Feast of Pentecost: Evensong at Cirencester Parish Church 2010.
The Revd . Canon Leonard Doolan.

If you know the lochs of Scotland you will be familiar with that wonderful scene early in the morning when you look out over the loch and hovering on the surface is a mist. It seems just to suspend itself there.

Whenever I see this I have a picture of the beginning of Genesis when we read of the Holy Spirit, right at the heart of creation, hovering on the face of the waters. The Holy Spirit is at work as God creates all there is. God’s powerful creative Spirit at work.

A second image of the Holy Spirit, also from the OT is in Ezekiel 37. The prophet finds himself, not on a lake, such as I have just referred to, but rather a valley. The valley is full of dry bones, representing faithless Israel. The Lord asks Ezekiel if these bones can live? Muscle, sinew, flesh, skin adheres to the bones, but still there is no life. Can these lifeless bodies live? The prophet replies – you Lord know. Breathe my spirit, my breath, holy breeze, into them. Up they get, an army of living beings.

Both of these images are brought to mind on this feast of Pentecost. Originally a Jewish festival, the disciples are gathered together. It was the feast when the Jews celebrated the giving of the Law, the 10 commandments, to Moses. Appropriately then, the sign of the old promise, the Law, is replaced but the new promise, not written on tablets of stone, but in the Holy Spirit, written on hearts of flesh. Rigid law gives way to gracious Spirit.

In the great event of Christian Pentecost the Holy Spirit confirms the new creation – new creation in Christ, the second Adam, as he is sometimes referred to. This parallels the passage in Genesis. But also the Valley of dry bones is paralleled, because God’s breath, his Spirit infuses the lifeless, dis-spirited, downhearted and fearful disciples. Can these men live again? Lord, you know! So he breathes his Spirit and new life is created in them. It is a powerful Spirit – it is like a rushing mighty blast of wind, and a searing heat of fire.

This is as Christ had promised. And this Holy Spirit, Christ tells us, will lead us into all truth.

But what is truth? Surely Pontius Pilate has one of the punch lines in the Passion story. What is truth?

How do we discern the truth? It is certainly no easy matter to claim ultimate truth, or empirical truth. How do we know something to be truth. Is it truth because many people hold to a view or a belief, so majority decides truth? This is the normal way for the church to claim truth ie something believed in all places and by all people for all time. But is that sufficient? Mahatma Ghandi said, even if you are in a minority of one the truth is still the truth. So it can’t just be about majority. The majority can be wrong, because sheer weight of numbers can blind one to what truth is.

Maybe there are other ways of testing truth. We might say that one test of truth is whether justice is being served. If the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth, then surely in the blueprint of the Kingdom of God, justice is a verifier of what truth is.

This is certainly the case in the American Episcopal Church at present. Last weekend they consecrated as a bishop an openly lesbian woman who has a long time partner. The Episcopal church would claim, I think, that the Holy Spirit is leading them into truth about such matters, and one of the ways of showing this is through the justice that this decision witnesses to. Many others, of course, do not hold it to be self evidently the truth.

Just before the ordination of women to the priesthood, I was opposed to women priests. All parishes were asked to pray in vigil the night before the decision that the Holy Spirit would lead us to the right decision. The Synod decided to ordain women. I could hardly say that the Holy Spirit was mistaken. That would be a blasphemy. It is becoming more and more evident that this decision was right, and that we were being lead by the Holy Spirit into a deeper truth.

But here is the problem. What is the relationship between truth and unity. What the American church thinks is witnessing to truth, others see it as a threat to unity. Some parts of the Anglican Communion are now broken from American Episcopal Church, and indeed threaten the integrity of the Communion  itself. So what is the relationship between unity and truth – can the former dictate the latter, or should unity be a servant of truth.

If unity had primacy of place we would never have had an English bible or an English Prayer Book, nor would Germany, Sweden etc etc have their own language to pray with. At the time of the Reformation truth was more important than the unity of the church. As late as the 1960’s the RC church shared in that truth about language as they too were lead by the Holy Spirit to allow people to worship in their own tongue – in fact an ancient gift of Pentecost.

Following truth must be the paramount enterprise of the Christian church. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism – of course, and unity is one of the endeavours of Christ’s church. But in seeking unity above truth we are in danger of imagining, vainly, that unity is sameness. We are one in Christ, through his work on the cross, but because we are not all the same does not mean that we are not one in Christ. St. Paul in dealing with the troublesome Corinthians makes it clear that Christians are not and should not be clones of each other. Equally there is not a church of Paul, or Apollos, but only of Christ, and he alone is the sign of unity around whom the universal Christian community gathers.

So the American Church has decided that it is being lead by the Holy Spirit into a newly revealed truth. Others are not there yet – I am, but others, many, are not. However only by patient and prayerful waiting will we know if this will be revealed also to others. Disunity, public wrangling, impatient rebuke, Nigerian ranting, is no way to discern the graciousness of God’s gentle lifegiving breath.  Might this be the Holy Spirit leading us into truth? You know Lord.

Can these dry bones live? The Lord asks Ezekiel. ‘You know Lord’ he replies. We must ask ourselves, can we live in a new, fresh, and Spirit filled way? Can we open our hearts to the leading of the Holy Spirit? You know Lord.

Amen.