Video for Pentecost, 21/5/26
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video. I’m recording this a little earlier than normal to catch the spring bed at its best behind me.
You don’t need to be an ardent royalist to recognise the recent visit of the King and Queen to the United States as a tour de force. The speeches, both to the combined Houses of Congress and the after-dinner speech in the White House, were a masterclass in succinct communication, combining dry wit, subtle satire and the occasional rebuke. All delivered with an affectionate tone which minimised any possible offence.
I have only visited the United States a few times and each time I have been struck by our cultural differences. George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote that, “Great Britain and the United States were two countries divided by a common language”, has certainly rung true for me. Different words for things, spelling and syntax are only superficial. There is a wonderful vibrancy and dynamism about American culture that explains much of their economic success. I found American friends much more likely to see the positive and the possibility than I was. I don’t think I’m an especially cynical person, but I found those interactions quite convicting. That is the value of spending time with people from a different culture. You see things in them to which you aspire in ways that make you re-consider what makes instinctive sense within your own culture. However, its not without its challenges. I remember sitting in an audience at one conference where everyone around me was laughing uncontrollably at something that I found mystifyingly unfunny. I still think there is a lot to be said for classical British reticence and emotional restraint. I didn’t agree with my friends there that everything was awesome. Sometimes you need an emotional range to respond to things appropriately.
On Pentecost Sunday which we celebrate this weekend, we read of similar interactions as the Jewish diaspora come together from around the Mediterranean and beyond to celebrate the great harvest festival in Jerusalem. They had been away from the home country for so long that Hebrew or Aramaic was no longer their first language. The list is comprehensive. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, people from Mesopotamia, Pontus, Asia, Egypt, Libya – the list goes on. They would have travelled months in some case to make the pilgrimage to be there. These were Jewish people, united by a common sense of identity, but with hugely different cultures, attitudes and expectations. That which made perfect sense to one would have made no sense to another. And yet they all hear Peter’s first sermon after he is filled with the Holy Spirit in their own languages. There were no translators present! Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?” Peter then tells them, and at the end of the sermon it records, “those who accepted his message were baptised, and about three thousand were added to their number that day”.
Later in Acts 10 we read of the Gospel breaking out of its Jewish nursery, but there is probably as much cultural diversity gathered here as there was later. The Gospel will not be constrained by the culture in which it first took root. Peter’s sermon (its worth reading it in full) makes links to Jewish history, prophesy and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The fact that Jesus reveals God the Father to us, dies for us to secure our forgiveness, rises to make the life of God available to all who believe and trust in him and sends his very presence by the Spirit to the same is a universal message for every culture in every time and place. It is universal because the human condition of alienation from God is universal. No one culture can adequately demonstrate the Gospel’s richness. Some cultures will manifest one aspect of it better than others. Most cultures, including our own, have major blind spots that like my experience in America need interactions with others to reveal.
What unites us is the gift of the Holy Spirit, the very presence of God himself in the hearts of those who believe and trust in Christ. At the Lambeth conference in 2022 there was a richness in worshipping together in vastly different styles and languages but a clear recognition that the Holy Spirit animated each group. It fostered a sense of family likeness even in difference.
Pentecost is the great culmination of the Gospel narrative, the point at which theology and history is translated into lived experience. His is the power to overcome human sinfulness, to transcend difference and create unity out of diversity. Pentecost is the birthday of the church and our hope that however challenging our circumstances God is with us. Amen to that.
+Richard