Rector’s Letter
With Easter being late this year we are still in the Red Letter Days. Ascension Day has just gone but that leaves Pentecost (Whit Sunday) and the Trinity Sunday, before entering a time of relative quiet with church life focusing on the basics of worship, prayer and service to our neighbours.
There are many super power films with the hero having some divine power – Superman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, but all have their weakness, their Achilles’ Heel to take the idea back to Greek mythology. Pentecost is the time when Christians celebrate the ‘power from on high’ (Luke 24:49), a time when the Holy Spirit is given to the Church so they, we, can do what God has asked through Jesus – love God, love your neighbour, love yourself.
This super power is real and dynamic, from the still small voice that directs day to day life, to raising the dead to life. It is even present in the PCC, through to the General Synod. I believe the Spirit directed the Conclave voting for the new Pope. But this power is given to fallible humans who might ignore the Holy Spirit or seek to try and control the Spirit for their own gains. It is human nature.
Growing up in the Church, as a child at each Pentecost I would get excited and think maybe this year there would be signs and wonders and the Spirit would make everything obvious and everyone would be perfect. Childhood dreams. I do very much believe that the gifts of the Spirit are available and should be at use in all churches, but I know that the Holy Spirit is not something that possesses us, but one that comes to us to challenge as well as empower, to encourage and convict, to lead us in to all Truth but one step at a time.
Just to prove that we have a way to go, the Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday when we have to explain the mystery of God as three person in one being, each distinct but never separate – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I’m glad we are still guessing, unable to explain God away.
I’m pleased we don’t have super powers invested in just a few people but the Spirit is given to all who ask, so that together we can fulfil Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:18, ‘I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God’.
Nick Law
Rector