet they all hear one voice. In Genesis chapter 11, God confuses human languages, but in Acts chapter 2, God clarifies human speech by empowering the speakers through his Holy Spirit. Genesis 11 is about humans united in rebellion and then scattered. But in Acts chapter 2, it's about the worshipers who have gathered and choose to glorify God rather than glorify their own name. In Genesis chapter 11, it's about human effort reaching up to the heavens. And in Acts chapter 2, the Spirit falls and comes down upon the people. In the Tower of Babel, it's about going from unity to division. But in Acts chapter 2, in the coming of the Spirit, it's about the divided nations becoming unified. So with the coming of the Spirit, these Christians are suddenly able to communicate miraculously to all the major languages of the known world. That's why Luke spends the time reciting all of those difficult names that Gene had to read for us. But should it worry us now that Google is creating a technology that seems to replicate this miracle that we have in Acts chapter 2? Or to ask the question slightly differently, can the coming of the Spirit be reduced to a technology of communication? A simple technology of information translation? Well, obviously not. That's why I asked the question. There's a little bit of rhetoric for you there, but I'd like us to spend the rest of our time together asking why not? What is the difference between what Google has created, wonderful technology as this is, and what we're celebrating this morning with the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost? Here's the difference in a nutshell that the Spirit does not simply download information to us, he transforms the receiver, he transforms you and I. So this is not about information download. This is about human beings, you and I, being transformed by the coming of the Spirit. And let me suggest two ways in which the Spirit transforms us. Firstly, he transforms our tongues, and secondly, he transforms our ears. When I say tongues, of course, I mean the words that come out of our mouth, the tone of voice with which we speak, the words that we're given to say, and maybe even the spirit will change the things that we want to say. I mentioned before that my background is in the Pentecostal and charismatic tradition before I found my way into liturgical worship. And one of my criticisms of that tradition, which I love dearly, is that it often emphasizes the gifts of powerful speech, of tongues, of prophecy, of miraculous words of knowledge, and so often fails to speak gently to one another. Be my criticism of us here this morning. That we love liturgy, beautifully crafted words, collects, and lyrics that have painstakingly spent time writing and getting down. We love it when our choir sings, uses their mouths and their voices so beautifully to lift our voices, lift our spirits in worship. But do we spend time caring about if we're being kind to one another in the words that we say? I'm sorry if this sounds a little bit basic, but I think it's where we need to start. When the Spirit comes, he will transform us into the sort of people who speak in a particular way, nicely, gently, but carefully to one another. We won't be a people who gossip, who slander one another. We will speak tenderly to each other. We will speak the truth, but we'll speak it in love. And maybe also the spirit will empower us to speak the good news, to speak the gospel to people who need to hear it. So you may well hear the spirit speaking to you to turn to your neighbor and say, Can I pray for you? Or to turn to your neighbor and say, I will pray for you when I do my prayers this evening. Say, I I understand you're having a hard time. Can I say a quick prayer for you? In fact, I was meeting with a congregation member recently who was telling me of a home visit they did, and they said this. I was visiting so and so, and I don't know what came over me, but I offered to pray with them. Never done that before in my life. But as I was sitting there with them, I just felt I had to. That's called the Holy Spirit, transforming us into the sort of people who speak in a sort of way. So the Spirit will transform our tongues. The Spirit will also transform our ears. Here's a quote from the theologian Paul Tillich, who says this the first duty of love is to listen. The first duty of love is to listen. What an incredible act of love to actually listen to someone. I think we all know what it feels like to be in a conversation with someone where you get the strong impression that when they're being silent, it's just to give their vocal cords a rest before they get to speak again. I'm sure we've all been that person, so caught up in the things that we're thinking about and the stuff we need to say that we're not really paying any attention to what the other person has to say to us. And what I'm discovering is that the real difficulty is to choose to listen again to the person you've been talking with for maybe decades, and you know exactly what they're going to say. But you choose, as an act of love, to listen again. When I was a teenager, I was mentored by our youth worker in the part of Southeast London where we lived. He was an amazing man called Mark, who's now a vicar in Cambridge. And uh he and I would just sit and talk uh, you know, once a week in a coffee shop after school. And I was a teenage boy, so I was coming to him with all sorts of different things, but they were not the things that he was interested in. And I walked away one week when I think I'd been particularly banal and thought to myself, why? Why is he wasting his time with me? I realized how much he must love me to want to just sit and listen to a teenage boy trying to work his way through the world. Jesus says to his disciples again and again, if you have ears to hear, would you listen? The point is we all have ears, but do you have the ears to hear what Jesus and the Spirit is saying to you today? Have you heard the gospel and really listened to it? Have you heard the voice of Jesus, the voice of your heavenly father, saying that you are his child and that he loves you. When the Spirit comes, we'll cry, Abba Father. We need to hear the voice of God calling us forward. And it's so easy to become to become dull to the voice of the Spirit.

unknown 13:43

C.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

S. Lewis wrote a magnificent series of books about the world of Narnia. And I just want to read a quote from the magician's nephew. This is the the prequel to the uh the Lion the Witch in the Wardrobe, where C.S. Lewis narrates the creation of Narnia. Narnia is created by Aslan singing the world into existence. And uh the book's called The Magician's Nephew because there are really two main uh characters: there's the magician's nephew and there's the magician. The magician is called Andrew, Uncle Andrew, and they both find themselves in Narnia and respond very differently to what they find there. And the book the children are trying to work out why Uncle Andrew can't hear Aslan's voice. And this is the explanation. When the great moment came and the beasts began to speak, Father Andrew missed the whole point. For when the lion had first begun singing long ago when it was still dark, he had realized that that noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things that he did not want to think or feel. Then, when the sun rose, he saw that the singer was a lion. Only a lion, he said to himself, and he tried his hardest to make himself believe that he wasn't singing and had never been singing. Only the roaring of a lion, any lion that we would find in a zoo in our own world. And the longer and more beautifully the lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew made himself believe that he could not hear anything but roaring. Now, the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that very often you succeed. I think C.S. Lewis C.S. Lewis's warning there should absolutely terrify us. Imagine being there in the first century, as the Spirit of God descended on the disciples, you're watching a miracle unfold before you, fire is falling from heaven, and you have become such a practiced dullard that you end up assuming that the people involved are just drunk. That can happen to any one of us. That can happen to you and to me. I have to, I find it so hard to listen to the voice of God, to really hear the spirit, to silence the constant chatter in my mind or the technology that's always trying to distract me, and to really listen, listen to the spirit, the voice of God. When the spirit comes, he will transform our ears so that we become people who listen. People who listen to Jesus, people who listen to one another. So, in conclusion, the coming of the Spirit does not just provide the believer with some sort of communication technology. This is not a download that allows us to talk to people in different languages. The coming of the Spirit is a gracious invitation for each of us to be transformed by the life of God made manifest. The result of this transformation will be, should be, an ability to communicate across the dividing lines that normally separate us. Lines of class and social economic status, lines of ethnicity and religion, the dividing that comes from conflict. The Spirit will transform us, transform our speech, transform our ability to listen and to hear, transform our willingness to understand the other. So be aware, there are technologies coming, and some are already here that will look and sound miraculous. Text and speech generation, real-time translation, communication technologies that seem to rival the experience of those first disciples on the day of Pentecost. That's all well and good. I'm glad those technologies exist. I'm sure they will, I hope they will, improve our lives. But let's not confuse it with the work of the Spirit to transform us into a people who speak and listen, such that God's life and his love would be made manifest in our community. Amen.