Pentecost at Maldon

Someone asked me if I could put up all of my friend, Rob Wiggs' sermon from last Sunday. He's kindly allowed me to do so. So here is what in the trade, I believe, is called a guest post.

Pentecost at Maldon 19^th May 2013

As you probably know, I am really interested in envy and rivalry, in inferiority and superiority, and in how we can get these monkeys off our backs and live in freedom and joy. When you are young and worldly you worry about people being more beautiful than you, more popular, more clever and better at sport.  And to get free of these things is really important. They stop us being happy. Ok, but what are the religious forms of inferiority that persist among Christians into later life? People who are bothered by God, and I am deeply in favour of being bothered by God, worry that they haven’t really experienced God, and they look at other people and say, what is it that they have that I haven’t got? Wouldn’t you agree that you only have to look at Father xxx and John xxx and it is just obvious that they are oozing with a knowledge of God that the rest of us don’t understand?

But, of course, this is all rubbish. Let me tell you something that a famous Indian priest, Anthony de Mello, taught. All you have to do to experience God’s Holy Spirit is simply to breathe in. Anthony de Mello spent a huge amount of his life teaching people to breathe in, and hence to receive God’s Holy Spirit. When you have learned how to breathe in you will stop worrying about other people and whether you are beautiful because you will have received God’s Holy Spirit, and nothing else will matter again in the same way. There is nothing living that is not enlivened by God’s Spirit. What must we do to be saved? Breathe.

When I was young in the late 1960s people and early 1970s people used to come up to you and ask you if you were saved. I don’t think they do that now. But it used to worry me. I was never quite sure if I was saved. And then in the late 1970s the question changed. People used to ask you if you had received the Holy Spirit. And I really didn’t think I had received the Holy Spirit. And even after I was ordained I used to worry sometimes that one day people would find out that I wasn’t saved and that I hadn’t received the Holy Spirit. And I used to feel deeply inferior around evangelical and charismatic people. Really religious people scared me, to be quite frank, even after I was a priest. And it was something to do with being made uncomfortable and the fear that they might find out that I am a fraud.

But then I made the most wonderful discovery. I started to breathe. And as I breathed I came to recognise that I am indeed a fraud and a phoney, but I can no more stop God loving me than I can stop breathing. And that made all the difference. In the languages of the Bible, both in Hebrew and Greek, breath, wind and spirit, are all the same word. When Jesus rose from the dead, he breathed on his disciples, who were, like me, frauds and phonies, and he said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’. And he thus filled them with his spirit, authority. And it was the same at Pentecost. A sound like a violent wind is heard, and the disciples receive the Holy Spirit’ and they became authoritative, free, not inferior to anyone.

I want to spin a fantasy. And the fantasy is that the parish project for 2014 is that as many of us as possible learn to breathe. Let me explain how it would work. You would sign up at the end of December to the following commitment. Simply this. You would promise that for 10 minutes at the beginning and the end of every day you would sit still and pay attention to your breathing. Let me tell you what I think would happen.

First we would discover that it is immensely difficult and  many, perhaps most,  would give up. Then we would discover that many of us would need friends, some kind of community to keep us to it. So we would start to have to do it together sometimes. But let us also suppose that many of us did stick to it. What would happen to us ? Over time there would rise up little sanctuaries of freedom. Think of all the nonsense that swirls around in your brain – all the rubbish that is there simply because you are a member of a noisy non-stop society that is terrified of silence. Think of the accusing voices that you are forced to be in dialogue with. My son, whom I love dearly, and who I believe, loves me, nevertheless admits to me that I exist in his brain as a kind of accusing and disapproving voice whom he can’t appease. Do you have angry conversations in your head with your enemies and your accusers ? Or with the things and people who make you afraid ? Do you lie awake in the night in some unwelcome conversation with the spirit of the future, the spirit of how things might turn out, but which is nevertheless a false and lying voice that is never quite so real during waking hours ?

What I am trying to draw attention to is the fact that our brains are never empty, that they are occupied by some kind of spirit, to use biblical language, and frequently by spirits that are not for our flourishing. So what would happen if we committed ourselves to this silent breathing. Not, absolutely not, instant transformation. But what would be beginning would be some kind of spiritual warfare. The dominance of the spirit of the age would be beginning to be broken by the Holy Spirit.

As I have told you before, the Biblical word Satan literally means ‘the accuser’. And the Biblical word the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, means the Counsel for the Defence.

It is as if both our brains and the whole world we live in is a kind of court, and there is an accusing voice abroad in the world that is against our flourishing, that we might call Satan. But there really is also the Paraclete, the counsel for the defence, the Holy Spirit, who speaks up on our behalf, who battles with and silences the accusing voice and pours into our hearts and pours into our lives his gifts, love, joy peace, gentleness, self control and the rest. These things are free, gifts of grace, but they can only be received by those who would give their lives for them. And sitting quietly paying attention to your breathing is a wonderful place to start.

What I am describing is easy, but it will also cost you everything. That is the extraordinary knife edge which is the missionary frontier.