In the reading from Acts, we find that the disciples - we’re not sure exactly which disciples - are meeting together, still nervous following Jesus’ execution, but happy he is risen. Jesus had died and risen at Passover time. We are now at Pentecost, seven weeks after. The disciples are doing what Jesus told them to do, and prayerfully waiting together in Jerusalem for the next stage of things. It is then that they have a strange experience, ‘like wind and fire’. Some congregations will share a birthday cake today because it was at that time that the Church was born as a group who started to go out boldly and draw others in.

To understand this story, we need to look at some older stories. Firstly, Adam and Eve. A timeless story, saying, really, that the root of mankind’s problems is that we don’t work with God. Adam and Eve wanted to make their own rules, and wouldn’t cooperate when God told them not to eat the fruit. Later on in Genesis, in chapter 11, we have the story of the Tower of Babel. People again wanting to do their own thing. They might believe in God, but they weren’t going to let him be in charge. They thought that God was somewhere up the heavens. So, they said, ‘Let’s get ourselves up there too, on a level with him. We can be in charge’. To build the big tower, they had to work together. But, in the tale, God thinks, ‘I’ll put them in their place.’ He makes them all speak different languages, so they can’t work together, or build their tower.

Things in the New Testament bring something new from God, to humanity’s situation. Unlike Adam, the human Jesus did cooperate completely with the Almighty, and was at one with him. So, St Paul calls Jesus the Second Adam - and Jesus is in real history - not in a timeless story like the first Adam. Newman in the hymn which we will know, speaks of Jesus as ‘a higher gift than Grace’, refining our humanity, and writes, ‘a Second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came.’ Grace is a lifegiving relationship, with himself, that God offers us. But Jesus is a higher gift still, ‘God’s presence and his very self, and essence all divine.’

Just as Jesus reverses Adam’s disobedience, the Christian Pentecost is an absolute reversal of the Tower of Babel story. In that story we have people who, like Adam and Eve, didn’t want to work with God. At Pentecost, the disciples are waiting and praying and very much ready to work with God. In the old story of the proposed tower, language barriers appeared, but, at the Christian Pentecost, strangely, language barriers are overcome, and the Gospel starts moving out into the world.

The Church, has a special relationship with God, changing the lives of individuals, and congregations, and the Spirit works through the sacraments, but, - having said all of that - God can be active in others, especially those of goodwill, whether they know it or not, or know about him, or not. It is not always our role to bring the things of the God to a situation, but to try to glimpse where he is, there ahead of us, and then to co-operate with him.

The Spirit is a ‘he’ – or even a ‘she’ – a person, not an ‘it’. To speak of the Spirit’s presence and activity is to speak of glimpsing God’s presence and activity. ‘Glimpsing’, because we must not be too hasty in telling people exactly what God is about, which would often be to presume too much. The Church, collectively, has to try to discern what God is about, and can still sometimes get it wrong.

One big message of Pentecost is there, for our personal lives, especially if we face difficulties. Look to God patiently, wait, and pray. The same approach for a congregation, at a time of uncertainty and change.

When I was in Wales, in one Order for Communion, you ended readings not by saying, ‘this is the word of the Lord’, but, ‘Hear what the Spirit says to the Church’. A lady churchwarden, whose father had been an Archdeacon, and whose brother became a bishop, told me, ‘We don’t want that sort of thing here’! But by heaven, they needed it!

As Pentecost is something of a Birthday Party, we might end today on the light side. Two questions: ‘at what age do you stop playing with toys?’ and, ‘why am I asking this question?’ I’m asking because I don’t know! At 77, I’ve not having reached that age! So I’ve thought of a toy for Pentecost.

We don’t know exactly which of the disciples were present in the room at Pentecost. We might think, probably, the twelve apostles, but Judas had left, to be replaced by Matthias. Some think Mary might have been there, and maybe Jesus’ brothers. In a very arbitrary way, we’ll say fourteen people.

I took 14 circles of paper, half black, half white, and laid them flat, in a nice pattern. When the individuals were willing to work together and be part of a larger plan, – as the disciples were at Pentecost – then something strange can happen. The group of individuals seems less flat and ordinary, especially when the pattern is spun round!

And the circle of paper that is called to serve at the very centre of things, and to do lots of rushing round, will be the least one of all. Didn’t Jesus say something like that about how leaders in the Church should behave?

Fr Roger