Tonight I’m going to start by telling you a joke. A door-to-door salesman is selling encyclopaedias. He knocks on the door of a house and when the man of the house answers, the salesman begins to expound the virtues of his product. He hasn’t got very far into his sales pitch when the prospective customer says, “It’s no good to me mate, I don’t need it.” The salesman is a bit taken aback, but nonetheless he carries on and begins to detail all the knowledge contained in the volumes he is trying to sell. Again the man of the house interrupts he and says, “Look, I told you I don’t need it; I’ve got a teenage son who knows everything.”
Those of us who have had teenage children or who remember our own teens will know that it is a rather strange and difficult time. I’m not talking here about the destructive nihilism of adolescents from disadvantaged backgrounds, but about teenagers from normal, loving, supportive families.
For one thing there is this strange mixture of idealism on the one hand and self-centredness on the other. This makes it possible to agonise about world environmental issues while maintaining a personal environment of complete squalor: to worry about the destruction of the ozone layer while the 2 week old dregs of cocoa grow all sorts of interesting cultures and the month old banana skin festers quietly under the bed.
This strange mixture also makes it possible to be passionate about world peace, while at the same time flying off the handle with anyone in the family at the slightest provocation.
Then of course there is all that dreadful insecurity. All that worrying about having the right clothes, liking the right music, having the right friends in order to fit in with peers and avoid being laughed at and held up to ridicule. At the same time, there is this seeming certainty that anything that the older generation says, particularly parents, must be outdated, old fashioned, or just plain wrong.
Sometimes it seems to me that we are spiritually adolescent. By this I mean that one the one hand we have no trouble accepting the central ideas and ideals of Christianity, but on the other hand we have great difficulty with the practical application.
We know that we need God’s forgiveness and know that God wants us to forgive others, but we often find this difficult in practice. Every time we say the bit in the Lord’s Prayer “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” while at the same time allowing grudges and resentments to fester, like the mouldy banana skins under a teenager’s bed, we are displaying our spiritual adolescence.
When we say that we desire Christ’s peace and yet continually fail to get on with our neighbours on a day-to-day level or bicker constantly with our nearest and dearest, we are displaying our spiritual adolescence.
When we say that we long for God’s reign of justice but fail to make the same allowances for other people that we make for ourselves, we are displaying our spiritual adolescence. Believing, for example, that when I speak sharply, or am offhand with you, it is entirely excusable because I am tired, or worried, preoccupied or whatever, but when you do the same it is completely inexcusable, is hardly a sign of spiritual maturity.
We also display our spiritual adolescence when we are ashamed of our spiritual clothing. By this I mean when we seek to blend in with the world around us by adopting its ways rather than standing up for Christian values.
In a book I read recently one character says “Many people want to serve God, unfortunately they often want to serve him in an advisory capacity”. Wanting to serve God in an advisory capacity, thinking we know better than him, that our way of doing something would be better than his, is that a sign of spiritual maturity. I hardly think so!
Good human parents do not seek to keep their sons and daughters marooned in childhood forever, and they certainly don’t want to keep them perpetually embroiled in the turmoil that is adolescence. In the same way God, our Heavenly Father, wants us to grow and mature and to help us he has sent his Holy Spirit. We begin to grow and mature the minute we first allow the Holy Spirit into our lives and we then find that the more we give the Spirit free reign the more we grow and the more mature we become.
Today is, of course, Pentecost and we need look no further than this morning’s and tonight’s readings from Acts to see how the Holy Spirit changed the disciples. After the crucifixion the disciples had been afraid for their lives and locked the door of the upper room when they met together. Now they were afraid no longer. The coming of the Holy Spirit transformed disciples from fear to confidence. The Holy Spirit gave them the courage to go out into Jerusalem and to declare the resurrection of Jesus to a city whose people had so recently called for his death.
The Peter we read about Acts seems very different from the Peter of the Gospels. The Holy Spirit has refined and honed his good qualities and pared away the bad. The courage to speak out, for example, remained but the words spoken are no longer impetuous and without thought, but cogent, considered and wise.
But he was still Peter. The Holy Spirit had not destroyed his essential self and replaced it with something new and alien. His basic personality remained the same, but had been refined and strengthened so that he became closer not only to what God wanted him to be, but closer also to what he himself wanted to be.
Peter’s undoubted courage was demonstrated on several occasions in the Gospels, but while Peter trusted in his own strength, it inevitably let him down at the crucial time and led him to deny Jesus. This same courage, strengthened by the Holy Spirit. becomes infinitely dependable and sure.
If we, too, want to come closer to being the mature, complete people God wants us to be, we must day by day invite the Holy Spirit to fall afresh upon us and we must pray constantly for the grace to let the Spirit guide our thoughts and actions.
The Holy Spirit does not invade us unasked but if we truly wish to receive it, it is there for each one of us for the asking. And if we truly want the Holy Spirit to enter our lives, it will be because we want to change and will welcome the changes that the Spirit will bring. It will also mean that we have recognised our inability to bring these changes about on our own and have realised our need for God’s grace.
St Paul tells us in Galatians that the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. I can’t, of course, speak for you, but I know that these are all things which I could do with more of in my life.
At the end of the Eucharist there is a prayer which we use only occasionally at St Mary’s, but I think it is one of the most beautiful modern prayers. Part of it goes like this “May we who share Christ’s body live his risen life, we who drink his cup bring life to the world, we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.” This is how it should be. God’s Spirit should be in us and influence everything that we do. It should shine from the love in our eyes, it should speak from the wisdom, humility and goodness that comes from our mouths, and be evident in the kindness and patience of our actions.
