WHITSUNDAY 2008
“And
they continued stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking
of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2.42).
In nomine Patris...
Prayers. When we think of prayer, we might consider
set prayers such as we have in our Book of Common Prayer. We might also think of our personal prayers,
which hopefully are a balance of adoration, thanksgiving, confession and
supplication; but, which I suspect for most of us are more in the supplication
part, “Dear God, please heal Aunt Polly of the dreadful cancer which has struck
her down.” Lastly, and sadly neglected,
there is the practice of mental prayer in which, after “tuning in to God” and
seeking His inspiriation by doing something like saying or singing a hymn such
as our Communion hymn today, “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire”, and then
quieting the noise in our minds, we meditate on a particular passage of
Scripture without necessarily forming any words, but rather by visualizing
ourselves being present. We might think
of the feeding of the 5,000; or of Jesus before Pilate; or of our Lord’s
Crucifixion; or of sitting at Jesus’ feet on the mountainside while He said the
beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount.
From such meditation, we should acknowledge our shortcomings, and seek,
with God’s assistance, to replace those vices with virtues – combining the
efforts of our weak and faulty wills with the perfect will of God to move ever
so slightly and slowly in that direction.
Our
Lesson for today, Whitsunday, the Feast of Pentecost is, not surprisingly, the
wondrous event as recorded by Luke for us in Chapter 2 of the Acts of the
Apostles, often referred to as the birthday of the Christian Church. While it might be as good a choice as any
other New Testament episode for meditation on in mental prayer, before I
pondered what is to be learned in terms of my own sanctification, I might
rather have been moved to ask myself, “How would I have reacted to such an
event?”
Among
the things that we should note from that passage is the presence of a strong
wind (“a mighty rushing wind”) and of tongues of fire which “sat upon each of
them”. Wind and fire were ancient
symbols of power. Recall the times: of
the Breath of God, moving over the waters at the beginning of creation; of breathing
life into lifeless clay; of the Breath of God in the valley of dry bones in
Ezekiel. Likewise, the pillar of fire by
night which led the Israelites during their sojourn in the wilderness after the
Exodus from Egypt; the fire from heaven that consumed all that Elijah had
prepared in his confrontation with the prophets of Baal; the chariots of fire
surrounding Elisha and so forth.
I
suspect that the Apostles were not expecting either of these signs; but, when
they did appear, they may possibly have recalled what Jesus had said to them 10
days earlier, just prior to His Ascension and as we heard read on the Feast of
the Ascension, “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come
upon you” (Acts1.8a). Whether they may
have recalled these words of our Lord before they began to exhibit the quite
unexpected signs of the Divine presence within them, we can only speculate.
And
surely here is what is equally important about the episode, at least as
important that the Apostles began to speak in languages other than their own. If we read the entire verse of Chapter 1 -
our Lord’s last words prior to His Ascension according to St. Luke, we hear what
is to be the purpose of the power that is to be given them on the Day of
Pentecost, “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon
you: and ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in Judaea, and in
Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”
Now
to be sure, on that particular day in Jerusalem, that the disciples did begin
to speak the “wonderful works of God” in a variety of foreign languages is what
got the attention of a large group of some proselytes, but mostly visiting Jews
from various nations to which they had been scattered and had learned to speak
the various local non-Hebrew languages which we hear listed for us in today’s
Lesson. And, even moreso, to be sure,
the Divine Presence, as manifested first in the rushing mighty wind and tongues
of fire was clearly the source of the ecstatic spiritual experience with its subsequent
manifestation in the Apostles themselves of glorious visions expressed in a
bewildering multitude of languages.
What
a spectacularly appropriate way for the Christian Church to be born.
Now
to be very honest, when we read the rest of Acts, and the pastoral Epistles, it
is quite clear that subsequently, their being “witnesses unto Jesus … unto the
uttermost parts of the world” which caused the rapid growth of the nascent
Church was not done by speaking in languages foreign to themselves. They preached plainly and simply about Jesus
and His Resurrection; previously cowardly and marginally faithful men were
given the power as provided by our Lord to be steadfast witnesses of the Way,
the Truth and the Life. Indeed,
immediately upon this manifestation, when they were accused of being drunk, St.
Peter preached what is often styled as the first Christian sermon, and it was
remarkably direct, frank and uncomplicated by further strange manifestations –
except of course, that it precipitated the Baptism of 3,000 converts on the
spot.
Throughout
the history of the Christian Church, including even the Apostolic age, there
have been groups of believers who have insisted that this peculiar gift of
speaking foreign languages is not just a
normal, but a necessary mark of the Christian
experience. “If you don’t speak in
tongues, you’re not a real Christian.”
Bishop Mercer was wont to observe on occasion that there are many people
who are just plain wired that way; for them, real Christianity must be an
experience of overwhelming emotional fervour and ecstatic experience.
For
such people, the subtleties of doctrine, the nature of the relationship of the
Three Persons of the Holy Trinity (which Fr. Peter will explain to us next
Sunday), the form of the settled institution of the Church and her hierarchical
ministry are seen as massive impediments to what should be the true expression
of Christianity. In contrast, they hold
that “freedom of Spirit” is paramount, by which it often seems that they mean
the absolute authority of one’s own feelings and personal opinions.
However,
Pentecost is not just about ecstatic experience with manifestations of an
extraordinary gift of God the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit of God is a Spirit of order, not of chaos. If an individual’s spiritual life is not
nurtured, and formed, and shaped under the influence of clarity of doctrine in
the settled institution of the Church with her regular and ordered forms of
worship, then the danger of chaos is very great indeed. At the end of the very Chapter in question,
after St. Peter’s sermon, St. Luke tells us that, “they continued stedfastly in
the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in
prayers”.
In
actual fact, for reasons of which I am unaware, the translators of the King
James dropped what I should think is a rather important definite article at the
very end of that sentence. The Greek of
the Textus Receptus states, “... in breaking of bread, and in the
prayers.” “The prayers”, not just
“prayers” as the King James has it, being of course the regular prayers that
the very earliest Christian Church had inherited from synagogue and
This
ordered form of worship was so far as we know, and in spite of contentions
otherwise, the norm of the early Christian Church. Many like to cite 1 Cor. 14, with St. Paul’s
thoughts about “speaking in tongues” in church, as further proof on top of our
passage from Acts, that this particular gift is a necessary part of any true
Christian’s makeup. However, if one
reads that entire chapter, it is abundantly clear that
It
is certainly no secret that our TAC form of worship is one of fairly controlled
decency and order as St. Paul exhorts, not unlike we understand that the early
Church generally practised; but, what if our little church were suddenly to be
filled with a rushing mighty wind and tongues of fire just as unexpectedly as
on that first Pentecost of the Christian Church were to descend on Peter and
Louise and George and Agatha, and they all began to speak in Mandarin,
Portugese, Cree and Russian? Well,
certainly Doug Ellis and Dr. Henry could translate for us; but what would be
our reaction otherwise?
ANNUNCIATION OTTAWA 2008 +CR