Pentecost: God is with us

Pentecost: God is with us
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Sunday 8 June 2025

Acts 2: 1–21
Romans 8: 14–17
John 14: 8–17

‘In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power’

Jacinda Ardern, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, speaks graciously of the Mormon church in which she was raised.  She respects its’ members dedication to service – and in her political life is grateful for the early experience it gave her of knocking on unresponsive and hostile doors.  Yet she left Mormonism when she was in her mid-twenties, because she could no longer reconcile its teachings on human sexuality with her commitment to inclusivity.  Her sense of justice led her away from her church.

On the day of Pentecost we open the final chapter in the story of salvation: the story that begins with the Annunciation to Mary, that relates the birth and the ministry of Jesus, that tells of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and that records his Ascension. Today, ten days on from that event, we hear of the outpouring of the Spirit on his followers. The story began in Nazareth and has yet to end. The story is long and has a host of climactic moments – yet the totality of its 2,000-plus-year plot can be summed up in the four words spoken by the angel at its very beginning. ‘God is with us’. That is the story.

Of course, in our churches, we tell it in a piecemeal fashion. We assign different parts of it to different days; we create festivals and seasons – Christmas, Epiphany, Passiontide, Easter.  But there is only one story, whatever the feast day and whatever the time of year. God is with us: with us in our poverty, in Christ’s birth; with us in every corner of the world, in Christ’s revelation to the nations; with us in our suffering, in Christ’s passion; with us in our deaths, in Christ’s dying and rising from the dead; and ultimately with us in the heights of heaven, in Christ’s ascension. And with us here and now, in the power of the Spirit, poured out upon all flesh:  Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Exeter Street, Rosemary Lane, Bishopdown Farm and Bemerton Heath – with us in every place at every moment.

If God is with us then Pentecost offers us is a glimpse of what God’s being with us means. ‘In our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power’. God cannot but draw human beings together. Devout Jews from every nation under heaven hear twelve illiterate men from Galilee speaking in their own languages. The barriers of dialect are broken down; the dividing walls of provenance are breached. Men and women hear one another; they understand one another; they become one body. And in harmony – in harmony, mind, not in unison – in harmony they lift their voices to God and declare God’s mighty works. God is with us, and so there is movement – movement towards unity – and there is praise.

You may know that Canon Probert and I share an attachment to the peerless work of the author Richmal Crompton, who published the first of her short story collections, Just William, in 1922. It introduced her readers to the eleven-year-old William Brown, leader of the Outlaws, scourge of the Hubert Laneites, despair of his parents, proprietor of or schemer for a panoply of catapults and pea-shooters, and proud owner of a mongrel dog called Jumble. I am told that, as a little boy, Ed would go to bed in the fervent hope that he might wake up and find that he was William. Crompton went on to publish thirty-eight further William collections, the last posthumously, in 1970. So William lived through the depression of the 1930s, and through the Second World War, into the era of space travel and rock’n’roll. Yet by the late 1960s he was still eleven years old; the Outlaws still ruled the village byways; and adults were still strange creatures, to be terrorized, avoided, or taken advantage of.

Through half a century, William never changed – quite a contrast with the young Ed’s wish that he might change overnight. Two accounts of change, then – and there are understandings of faith, and understandings of Pentecost which promise each of them. According to the first, God is with us in this moment and therefore the task is to make sure that nothing changes from this moment on; the task is to preserve everything around us as it always has been (whatever ‘always’ may mean). According to the second: if God is with us then we will become different people, and we will become different people overnight. But neither account survives the joyous, distressing, uplifting, wounding, hilarious, terrifying experience that is human living.

As the Twelve spilled out onto a Jerusalem street the Spirit drew a crowd together. Day by day it is nations and Churches – it is you and me – whom the same Spirit longs to draw together. Most of us are a mess of shards and splinters.  If we survey the landscapes of our individual lives we will see our deepest joys – the ones we love, the moments of bliss, the things in which we’ve taken pride. We will see also our deepest griefs – the broken relationships, the failed ambitions, the gnawing insecurities.  Faced with all this we cannot be William Brown, locked in a time warp, never getting beyond our twelfth birthday. And however much we might share the young Ed’s desire, we can’t go to bed and wake up transformed forever. No: instead, we are called – as nations, as Churches, as followers of Jesus – to the hard, painful business of change. Of growing up. We grow up when we hide none of the shards and splinters, deny none of them, run from none of them. We grow up when we acknowledge them, accept responsibility for them, and recognize the part they have played in our story.  The Spirit will make us whole as she made the crowd whole; God with us draws us together.

History’s verdict is yet to be written, but Ardern is remembered as a leader who tried to exercise power through personal integrity and empathy with others. Had she remained a member of her church, publicly subscribing to doctrines that she had grown beyond, she would be remembered differently. Had he been turned into William Brown, fated to wage perpetual battles with local farmers and to formulate endless schemes to make pocket money, Ed would never have become Salisbury’s Chancellor.  In fact, there are a number of things he would never have done… This place and all of us would have been poorer; we – and, I venture to suggest, he – would not have grown up as we have grown up over the last twenty-one years. And – here’s the thing – there is further growing for all of us to do.

We give thanks for a vocation fulfilled among us and pray for the Spirit’s continued work in us, drawing us together and opening our mouths in praise. It is Pentecost, and God is with us. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.