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Thought for the
Week 11 May 2008 – Pentecost Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday, dear Church, Happy Birthday to You!
In our
reading from the Acts of the Apostles today, we are following on from last
Sunday’s reading, when we jumped back some twenty years from the last few
Sundays. Here we are now in 32 or
perhaps 33 AD, just a few weeks after the death of Jesus on the cross, on the
worst of all days in human history, and the first Easter Day, the best of all
days in human history. Not
surprisingly, there is a level of confusion over exactly how the birth of the
Church took place. Matthew and Mark
pass over it altogether, although some later manuscripts add a few extra
verses, almost certainly written after the rest of their Gospels, and almost
certainly by somebody else, which give some account of Jesus commissioning
the Church to do what it actually does.
Perhaps for Matthew and Mark, the Church has its roots in the words
and actions of Jesus, and any specific act that marked out the beginning of
the Church is unnecessary. John,
writing a generation later, integrates the whole thing, and sets the giving
of the Holy Spirit in the context of the Easter evening appearance of
Jesus. After a few years’ flirtation
with a season of Pentecost, the Church takes John’s line in the current
version of the Calendar, setting Pentecost firmly in the context of the
Easter Season. Luke,
who gives us the fullest (if not quite the only) account of Jesus’ birth,
also gives us the fullest account of the Church’s birth. For Luke, this is not a thing which happens
just in Galilee, nor even in an upper room in Of
course, the truth is that what ever day you count as her Birthday, there were
many, many things that went into the forming of the Church, and Easter is,
literally, crucial to the whole business.
Do you
say “Bless you!” when somebody sneezes?
I do, but then the Bishop charges all his priests to take every
opportunity to bless God’s people.
Some people think this rather good custom comes from the days of the
great plague, like the nursery rhyme, “Ring-a-ring of roses, a pocket full of
posies - Atishoo! Atishoo! We all fall down.” Sneezing
was often the first symptom of the plague, and so, they claim, the habit of
blessing somebody who sneezed arose, in the hope that the blessing might stop
a sneeze turning into something much worse. In
fact, the tradition is very much older than that; indeed nobody really knows
just how old it is. Let me introduce
you to a theological term, for which you would need a truly enormous
dictionary – exhufflation. In most of
the ancient creation stories, including the second of the two creation
stories in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis, God breathes life
into man. It is a very ancient concept
indeed that life and breath are bound up together, and it is only in the last
few years that we have been able to keep people alive when they couldn’t
breathe for themselves. Like
many sacramental acts, exhufflation works in two directions. At the creation of man, God breathes life
into us, and when we die, we breathe our life out with our last breath,
returning God’s gift of life to Him, as we entrust ourselves to his loving
care. So, in the days when everybody
believed in ghosts and demons, it was thought that you could breathe out an
evil spirit that had entered you. In
some traditions, an exorcist would breath upon you, to force any such demons
out. That is what exhufflation is. And that is the origin of saying “Bless
you” when somebody sneezes – they might be having not just an ordinary
sneeze, but a theological sneeze, sneezing out a devil, and so God’s blessing
will stop any demons filling the vacuum. In our
Gospel today, John tells us, that on the evening of that first Easter Day,
Jesus breathed on the Disciples, that they might receive the Holy
Spirit. In the
Acts reading, God’s breath is a few days later, and rather more violent –
Saint Luke describes it in the same words that the writer of Genesis uses to
describe the Holy Spirit: “A noise like a mighty, rushing wind”. There
were three “Pilgrim Festivals” in the Jewish calendar, Pesach, Pentecost and
Tabernacles. They were called Pilgrim
festivals because all adult male Jews were required to make a pilgrimage to
the All
three probably had their origins in the agricultural cycle: Pesach
was at the time of the Barley Harvest, Pentecost
at the time of the Wheat Harvest, and Tabernacles
at the time of the gathering in of all crops and fruit before winter. Certainly
most Ancient Near Eastern religions kept festivals at these times of the
year, and perhaps the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, celebrated them
too. Since
the Josianic Reforms (King Josiah ruled over Pesach
was the time when the Passover was kept, the founding event of the faith, and
of the nation of the Jews. At
Passover, God had brought the children of Pentecost
commemorates the time when the Law was given to Moses on Tabernacles
commemorates the forty years when the Children of Israel were lead by God
through the wilderness, from For us
Christians, Easter happened at the Passover, and Easter is the new initiative
of God, which brings us all out of the slavery of sin. Similarly,
at Pentecost, God sent his Holy Spirit to empower the disciples and found his
Church. For us,
Tabernacles is still going on. During
the feast of Tabernacles, the Jews would build little shelters of branches,
and sleep out in them, as a reminder of the nomadic lifestyle of their
forefathers in the wilderness. Every
reformer in Judaism would cry, “To your tents, O Israel!” recalling the Jews to a purer, simpler and
holier lifestyle, when they were single-mindedly searching for God, and all
too aware of the impermanent nature of life on earth, expressed vividly in
having to live in tents. For us
Christians, we too are on a journey through the wilderness, which is this
world, led, like the ancient Israelites, by God our Father, in search of his
heavenly Kingdom. By and
large, the same people would come to Peter
who had sworn with an oath that he did not know Jesus, was not the only one
who betrayed Him, and then came back to follow Him in faith. Paul, at whose feet the crowd had laid
their coats while they were stoning Saint Stephen, was not the only one who
betrayed Him, and then came back to follow Him in faith. The crowd who shouted “Crucify him!” and
“We have no King but Caesar!” and “His blood be upon us, and upon our
children”, were not the only ones who betrayed Him, and then came back to
follow Him in faith. No, my dears, the
fact is that all of us have betrayed Him.
All of us are sinners. All of
us let Him down time and time again, but we come back to Him, and try to
follow Him in faith. But the
important thing is that He loves each and every single one of us anyway, even
though we are sinners. The
crowd who cried, “His blood be upon us, and upon our children”, spoke truer
than they knew. For it is his blood
which heals us, his blood that makes us new, his blood which opens for us the
Father Charles Howard: Anglican
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