Pembrey Parish Churches, St. Illtyd and Llandyry

Monday 1st June 2020. Sunday was Pentecost Sunday- ‘Whitsun’. Traditionally it is the Church’s Festival when we celebrate the working of the Holy Spirit in an act of great power, bringing into being the ‘early church’. The familiar reading from the Acts of the Apostles uses dramatic language to try and convey that spiritual experience: tongues of fire alighting on the Apostles and the sound of a mighty, rushing wind. They speak ‘in other languages’ and visitors to Jerusalem for Jewish Pentecost (Shavuot) heard them speak in their own language. This experience is followed by Peter’s Sermon after which, we are told by Luke, many were baptised and became part of a fellowship that ‘sold their possessions and belongings and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need’. The author of Luke-Acts was not an historian in the sense we mean it today, and like the other Evangelists, wrote ‘history through the eye of Faith’. The author of Luke-Acts was writing in the last decades of the first century, fifty or so years after the Crucifixion, and things had changed. Whilst we think of Pentecost as the ‘Birthday of the Church’, not so, at least not as we know it. Significantly, Luke tells us that these embryonic Christians were still ‘In the Temple and breaking bread in their own homes’. The split between Judaism, Jesus’ own Faith, and the early church had not yet happened. That painful experience was to come later, in the nineties of the first century, when the author of the Fourth Gospel recorded that the Jewish followers of Jesus were ‘excommunicated from the Synagogue’. So, whatever it was that happened on that Jewish Pentecost in something like the year 33 AD, it was not the sudden beginning of an Institutional Christian Church as we know it today!

That didn’t happen for another two centuries, although St. Paul had established Christian communities in Asia Minor some decades before the first Gospel was written ( Mark in about 65-70 AD). What we will find, piecing the picture together, is that Paul headed a missionary venture to the non-Jewish world and that the leaders of the ‘Jesus Movement’ (Peter and James) stayed in Jerusalem, within Temple and Synagogue worship, but with a new understanding of what it all meant. But they didn’t quite ‘get it’. One of the biggest controversies for those early communities was the friction between St. Paul and the leaders in Jerusalem. ‘Could Gentiles (that is non-Jews) become a part of the Body of Christ without being received into Jewish Faith first?’. Peter said ‘No’; Paul said ‘Yes’. ‘T’was ever thus’!

After bitter disagreement St Paul won; the Gospel is a universal message for all. The biggest change came in the year 312 AD. The Emperor Constantine was ‘converted’ to Christianity and the long years of persecution of Christians stopped. Constantine’s move was political as much as religious. Stability in the Empire could be more easily achieved if there was a ‘State Faith’ and the Council of Nicea, the First Ecumenical Council, was called in 325 AD. One outcome was the Nicene Creed, which we still recite today. The understanding of Christian Faith, that Spirit driven movement, was fixed in human words for all time. The Creed was carefully worded, many of its Clauses countering some heresy or other that had sprung up over the decades: Gnosticism, Docetism, Apollonarianism, Ebionitism to name just a few. It is from that Council, which lasted nearly 50 years(!) that we get the understanding of Christ as ‘One Person, Two Natures: Human and Divine’. Some Church historians view the Constantinian Church as being the ‘undoing’ of the Jesus Movement, because it lost something of its ‘cutting edge’ and settled down to a life of conformity to the State.

Well, what of the Spirit; that powerful catalyst that can bring about change, if not revolution? Had not Jesus Himself referred to the Spirit as blowing where it will (the Fourth Gospel) and had he not tried to explain to the Rabbi Nicodemus of the need to be ‘born from above’(again)? In other words to be open to that Spirit, bringing new insight and new understanding? It seemed that once the ‘Jesus Movement’ became an Institution there was (is) the inherent danger of thinking that its pronouncements were fixed and final. It speaks; God speaks. But, it sometimes gets things very wrong; not because it is full of bad people but because it is sometimes too obsessed with its own power and the need for security. Venture ‘into deep water’ Jesus had told His first disciples. ‘The Spirit of Truth will lead you into all Truth’; there is more to be said and done.

In this ‘Lockdown’ time I’ve been reading the autobiography of someone I greatly admire; Bishop John Shelby Spong, now in his nineties. He was Bishop of Newark New Jersey and a very able, albeit controversial, Biblical scholar. I was privileged to meet him in 1989 when he visited London for the launch of one of his many books. The autobiography is entitled ‘Here I Stand’ ( quoting words of Martin Luther). In the section of memoir on his childhood days in South Carolina he looks back with a deep sense of shame on the Church communities he was a part of. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, in his cultural environment, there were separate churches for white and black people. Segregation was the norm and, invariably, black people would occupy menial jobs in the work-force, with few exceptions. That was in the ‘Christian’, ‘Bible-believing’ South. The pages of Scripture, the narratives of both Old and New Testaments were presented as if they were all literally true, from ‘Creation’ to ‘walking on water’. No allowance was made for the literary genre of the texts, authorship or theological intent or motifs. It was, excuse the pun, a very ‘black and white’ world view. To its adherents, a cosy, ordered, content way of life, oblivious to the huge human injustices, which we still see alive today in places such as Minneapolis and in the breath-taking and varied prejudices that still fill the minds of so many pew-sitters across the world.

Pentecost. The Feast of the Holy Spirit. St. Paul has been called ‘The Apostle of the Free Spirit’; not in the sense of ‘Do as you please’, but in the sense of allowing that powerful Spirit to bring enlightenment and creativity and fullness to all human living. It was Paul who could pen the words ‘The Letter kills, but the Spirit brings Life’ and in another Epistle ‘If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit’. It is that Spirit that guides us through our troubled times at present, and, I believe, the Holy Spirit is showing us, at so many different levels, what it means to be fully human; what it means to be one humanity.

Prayers for Our Times

Lord, as we celebrate this remembrance of the
Outpouring of your Spirit,
Open our minds and hearts that we may
Receive all that you try to show us.
In the inter-racial, inter-gender dependency
We have experienced in our present challenge,
Help us to see Your power at work, not only through
Your Church, but through all who work for the Common Good,
That a new world view may dawn and Your Kingdom come. Amen

Come, Holy Spirit of the Living God,
Challenge our cosy thinking, upset our frequent
Complacency, disturb our irrational certainties
So that with You, we may see as You see
And so live your dream for the whole of Creation. Amen

Canon Dewi DaviesPembrey Parish