Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday 27 May 2007

 

What does this mean?

a sermon preached at Pentecost, 27 May 2007

by Jeremy Harvey - Reader at St. Andrew's Church

 

 

What does this mean?

 

The photo came as a pleasant shock. It was of two smiling men, laughing and standing side by side. One was Ian Paisley, the staunch and fiery Protestant,

the other Martin Mcguinness, the former IRA commander turned politician.

 

But smiling? And side by side? For years they had been enemies. They had been so far apart politically that they ‘were hardly on each other’s radar screens’. Each had repeatedly said ‘No compromise, no sell-out, no surrender.’

 

And yet there they were, just sworn in at Stormont as Northern Ireland’s First Minister & his Deputy. They had promised to run the province together for the benefit of its people. Both spoke of peace and reconciliation, and Paisley of ‘wonderful healing’, & they meant it.

 

What did that photo mean? A miracle had happened. After 40 years of the Troubles, hate no longer ruled. The Good Friday agreement had started that dramatic process. And since then there had been all sorts of minor miracles. The IRA had disbanded, the soldiers are off the streets, and now              republicans support the police. A recent general election endorsed the peace process, and the world, & almost all in Northern Ireland, want the Paisley -McGuinness alliance to get on and govern.

 

This miracle confirms that the worst of situations, no matter how terrible,

can be transformed. Swords can turn into ploughshares.

 

And ordinary people do count. Their longing for peace does get heard, it does change things. 

 

Prayer transforms both us, who pray, and the people and situations we pray about. Think of the Sundays we’ve prayed for peace in Northern Ireland! We have done that in the company of people across the world.

 

Prayer in Jesus’s name brings hope.  And it certainly works. And the hope that things can get better leads to the transformations that we call miracles. The man paralysed for 38 years obeyed Jesus’ command to pick up his mat and walk.

 

In South Africa De Klerk & Nelson Mandela agreed that apartheid had to be replaced. 

 

For Christians our expectation that miracles happen is particularly linked to Jesus’life, work, and resurrection. Despite his cruel death by crucifixion, he rose from the dead. It was a miracle he had predicted. Death could not suppress him. Since Easter we have been celebrating that astonishing fact.

 

Now 50 days on we commemorate another miracle. His friends and his mother were gathered in one upstairs room when a combination of rushing wind and flames of fire like forked tongues transformed their speech. Suddenly they were talking with tongues.

 

They rushed out into the streets of Jerusalem which bulged with pilgrims from many nations. They had come for the Feast of Weeks, which was a public holiday, hence the crowds, & the next festival after Passover.

 

Still talking, still caught up in some mysterious power, Jesus’ friends, joined the crowds. They were ordinary Galileans, not linguists or scholars. But what they were saying was understood by the pilgrims, from whatever country they had come from, each in his or her own language. ‘What does this mean?’, people asked. What is going on?

 

It was quite clear to some. They must be drunk’. ‘No’, we are not, said Peter their spokesman.  ‘It is only 9.0 a.m. What has happened is that the Holy Spirit which Jesus promised to send in his place, has come upon us as Joel foretold. Through the Holy Spirit we can dream dreams and have visions.

 

And he went on: ‘Remember how Moses saw a burning bush licked by flames

and yet it survived? Well, we’ve been licked by flames which have loosened our tongues and released new life in us.

 

‘And before Moses there was a time when men built a tower called Babel

which they thought  would reach to heaven and so challenge God. And what happened? He scattered them from there all over the earth. He confused them so that they no longer spoke one language and no longer understood one another.

 

‘The opposite has happened today’ Peter said. ‘Our hopes are being fulfilled beyond our possible imagining. And you, thanks to the miraculous gift of the Spirit, can understand what we are saying. Jesus our friend and master has risen from the dead and has returned to his, and our, father. He has given us in his place the Spirit of Truth and reconciliation. He has commanded us to baptize all peoples in his name, to make all his disciples.

 

That was part of the first sermon. And Peter, in giving it, showed that he had been transformed. In Jesus’ company he had been enthusiastic but also rash - and he had  denied his master. Yet in the power of the Spirit he had become an eloquent leader, as Jesus predicted. 

 

To return to Northern Ireland – one observer predicted that change, when it came, would come in a rush.

         

So it proved. And the Troubles ended ‘not with the bang of bombs and gunfire

but with  an outpouring of the Spirit of peace and reconciliation.’ Ian Paisley & Martin McGuinness met the press & gave tea to Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern.

 

The days before Pentecost were like that. First of all no change – no sign of the Holy Spirit, and then on the fiftieth day there was that amazing outpouring of the Spirit ‘which transformed all those it touched.’

 

Happy Birthday, then to the Church! Christ’s Body, you and me, and countless

millions who give thanks today for the coming of the Spirit.

         

Are we ready to receive it?

Are we ready to be transformed?

And, through the Spirit, to transform the world around us?

 

Jeremy Harvey

 

With thanks to Katharine Smith and Tricia Anderson; and in acknowledgement of a David McKittrik article in ‘The Independent’.

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