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Yesterday Bishop Michael Curry stole the show at the Royal Wedding - with the power of his sermon. Apparently according to the BBC there was an ipad in front of him but to the BBC’s astonishment he didn’t even refer to it. A friend commented to me that during the service the congregation were so secular that most of them just of them just mumbled the Lord’s Prayer - yet when Bishop Michael preached - he held the whole of the chapel spell bound. There was something about that sermon - because there was power in the preacher who preached it. Wouldn’t you like something of that power?
There was a young lady who worked in an enormous factory, one of the largest factories of its kind in the world. One day she confided to her pastor that she’d have to quit. What’s the matter? he asked. Doesn’t the factory have enough orders to keep you going? “No, it’s not that. They have more orders than they can fill, but they haven’t got enough electricity to keep all the machines going at once, and my machine has to be shut down part of the week. I lose so much time and pay. The trouble is that they have more machinery than power.”
That can happen to us, more machinery than power. We need power if we’re to deal with our lives so that we’re kept in the way that leads to life. We need power, power to make the changes necessary for us to be all God created us to be. (1)
Today is the day of Pentecost when the Apostles, Our lady, Jesus’s brothers and a number of other early Christians were gathered praying and power fell upon them in the person of the Holy Spirit.
“they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers….
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.(Acts 1:13-14, 2:1-2)
Imagine what it would be like to be there on that morning when that happened. Imagine!
People are speaking in tongues. Peter preaches about sons and daughters prophesying, young men seeing visions and old men dreaming dreams.
3000 people were converted in that day. And a church began in which gifts were poured out. Gifts of healing. Gifts of teaching. Gifts of preaching. Gifts of of prophesy. Gifts of power.
And that church has not gone away! There have been times down history when these gifts of the Spirit have been less common - but the Spirit has never stopped working. And times when people have turned back and asked for them these gifts have emerged in full force.
When John Wesley’s revival took place in the 18th century, such gifts began to re-emerge and certain people began to criticise - strange how when you do God’s work, some people will always criticise - Why were such gifts around now when they had not been around for 1600 years asked the critics.
Wesley replied “The reason why tongue speaking and similar gifts had disappeared, was that ‘dry, formal, orthodox men’ had begun to ‘ridicule’ such gifts because ...they themselves did not possess them."
Let me tell you something about God. There will always be new surprises he has in store for you. New gifts for you to exercise yourself and new gifts for you never to have but to witness powerfully at work.
As Christians we are like that woman in the factory. The job as a Christian seems enormous. There is so much work to do. There are thousands of people out there - just literally out there locally - who don’t know Jesus. Where do you and I start to reach them? Where do we find the energy to do what needs to be done? People are hungry for gospel, just like that lady’s factory that had no shortage of orders coming in. But it’s not enough just to have orders or even machines. We need power.
And when that power is offered - we can ridicule it like the “dry formal orthodox men” whom John Wesley speaks of. Or we can hunger for it.
There’s the gift of tongues. If you are good at praying, you don’t need the gift of tongues. But many of us struggle to pray. We know we want to pray for our friend who has just their job or who’s marriage is on the rocks or who has just been diagnosed with MS - or just who doesn’t know Jesus. But we run out of words and we don’t know what to say. In the second reading we heard, Paul (who clearly struggled to pray himself) tells us - “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8:26-27)
When you pray in tongues - it’s like: you open the mouth. You decide whether to make noise or not, but you are not choosing what words to say. The Spirit gives you the syllables. And in your minds eye you can picture the person you are praying for - and you pray these words which may sound like nonsense but which convey the very depth of the heart. The sighs too deep for words …[where] the spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God”
There’s the gift of healing.
This year at the On Fire Conference my friend Angela Southern stood up and shared her testimony about her cancer. Her cancer was very severe. She was going need first radiotherapy to shrink the lump then surgery to remove it and then possibly ongoing treatment. It was going to be a hard slog. Well while the radiotherapy was going on, her friends were praying for her. Well it came to her operation. They went to remove the tumour - and it was totally gone. The doctors couldn’t believe it. The radiotherapy should have made a little bit of a difference - but not that much.
Or there’s Mandy Pratt who each year brings a group to the Walsingham Youth Pilgrimage. A couple of years back she stood up to share her testimony at the Youth Pilgrimage. She had been diagnosed with severe irreversible Macular degeneration. She was told that in a matter of months or years she would be blind. She was devastated. Her friend brought her one quite weekend to Walsingham to ask Our Lady to pray for her. It’s a powerful place Walsingham and when we join our prayers not just with those of Mary but with centuries of pilgrims, there is power in the prayer. And as hands were laid on Mandy, a deep sense of peace came over her. That’s what her friend had wanted - that her sense of devastation would go away and she would be in peace. But the Holy Spirit didn’t leave it there. Mandy went back to see her doctor who did another test and couldn’t believe his eyes. There was no trace of the Macular degeneration at all. Apart from a little bit of short sightedness, there was nothing wrong with her eyes whatsoever.
Now those are two dramatic cases of healing. Some cases are less dramatic. And some people for reasons we don’t understand - just aren’t healed or at least not physically. And yet - so often - when the doctors say nothing can be done, the Holy Spirit does something. Amen?
And then there is the God who speaks. What the bible calls “prophecy”.
It can happen in many ways.
Sometimes it’s gentles. As the late Billy Graham said “God often gives us an inner conviction or prompting to confirm which way He wants us to go. This prompting comes from the Holy Spirit.”
But sometimes - as Gina Napoli puts it “When the Holy Spirit demands attention, He clunks you on the head.”.
I still remember a sermon from over 20 years ago. The priest described how before he had been ordained he had been youthworker of a small and rather failing youth group. Then tragically one of the teenagers died. He had to lead the first youth group session after the death and he hadn’t a clue what to say. That night - and he says this has never happened to him before and never happened since - that night he woke in the middle of the night and heard an audible voice telling him exactly what to say.
The next day he turned up at the youth group session. It was packed. All the kids who never normally turned up had turned up full of questioning, anger and pain. And he spoke those audible words he heard. And they spoke directly to the hearts of the young people. Nothing could take away from the tragedy of the loss of the young man. But those words brought such realism and emotional healing that the youth group was changed. Lives were changed. And a group that had been struggling suddenly became overflowing. A memorial to the young man- but also a memorial to listening to what God is saying.
Amidst all the times when God has whispered gently, I’ve had a few occasions when God has clunked me on the head. Two I would like to share.
The first was when I was 20. I was in the Co-op supermarket in Oxford. I had already for several years been exploring the possibility of ordination. While I was in the queue, a complete stranger came up behind me. “Excuse me” he asked “Are you thinking of offering yourself for the ministry?” “What? Why do you say that? Do I know you from somewhere” - it turned out that this man was from out of town. He just happened to be visiting that day and had never seen me before. “But sometimes God tells me to say these things.”
I’ll come to the second in a moment. But while I can’t promise you that God will clunk you on the head like that, I do encourage you to listen out for his gentle whispers. Often God may put a nudge in your heart. Or perhaps while you are praying he may put a picture in your imagination, or a literal word, or a sentence of Scripture. And like the man in the supermarket, that picture or word or verse might not be for you. You might be meant to share it. I still remember a word that God gave Gladys Taylor to share with me when I first arrived at this parish. In a little while we will have a time of listening to God, and if you think God may have put anything on your heart - don’t worry if you are wrong - it’s always OK to get things wrong - but share it.
And of course these are not the only gifts of God. There’s people with gifts of evangelism - not just like you or me sharing their faith, but almost every conversation they have leads to someone coming to Christ. Or there’s people with gifts of hospitality. There’s people with gifts of administration to make things happen. There are people like Bishop Michael Curry whose gifts of preaching can hold a nation spellbound as he talks about the power of God’s love. There are many gifts.
Back then to the second time God clunked me over the head - which wasn’t comfortable.
It was April 2015 at the On Fire conference. I had been here at St Barnabas for a few months after having had to leave a really difficult situation in a previous parish. I went up for prayer ministry. I found myself keeling to the floor under the power of the Spirit - and the person praying for me shared a word. “The next year is going to be one the worst years of your life”. I thought “you are hearing God wrong. Last year was one of the worst years of my life…” But within less than 12 months I had been through a major bereavement and then while my was dying, my marriage fell apart.
And one the things that got me through that really horrible time - was knowing that if God could warn me about it, then God had things under control.
I didn’t say things with the Holy Spirit were comfortable…
Things weren’t comfortable on the day of Pentecost when people at first thought the disciples were drunk - but then 3000 people were converted.
Things weren’t comfortable when the gentile Cornelius was converted and the early church had to rethink its whole way of doing church.
Things weren’t comfortable yesterday when an African-American Archbishop preached a sermon of the sort never heard before in Windsor Castle - yet the nation was held spellbound.
As Pope Francis puts it -
“To put it simply: the Holy Spirit bothers us. Because he moves us, he makes us walk, he pushes the Church to go forward. And we are like Peter at the Transfiguration: 'Ah, how wonderful it is to be here like this, all together!' ... But don't bother us. We want the Holy Spirit to doze off ... we want to domesticate the Holy Spirit. And that's no good. because he is God, he is that wind which comes and goes and you don't know where. He is the power of God, he is the one who gives us consolation and strength to move forward. But: to move forward! And this bothers us. It's so much nicer to be comfortable.”
(1) sermon by Fr Paul Andrew on this site
(2) Pope Francis, Encountering Truth: Meeting God in the Everyday
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