United Service - Churches Together in Fareham and Portchester
Holy Trinity, Fareham
Sunday 15th May at 6pm for Pentecost
Readings: Gen. 11: 1-9 and Acts 10: 34 – end
I’ve been walking around Fareham for a number of years as a private citizen. As I walk round, I pray for the town and its Churches, and every Tuesday, I remember particularly the Borough Council, the Mayor, Chief Executive, and Leader, as well as our MP. In recent weeks I’ve been remembering particularly the Festival of Faith. If prayer does nothing else (it’s certainly not telling God what he doesn’t already know!) it concentrates the mind, it deepens relationships, it sets oneself and what and who is being paid for in the heart of God.
That’s a good basis for today, Pentecost: ‘50 days’ after Easter. It was an old Jewish Festival to do with the barley harvest. And, as many of us read this morning (Acts 2: 1-21), it was on the day of Pentecost that the disciples gathered from all corners of the then known world, and instead of keeping that festival, the Holy Spirit fell on them all, enabling each one of them to declare the works of God in their own time. With the Fareham Festival of Faith in view, this is a good launch pad, a good taking off point.
But – it’s not quite as easy as that! Planning, prayer, preparation; meetings, publicity, events – with a willing sympathy to work together, and the surrender of something, never pre-determined in advance, for the benefit of the whole. A small miracle indeed! Who is to do what? What is to be said? Neutral territory is important. A sense of urgency takes over, if only because Christian faith may be ‘ticking over nicely’ in Fareham, but too many, underneath, disregard it. That includes ourselves. Mission is not something handed over, like a tin of baked beans. It is, rather, what we need to hear. And tonight’s readings give some quite challenging truths for us to attend to.
First, the tower of Babel – or ‘Confusion’ (Gen. 7: 1-9). It is a curious picture of a tower for the human race that overreached themselves and tried to be like God. It all results in confusion and many different languages. That’s not, of course, quite how different languages developed in the first place, let alone dialects. Melvyn Bragg’s book is fascinating, with its account of the English language always on the move, always absorbing new elements, whether from old Frisian, that gives us the word ‘butter’, or the American Wild West, with the word ‘toboggan’. Babel, however, is about the babble of misunderstood difference with which every organisation deals daily, especially worldwide. So with Christians: the language of words, the language of music, the language of symbolism, how much we use or don’t use of these. In my wandering ministry in South-East Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, I have regular experience on a weekly basis, when I move in and out of different communities, speaking the languages of their localities, with different flavours of Anglicanism. But it’s not just my Church that knows variations! At a recent Hampshire Church Leaders’ meeting, the local regional Baptist leader said to us that the most difficult thing he had to do on a Sunday morning before driving off to one of the Churches in his area was to decide what to wear: a suit, a sports jacket, an open-necked shirt, or a sweater. It was funny when he told me, of a Church not used to clergy wearing robes, but he was being serious.
The painstaking work of turning the babble of misunderstood difference into the Pentecost of reconciled diversity – that’s a real challenge, where different flavours are valued, and the big, noisy congregations perhaps need to realise that they can’t call the shots over the smaller ones, and that when there is talk of ‘success’, it’s not just numbers but faithfulness that matters.
This leads me to tonight’s second reading (Acts 10: 34 – end): Peter’s speech at Caesarea on his visit to Cornelius, a Gentile convert. It is so easy to skim through this episode and forget its significance. It is so easy, in fact, to read the whole of the Acts of the Apostles as one, great, trouble-free success story – a bit like some of those spoof Christmas letters, where we give our friends the sunny version of the past year, and take care to edit out the difficult parts. Acts does indeed tell us of the early Christian mission. But there is a dark side to it: clergy who couldn’t get on with each other (Paul’s refusal to have John Mark as a colleague, Acts 15: 37-39); and real failure for the Christian mission in Jerusalem, leaving a chronically weak Christian community there, a situation which persists to this day.
Most important of all, however, was the row about Gentiles and the new faith. Devout, conservative Jews wanted all male converts circumcised, whereas others, Paul included, didn’t. There is more than a whiff of this controversy in our second reading, where Peter is with Cornelius and his household, who are baptised straight away, as we hear, and Peter has to explain himself in Jerusalem in the following chapter (Acts 11: 1-18). So mission and controversy, the controversy of new territory and new situations (they floor us, because we’ve not met them before), often do go hand in hand. It’s not all sweetness and light. The real tale of Christian history is a human one, but it’s also divine, because God keeps being able to use us, in spite of ourselves. no mission is perfect, because the missionaries are human beings – and if you think otherwise, take a look at my in-tray any time!
From the babble of misunderstood difference, to the Pentecost of reconciled diversity, in tonight’s first reading. And in the second reading, from the dreamworld of the perfect Church to the real world of mission and controversy. Not that we can or should reconcile everything into a mush of compromise, nor should we look for difficulties. That would be perverse in the extreme. But we are called to walk with conviction and humility, in a spiritually bleeding world, which needs all the riches that God has assembled here tonight, and much more. There’s no simple, typecast, cardboard cut-out contemporary Church, supposedly modelled on what we think it was all like until everything went badly wrong, and bishops were invented! In the midst of the highly charged atmosphere of Peter actually meeting and talking with Cornelius the Gentile, his short speech is a beautiful summary of Luke’s gospel. (Well, Luke wrote Acts, so that should be no surprise.) We have themes such as Jesus as Lord of all, who is anointed at his baptism (Lk. 3: 22), and who after his resurrection is revealed only to those who are chosen (Lk. 24: 48), and he eats and drinks with them (Lk. 24: 30-31, 41-43), an allusion to Holy Communion, and with a message of the forgiveness of sins (Lk. 24: 47). But Peter also uses the word ‘witness’ in two senses: witnesses ‘of these things’, as Jesus tells the disciples at the ascension at the end of Luke’s gospel (Lk. 24: 48), and witnesses to Jesus, as he tells them at the other narrative of the ascension at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1: 9). So we are witnesses in two kinds of ways: passive witnesses, taking in Christ, and active witnesses, living out and proclaiming the Christian gospel. Here in Holy Trinity tonight, we are passive witnesses, taking in the gospel, in our worship and prayer, and that is essential. But we are also called to go out and live and proclaim it actively.
Let me end with a true story to illustrate active witness. Each morning I walk round Fareham Park. It’s a much valued thinking time, and folk tend to leave me alone, either because I’m obviously preoccupied, or because the dog can’t behave very well – or both! Some time ago, on an afternoon walk, I saw some youngsters, who’d just damaged a tree. They were excited (perhaps on light drugs?), and when they saw me coming, they hailed me with amused aggression. I went up and talked to them. They started on the devil and God. I stood there and did my best. I’m sure I could have done much better, but I tried not to patronise them, and speak to them in an ordinary matter of fact way. Of course they had done wrong, but I shall never forget the expression on the faces of some onlookers when I walked past them shortly afterwards. They told me I was wasting my time even talking to them.
If we stop talking to the world, and stop taking care to listen, we might as well give up and go home.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
