Receiving the Spirit
27 April 2008
It’s competition time. I’m going to read to you the lyrics of a song. You’ve got to tell me the name of the group who are most famous for singing it.
Don't leave me this way
I can't survive,
I can't stay alive
Without your love, no baby
Don't leave me this way
I can't exist,
I would surely miss
Your tender kiss
So don't leave me this way
Aaahh baby
I’m relieved to see that you all spurn that cheap gimmick which is the interactive sermon. For I’m sure you all knew at once that it was the Communards who topped the charts with that timeless classic. Indeed I’m sure I could even see some feet tapping in the choir. It’s a popular song, recorded by many groups and artistes. It clearly has deep resonances with people, and the reason is not hard to see. Those words play on a basic, primal human fear which is that of abandonment. I have for many years had a recurrent nightmare. Perhaps that is not surprising given that I was at College with two members of the Chapter of Pusey House. But this nightmare evokes memories even older than that. I am on a huge beach. All I can see around me is people – endless people. But they are all unknown to me, and they all ignore me. It is as if I don’t exist. And then I realise why – my real family have gone off and left me. I suspect it goes back to an incident on Daymer Bay in Cornwall. As a very small boy I wondered off and got lost on that huge stretch of sand and I thought I would be left there for ever. It is a fear we all have – that those who claim to love us don’t really, that our precious relationships will dissolve away to nothing, that we will be left lonely and abandoned.
The ubiquity of that fear perhaps helps us to enter into the mindset of the disciples as they gathered at the Last Supper and heard Jesus speak to them for the last time. These men had left everything to follow Jesus – homes, livelihoods, loved ones. They had sacrificed all of that out of love for this one man. And now he tells them he is going to leave them. They are to be abandoned. In the words we have just heard in the Gospel, Jesus seeks to reassure them. They are not to be left, for he is sending the Advocate, the Holy Spirit. Now I suspect that at the time, that sounded like a very poor second best. It’s like wanting a slice of Victoria Sandwich and instead being given a mouldy cheese biscuit. You can’t have Jesus, instead here’s some kind of weird ghost thing. Well how wrong that is. Later in this same meal, Jesus speaks the most extraordinary words. ‘It is to your advantage that I go,’ he says, ‘for if I do not go away the Advocate cannot come.’ In other words the gift of the Spirit is a greater gift than the actual, physical presence of Jesus. It is so easy as Christians to feel second best to the disciples, to wish that we, like them, could see Jesus face to face, touch him, eat with him, ask him our questions. But that sort of thinking forgets the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit we can know Jesus just as intimately as Peter and John and the other disciples who walked with him along the shores of Galilee. Through the Spirit, Jesus is completely present in our lives, and he will never abandon us.
And that’s not all. Look what happens to these disciples after they leave this meal. They shake off their fear and go into the world and proclaim Jesus risen. They perform miracles in his name, they stand before crowds and confound them with their understanding of the things of God. They find that, in the Holy Spirit, Jesus is not just present for them. He is present in them. In the Spirit, they are the presence of Jesus, sent to continue his prophetic work. The Incarnation does not end when Jesus returns to the Father. Jesus is still physically present in his world through his Church. He is here, now, walking the streets, ministering to his people, engaging with his world through you and me. In the Holy Spirit, we are the Incarnate Christ.
If that sounds odd, just watch as it is modelled for us in this Mass. Here at the altar we call down the Spirit . We do so first on the gifts of bread and wine, then next on the assembly gathered to receive them. And in that invocation of the Spirit, both are filled equally with Christ; bread and wine to be his body on the altar, you and me to be his body in the world. The real presence is not just about what happens to some bread and wine. It is about what happens to you and me. We receive the body of Christ. We become the body of Christ. In the Spirit we are sent out to be Christ.
That’s the theory, and let’s face it, on paper it’s a pretty good one. The trouble is, somewhere along the line it goes a bit wrong. Last year I went to see an amazing production of Benjamin Britten’s opera ‘Peter Grimes’. The second act is set on Sunday morning as the people of the Borough go off to Church. As their worship begins, out on the beach the most chilling scene is being played out. A man is rejected by his community. A neglected boy suffers abuse. A woman is beaten. The filth and squalor of sinful human life is brought horribly into the open. And meanwhile the churchgoers stand with their backs to the action, as if all were well with the world, piously singing their own, sweet songs. There is a terrible warning there for the Church. We see all around us a world filled with desperate human need; Look around you – so many fearing for the future as the global economy crumbles away, others seeking forgiveness or a fresh start, others led astray by the twisted words of those who can’t abide the Good News of Jesus Christ, others longing for something that will make sense of their lives, others wracked with pain or the agony of grief. It is to those people that the Spirit sends us to be Jesus. Yet so often we who bear that vocation stand, metaphorically or sometimes even literally, with our backs to the world, singing our own sweet songs, cheerfully oblivious to it all. Perhaps we feel threatened and, like so many threatened institutions, retreat into ourselves, wanting a smaller, purer church from which we can fly for refuge from a world that bewilders us. Perhaps we lack courage, or the confidence that the Gospel really can transform. Perhaps we’re just afraid.
‘Come, Holy Spirit.’ That must be our prayer. ‘Come, Holy Spirit.’ That is the most dangerous prayer you can pray, for once you have prayed it, you simply don’t know what might happen. The Spirit turns us round. In him there is no turning our backs to the world. We can’t hide away from human need. We are sent right into the thick of it to confront, interpret, transform. ‘Come, Holy Spirit.’ I know a parish who prayed that prayer one cold winter. Next thing they knew they had pushed back the pews and invited the homeless people from the street around to join them for a meal and sleep in the warmth of the Church. I know a parish in Sunderland that prayed that prayer. Their hall is now a centre for immigrant workers and asylum seekers and is at the forefront of efforts to build social cohesion in an area that was once a stronghold of the BNP. That is the Anglo-Catholic movement at its very best. That is the spirit of Fr Jellicoe who laboured tirelessly to clear the slums of his teeming parish and force the authorities to build decent housing. That is the spirit of the Sisters of St Margaret who alone tended to the needs of cholera victims on the streets of Plymouth, or of Fr Lowder who gave his life to the poor of a community that no one else would go near.
As we gather around this altar, the Holy Spirit is called down upon us. And that invocation impacts upon every single area of our lives. From this altar we are sent into the world to be Jesus. And because the Spirit of Jesus fills us, we don’t need to be afraid. Don’t be afraid to counter the claims of atheism and secularism and speak the name of Christ. Don’t be afraid to reach out the hand of love to the lost or the poor or the confused. Don’t be afraid to show the world another way of being human, one based not on untrammelled consumption, but on trust in the saving work of God in Christ. Don’t be afraid to be Jesus. ‘The one who believes in me will do the works that I do, and in fact will do greater works,’ Jesus said at the Last Supper. You can do the works of Jesus, for you have been filled with the Spirit of Jesus. Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful. And kindle in us the fire of your love. Amen.
The Revd Philip North Priest Administrator, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham