[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 5th of June 2022]
(Readings: Acts 2:1-21 and The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced by Gerard Winstanley)
“God is Dove” is what, on first glance, I read to myself from the memorial to George Dare on Friday. Of course, I quickly realised that this reading was the result of a dyslexic Minister trying to read fancy calligraphy. The quote on Dare’s memorial is, of course, “God is Love”.
Yet, “God is Dove” might be strangely apt for today’s service. The gospel writers recall that, when the God’s Spirit descended on to Jesus at his moment of baptism, it took the form of a dove.
Today is Pentecost or, as it is otherwise known, Whitsun. Traditionally congregations would process or walk around the town today but do not worry, I will keep you seated today.
Pentecost commemorates the event we encountered today in our reading from the book of Acts where the Apostles receive the Holy Spirit. Now, in the narrative of the Book of Acts, the apostles had been warned by Jesus that the Holy Spirit was going to descend on them, but this must still have come as something of a shock. It is not everyday that one is confronted by a rushing wind from heaven filling the house one is in!
But what was the point of this experience? Why did this happen to the Apostles? And why is this event so important that it is considered to be the birthday of the Church, and, arguably, the start of Christianity becoming a distinct religion in its own right?
The major clue to the significance of the Pentecost event comes after the whooshing of winds, it is the speaking of languages. Now Luke, the author of Acts – Acts should really be viewed a Luke’s Gospel Volume 2 – tells a story of how everyone from all different cultures and climbs, could understand the disciples as if they were speaking their own multitudinous languages simultaneously. The problem is that this story does not hold water. Yes, Jerusalem would have been packed with people from all over the place, every Jewish man within 20 miles of the city was legally obliged to be there for a start. However, all the Jewish diaspora at the time, no matter how widely spread they were, would, according to the New Testament scholar William Barclay, have been flaunt in either Aramaic or Greek. To have been understood by everyone would not have been such a miraculous feat after all.
We could convince of this being a story about speaking in spiritual tongues – the practice, favoured by many modern-day Pentecostals but looked upon unfavourably by Paul, of speaking in sounds that make up no discernible human language but instead emanates directly from the Spirit. This practice of speaking in tongues is fascinating but really requires a sermon to itself to explore fully.
Instead, however, what I think Luke is doing in this story is contrasting the event of Pentecost to the Genesis story of the tower of Babel. In a story hopefully familiar to fans of the Babel fish in Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Genesis narrative tells of humans working together so well that the embark on building a tower rooted in their own city but with its top in the heavens. God comes down, sees what the humans are up to and decides that these humans are becoming far too powerful so confuses their language so that they can no longer understand one another to cooperate on the building work.
This Genesis story features a model of a powerful God existing up there, and humans made powerless by God and unable to get close to God.
I think what Luke does in his account of Pentecost is to reverse the Babel narrative. After Pentecost the Divine can no longer be understood as this remote being that exists “up there” in the heavens. Instead of God coming down to earth to scatter humans and deny them power, the Spirit has come down into the people of the church to bring people together, regardless of their nationality or any other social division. Divine power is no longer the preserve of the distant and far out of reach heavens but is something that exists intimately within and among us. Something that is fostered in community.
The divine in us… community… hopefully this is starting to sound familiar to us. Or at least what we as modern-day Unitarians desire to be all about.
If I could force one book into the hands of every Unitarian right now, it would be Faith and Understanding: Critical Essays in Christian Doctrine by Arthur J. Long. In his chapter on the Holy Spirit Long states that, “properly understood, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, […] is still of vital significance. In a sense, it is the one basic and essential Unitarian doctrine.”
Still not convinced? Hopefully our second reading can fill in the gaps.
Gerard Winstanley was not a Unitarian but his movement The Diggers, a collective of Christian agrarian communists, was one of the original racial dissenting groups in England that grew out of the same ferment of ideas during the commonwealth period after the Civil War that also created some of the first home-grown English Unitarians as well as the Quakers.
The evidence of this shared lineage is evident in Winstanley’s writing, especially his emphasis on Reason. For The Diggers just like the Unitarians human reason was of divine origin. Yet Winstanley goes a step further and identifies Reason directly with the Spirit. If Pentecost democratised religion, by bringing God out of the heavens and bringing the Divine into our earthly communities, Winstanley is using the same process to wrestle power form the nobles and landlords and give it to the people directly. For Winstanley, if all people have access to the same Holy Spirit that came down to Jesus in the form of a dove, and that that Spirit dwells in us all, then we have access to the same power of reason that Jesus had and are in need of no guru to explain religion to us and no king to rule our lives for us. We are all imbued with the power and responsibility to manage these matters for ourselves.
It is though the Spirit that we engage as individuals with the search for truth and meaning and do so in community. That is why we cannot have good Unitarianism without the Spirit. And without knowledge that the Spirit lives within us all, the fullness of love would be but a pale imitation. It is love though the Spirit that sets us free.
Amen.
