Well, I’ve been back a week but life has been so frantic that posting anything has been impossible. But for starters here is my sermon for Trinity Sunday tomorrow.

Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

Introduction
‘The doctrine of the Trinity isn’t in the New Testament. It’s a pagan idea.’

So said two Jehovah’s Witnesses who stood on my doorstep.

‘Pagans also wear trousers,’ I replied, ‘Do you want me to
take mine off?’

They declined my suggestion.

The Trinity is such a difficult doctrine. I think it’s fair
to say that Trinity Sunday is one of the two most dreaded Sundays in the year
for preachers (the other being Remembrance Sunday). And I suspect congregations
dread it, too. Yet at the same time, church members will say to ministers, ‘I
don’t understand the Trinity.’

Maybe we should expect the Trinity to be difficult to
comprehend. When Albert Einstein came up with his theories of relativity a
hundred years ago, someone commented that if the previously accepted theories
of Isaac Newton had been true, then God hadn’t stretched himself much in
deciding how the universe would work. We shouldn’t be surprised if it were much
more complicated. Moreover, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if understanding
God is complex – even if the Gospel is simple.

So today, I’m going to use for my outline the themes of a
book entitled ‘Experiencing
The Trinity’ by Darrell
W Johnson. I used it to preach a series of five sermons on the
Trinity. I’m not going to give you five sermons today! However, I am going to
offer four of the five basic points Johnson makes in his book – the contents of
which were originally a sermon series on the Trinity. (The fifth is an extended
exposition of Ephesians 3:14-21.) And if you wish to read more on the subject, I
know of no better introductory book.

1. Finding The
Trinity
‘The Trinity isn’t in the New Testament,’ claimed the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Well,
the full doctrine isn’t – but the data that the Church Fathers used to
formulate the doctrine is. The New Testament is full of passages that reflect a
belief in the Jewish notion of one God, but that the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit are all divine. Our Bible readings from Romans 5:1-5 and John 16:12-15 are just two of
many. Indeed, you could go as far as to say that in the New Testament God has a
new name, and that name is ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. For that is what
Jesus says in the Great Commission in Matthew 28: he says disciples are to be
baptised ‘in the name [singular!] of
the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’ This is God’s name: Father, Son and Holy
Spirit.

Yet where did all this data come from? The answer, surely,
is that the New Testament documents faithfully and authoritatively recount the
early Church’s experience of God. The Trinity is a case of those first
Christians saying, this is our experience of God – it’s more than we’d been led
to believe – but how do we make sense of it? The Trinity is the only way to
make sense of the data.

Now if that is true, then the doctrine of the Trinity has a practical
use. It isn’t in the first case something that needs a ‘brain the size of a planet’,
like Marvin
the Paranoid Android in ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s
Guide To The Galaxy’. In the first instance, it is something against which
we check up our own Christian experience.

Some of us emphasise one member or another of the Trinity. Thomas
Jefferson said we should just get back to ‘the simple Jesus’ (cf. Johnson,
p13f), and others might stress the Holy Spirit, and still others say that our
most important duty is to revere the Father. However, if we are Trinity people,
then this is an encouragement and a challenge to see how broad and rich our
experience of God is. Do we honour the Father and know his tender, fatherly
love? Are we disciples of Jesus, living by the benefits and example of his
Cross? Do we live in the power of the Holy Spirit, serving God with his gifts
and letting him make us more Christ-like? Have we found the Trinity in our
Christian experience, or is there something missing to be filled in?

2. Understanding The
Trinity
Perhaps ‘understanding’ is too strong a word. ‘Too right,’ you may think, ‘the
Trinity is a mystery to me.’

But in a sense, that’s what we’re about: mystery. The Church
Fathers never thought they had God completely wrapped up when they formulated
the doctrine of the Trinity: they were preserving the mystery of a God whom we
mere creatures can never fully comprehend, and they were setting the boundaries for what is truly Trinitarian, and what isn’t.

I remember fire-fighters coming to my primary school to
teach us about the dangers of fire. They had three blocks of wood that made a
triangle: on one it said ‘air’, on the second it said ‘heat’ and on the third
it said ‘fuel’. In the middle, it said ‘fire’. If you took one of three sides
away, the triangle collapsed and there was no longer a fire.

Similarly, the Church Fathers held three truths together as
the basic boundaries of the Trinity: ‘one God’, ‘three Persons’ (although ‘persons’
isn’t the most helpful word in today’s language, but we’ve yet to think of a
better one) and ‘equality’. If someone left out one of these three blocks, you
didn’t have the Trinity. Some heretics got around the problem of the three
persons by saying that the one God revealed himself as Father in Old Testament
times, as Jesus in New Testament times, and later as the Spirit. However, the
Trinity is not God appearing in three successive different ‘modes’. Nor were
Jesus and the Spirit lacking in equality to the Father, ‘subordinate’ to him, as
someone called Arius claimed (and Arius is a hero to Jehovah’s Witnesses). But
nor do we believe in ‘tri-theism’ – three gods. There is a oneness, a unity at
the heart of God.

Put the boundaries another way: the Father is not the Son
and the Son is not the Father; the Father is not the Spirit and the Spirit is
not the Father; Jesus is not the Spirit and the Spirit is not Jesus; but the Father, Son and Spirit are all
God. Father, Son and Spirit are not distinctions of God’s being, but distinctions in God’s being. They do not ‘co-exist’ alongside each other, but ‘subsist’
in an eternal inter-relationship. There is something unique to each of the
three Persons. The Father is the source of all the distinctions. The Son is ‘eternally
begotten’ of (but not ‘created’ by) the Father, and the Spirit proceeds from
the Father through the Son. These are the mysteries we affirm in the Creed.

But what does all this brain-bending stuff mean for us
practically? Darrell Johnson makes three helpful suggestions: firstly, it means
relationships are at the heart of ‘life,
the universe and everything.’ When they are right, other things are right; when
they go sour, all of life is sour. Therefore, they need to be priorities.
Secondly, there is the balance I referred
to in the first point: we need all three members of the Trinity, otherwise our
spiritual triangle collapses, like the one used by the fire-fighters. Thirdly,
there is the matter of fullness: if
we are baptised into the Trinity, then God wants to immerse us in the life of
the Trinity. A sprinkling will not do! We long for all the life of God!

3. Joining The
Trinity
What’s the most basic statement about God in the whole of the Bible? Surely it
is, ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8). How can love be God’s very nature, even before
creation, unless God can love ‘internally’? God may be one, but God cannot be
solo.

And the miracle of the Gospel is that God’s love reaches out
to us so that he may experience the love that is at the heart of his being. We become
what one thirteenth century Christian called ‘co-lovers with the Trinity’ (John
Duns Scotus, cited in Johnson, p62). What does this mean in practice?

We do not love God on our own: we love God with God! We witness
the amazing love that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have for each
other. Our love for the Trinity is feeble, but God enables us to love God
better. That is one reason why our reading from Romans 5 spoke of the Holy Spirit
pouring God’s love into our hearts.

Further, if we see ourselves this way, then the only way we
can view others is to see them as held by the love of God, too. Therefore, with
God, we become lovers of others. It is hard to love other people sometimes –
you can add your own illustrations, I am sure! But the inner love of the Trinity
is made available to us – once more because that love is poured into our
hearts, we can with God love others in a way that we could not on our own.

Finally, we remember that ‘God so loved the world.’ The love
of the Trinity is for the world. If we are held within that same love, then, as
one person put it, ‘the closer you get to the heart of God, the closer you get
to what is on God’s heart’ (Robert Boyd Munger, quoted in Johnson, p68). And
the world is on God’s heart. An experience of Trinitarian love will give us a
heart for a lost and broken world, too.

4. Entering The
Trinity
God the Holy Trinity joins us in love to his inner life of love. We are
connected to the love that is at the heart of the universe, for ‘in him we live
and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). What will we encounter as we enter
the inner life of God? Darrell Johnson suggests these qualities:

Intimacy – no longer
need we think of remaining distant from a remote God: the Spirit enables us to
cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’ There is tender love in the Trinity, and God shares it
with us.

Joy – The members
of the Trinity take great mutual delight in each other, and Jesus prayed in his
High Priestly Prayer, ‘may they have my joy made full in themselves’ (John
17:13). Yet the ruin of sin brings sorrow to the Trinity, and so salvation is
the restoration of godly joy to the world.

Servanthood –
Despite his equality with the Father, Jesus served him. And the Spirit’s work
is to glorify the Son. If we reflect the life of Trinitarian love, we shall
want to serve others, not ourselves, and glorify God, not ourselves.

Purity – Whatever the
twisted form of our world, purity is at the heart of the universe. That is why
salvation must lead to holiness. But such is God’s purity that when we, like
Simon Peter, encounter it and say, ‘Depart from me, I am a sinful man’, the
Trinity embraces us, heals and restores us.

Power – The God
who upholds the universe must be of immeasurable power. It is power not used
selfishly, but given away. So we have just marked Pentecost, and the gift of
the Holy Spirit and power. God’s power enables us to change; God’s power
enables us to glimpse the wonders of his love. God’s power is a model for our
use of power, too.

Creativity – From creation
itself, to the Virgin Birth, to using the wickedness of Christ’s crucifixion
for the salvation of the world, to the Resurrection and beyond, the Trinity has
always been creative and always will be. Spiritual gifts – often wrongly called
‘gifts of the Spirit’ when they are gifts of the Father, Son and Spirit – are given
so that we may use God’s creative and recreating power for the common good.
They are an expression of Trinitarian life.

Peace – Whatever evil
there is in the world, the Trinity is never threatened, and never panics. That peace
is a gift of salvation in restoring things to how God intended them to be.

Conclusion
My Jehovah’s Witnesses got it wrong. Not simply because they were not half as
biblical as they claimed to be, and not simply because they have to use a
deeply distorted translation of the Bible to buttress their teaching. The tragedy
is that in settling for a more easily explained understanding of God, they
reduce not only the complexity of God but also the beauty, mystery and truth of
God.

We shall never completely come to terms with the Trinity,
not even in the life to come. However, by keeping a hold all the time on the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God in three equal Persons, we shall
enter more deeply into the life of the God who sustains the universe, and whose
most profound characteristic is love.

Technorati Tags: Trinity, JehovahsWitnesses, Father, Son, HolySpirit, AlbertEinstein, IsaacNewton, DarrellJohnson, MarvinTheParanoidAndroid, JohnDunsScotus

OK, here is the sermon for Sunday fortnight:

Acts 2:1-21

Introduction
The 1970s were a time of great liturgical change in the Church of England, with
different forms of service coming out on a trial basis at regular intervals.
The then Bishop of Kensington is said to have turned up to lead a confirmation
service which he began with the words; ‘The Lord is here.’ In line with the
latest liturgy, he was expecting the response, ‘His Spirit is with us,’ but
instead there was a stony silence. He tried again, a little louder: ‘The Lord
is here!’, but again there was no reply from the congregation. So he said it a
third time, this time with still greater emphasis. When this once again failed
to produce any response from the congregation, he turned to the vicar and said:
‘The Lord is here, isn’t he?’ To which the vicar replied: ‘Not in our book he
isn’t.’[1]

The Lord is here: his Spirit is with us. This we celebrate
at Pentecost. In this sermon I want to look at some of the big themes
associated with the coming of the Holy Spirit. (I’ve dealt separately
with the question of speaking in tongues.)

1. Unity
The story begins with a note of unity:

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in
one place.
(verse 1)

Whether the ‘they’ is the hundred and twenty disciples of
Acts chapter 1 or just the apostles, what matters is that ‘they’ – a corporate
group of Christ’s followers – ‘were all together in one place.’ Jesus had told
his disciples to stay in the city of Jerusalem until the power of the Holy
Spirit came upon them. The blessing falls on disciples united in prayer. It is
the New Testament fulfilment of Psalm
133, where those who live together in unity receive the Lord’s commanded
blessing.

It is the same thing seen among groups of Christians who
desire to see God’s Holy Spirit work powerfully today, both within and beyond
the church. They seek to live in unity, and pray together. I was part of one such group in my last
appointment. Every Wednesday lunch-time there was a united act of worship,
preceded by a prayer meeting. It was not a gathering that sought to deal with
all the institutional differences between various Christian denominations, it
was a movement that tried to build united relationships and reconciliation across
the Body of Christ, and to see this as a springboard for spiritual renewal and
change. There were odd bits of theology where I disagreed with some of the
founders, but the basic vision – united relationships and prayer for the sake
of church and social transformation – seemed sound to me.

The testimony is similar from countries where the Gospel is
spreading to many people. I have had the privilege of meeting several Ugandan
Christians, and while their cultural style of praying might be different from
ours, the same truth remains: a church united in prayer is one either already
empowered by the Spirit or it soon will be.

It is not that in unity we manipulate the Spirit, but it is
that unity pleases the Spirit and discord grieves the Spirit. Unity in our
relationships and praying together is a way of saying that the work of the Holy
Spirit is welcome here. Opposite trends – be they Christians remaining in
isolation from one another or worse, fighting each other – are ways of saying
that we care little for the power of the Holy Spirit.

I am not suggesting that people here do not pray. But I am
suggesting that a coming together in prayer that is for more than just the
‘enthusiasts’ would be quite an indication of our desire to meet with the
Spirit of God. It will be good, therefore, if our forthcoming Sunday morning
prayer meeting becomes a gathering not merely of the faithful few but has a
wide membership. That would be an indication that we wanted to do business with
God.

2. Mystery
Luke, the writer of Acts, wasn’t present at that first Christian Pentecost. He
must have relied on eye-witness testimony for his account. But clearly those in
attendance when the Spirit fell struggled to describe what happened. Listen
again to some of the language:

‘a sound like the
rush of a violent wind’ (verse 2, italics mine);

‘Divided tongues, as of
fire’ (verse 3, italics mine).

It’s mysterious stuff, beyond capturing in human words. There
is something elusive and beyond our control about the Holy Spirit. Jesus hinted
at as much in his famous conversation with Nicodemus:

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of
it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with
everyone who is born of the Spirit.
(John 3:8)

I have listened to preachers tell congregations that the
Holy Spirit is a gentleman, as if he is some kind of souped-up spiritual
epitome of Britishness – that he will play by the rules, never force himself on
us, and only do things when invited, a sort of ‘You first’, ‘No, after you’
kind of spirituality. It seems to me this is nonsense when confronted with the mysterious,
can’t pin him down behaviour of Acts 2 and elsewhere. John Wesley, for one, had
to come to terms with the fact that the Spirit’s work and leading did not
always coincide with English manners: take the struggle Wesley had to accept
that he was being called to preach outdoors, not just inside church buildings.
But then see the spiritual fruit that resulted when he followed the Spirit’s
leading.

I have equally listened to preachers who effectively claim
that the Holy Spirit only works in wild and wacky ways. But that, too, is to
limit the Spirit: it is to tell the wind of God where he may or may not blow.

The mystery of the Spirit is that he may work in ways we
find strange or uncomfortable (the gift of speaking in tongues, people falling
down when prayed for, to give two quick examples) or he may choose to work
quietly and gently. The manner is up to him. He is the third Person of the
Godhead, and he shares the divine characteristic of sovereignty. He chooses,
not us. The guideline we have in discerning what is the work of the Holy Spirit
and what isn’t is not to ask whether an experience ticks our boxes (whether we
prefer the spectacular or the polite); the test is whether what happens gives
glory to Jesus Christ, promotes his Gospel, and leads to changed lives. Our
response, simply, is to let the Holy Spirit be God and work as he sees fit,
glorifying Jesus however is best – whether that suits our tastes or not.

3. Worship
I find people often assume that when the disciples spoke in tongues, they addressed
the assembled crowd. But my reading of the story is different: I think the
crowd overheard the disciples:

‘in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds
of power.’ (verse 11)

What did they overhear? ‘Speaking about God’s deeds of
power.’ I suggest that in the context this is a description of worship. Worship
declares God’s mighty works. It proclaims his acts of salvation, just as we do
in the Holy Communion thanksgiving prayers. It says he is worthy of praise,
because he has been at work decisively in history and is still at work.

It is not surprising, then, that great movements of the Holy
Spirit have frequently been accompanied by, or even characterised by, worship.
Surely this is why Charles Wesley wrote something like ten thousand hymns and
poems. Is this not why the Welsh Revival of a hundred years ago is remembered
as much for its singing as for the accounts of judges leading penitent
criminals to forgiveness in Christ? I submit it is also why the Pentecostal and
charismatic movements of recent decades have had sung worship at their heart.

Of course, worship is not to be limited to singing (nor even
to our gatherings on Sundays) and the work of the Holy Spirit goes beyond worship,
as we shall see when we come to the fourth and final theme of this sermon.
Equally, there are some Christians who practise a form of religious escapism
into worship events and services, and there are others who doggedly defend the
great hymns while not living out the doctrines those hymns describe.

But at the same time the 1936 Methodist Hymn Book was right
to say that ‘Methodism was born in song’ and Brian Hoare in his hymn ‘Born in
song’ was correct to say that ‘God’s people have always been singing.’ When the
Holy Spirit is at work in individuals or in communities there is a note of
worship in the air. A popular story in recent years has been about one Chinese
Christian who was imprisoned for his faith. He asked to be put to work clearing
out the open latrines at the jail. When asked why he should volunteer for such
a putrid task he replied, ‘Because if I work there I can sing praises to God as
loud as I like and no-one will stop me!’

When our lives are not full of praise, there may be more
than one reason. It does not necessarily mean we are insensitive to the work of
the Holy Spirit. We may be distressed, depressed, grieving or stressed, for
example. And equally we cannot live our entire lives on a spiritual ‘high’. But
if our spiritual lives have become characteristically dull and monotonous,
might that be a sign that it is time to seek a refreshing touch of the Holy
Spirit? Jesus did after all refer to the Holy Spirit as ‘rivers of living
water’ (John 7:37-39).

4. Mission
The speaking in tongues may not be mission, but what follows is. When the crowd
is amazed and the scoffers pooh-pooh, mission follows. Peter stands up with the
eleven, and addresses the crowd (verse 14). In our reading, we heard the first
part of Luke’s summary of his speech.

For Peter, then, mission is not a technique he has learned
and practised: it is an overflow of spiritual experience, as the Holy Spirit,
the rivers of living water, cannot be contained within him but inevitably flow
out and touch others. Granted, there are things to learn – note how Peter knows
his Bible and his message – but these are futile unless in the first place
there is a living experience of Christ through the Spirit that bubbles up and
out of us.

At the age of four, our daughter has her first obsessive-compulsive
disorder. She loves to wash her hands. Any excuse, it doesn’t have to be after
a visit to the loo. But she cannot always turn off the taps completely. If she
has had the plug in the basin, we are grateful for the overflow pipe. Mission
is our overflow pipe; the problem for many of us is we have learned how to turn
off the taps. Being open to the Holy Spirit is about turning on the taps again,
and not worrying too much about the mess!

Often I hear Christians say, ‘I couldn’t possibly talk about
my faith to others: I don’t have the knowledge. I wouldn’t be able to answer
their difficult questions.’ There are a number of responses to this. The most
important thing to say is that the one non-negotiable attribute of a Christian
witness is to have a live experience of Christ through the Holy Spirit. You
don’t have to have all the answers, that’s God’s job. In any case, not
everybody is argued into the faith by persuasive debate. Do read up and learn
more about your faith, of course – there is no excuse for ignorant Christians –
but get your priorities straight. And the first priority in mission is not to
be clever and have alphabet soup after your name, it’s to have a life that is
manifestly influenced by Jesus Christ. And that is the work of his Spirit. Do
not despise the intellectual aspect of Christianity – there is a proper place
for it – but place it in the service of your relationship with God in Christ,
not the reverse, which is putting the cart before the horse.

Conclusion
What are we to do, then? I think the answer is to be some kind of Christian
Oliver Twist. We come with our bowl and ask for ‘more’. The difference is, our
heavenly Father is no mean Fagin character, looking scornfully upon such
requests. No, he delights when we want more of him. In Ephesians 5:18 Paul
calls us to continue to be filled with the Spirit – and I take that as an open
invitation to come back to the Father’s table with an empty bowl and say,
‘Lord, fill me up again.’

Do we dare to pray that? May it be our regular and persistent
request. Heaven will be thrilled.

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I’m trying to get ahead for Pentecost, due to some impending leave. As I began preparing (yet another!) sermon on Acts 2, I found myself going in several directions. Eventually I put aside the stuff trying to allay the fears of traditional churchgoers about the gift of tongues into a newsletter (‘Topic’) article. Here is what I wrote. The sermon will follow in the next day or two.

I am writing this before going on holiday. I am in the middle of trying to write my Pentecost sermon three weeks ahead of time. As I scribbled my notes, I realised I was going in two directions. I had some big points to make about the work of the Holy Spirit, but I also knew that every year when we read Acts chapter 2, a number of Christians get nervous about the references to speaking in tongues. Like a columnist in the Methodist Recorder last year who described a televised act of worship that featured speaking in tongues, they want to add a cautionary note: ‘Don’t try this at home.’ Therefore, I decided I would separate out the two strands of my thinking. I would develop the big themes for the sermon, and use my column in Topic to try to help people who are worried about the gift of tongues.

The New Testament presents ‘tongues’ as a gift of the Holy Spirit, and for that reason I think the first thing to say is this: a gift from God is always a good gift. Jesus said that if earthly parents knew how to give good gifts to their children, how much more does our heavenly Father (and especially with the gift of the Spirit). However, to some Christians, speaking in tongues doesn’t feel like a good gift. They may have seen or heard people using it, and thought the users were behaving unnaturally. Perhaps they seemed to have been ‘taken over’, or they appeared to have lost their self-control; they might even give the impression of being mentally unbalanced. But in my experience that is as much to do with the personality of the user as it is to do with the gift itself. I have also seen the gift of tongues used quietly and gently. Nevertheless, let us also not despise those who are more extravert in their personalities.

A second issue raised is whether people are speaking in a known or unknown language. At the first Christian Pentecost in Acts 2, members of the international crowd overhear the Galilean disciples speaking in their own languages. On the other hand, when Paul discusses spiritual gifts at length in 1 Corinthians 12-14, he speaks about ‘tongues of angels’. Some language analysis of tape-recorded tongues-speaking has suggested that most instances are not a recognisable human language – which might make you think that the examples witnessed since the Pentecostal revival that begun a hundred years ago brought this back to prominence in Christianity is not the gift spoken about in Acts 2. However, it might be Paul’s ‘tongues of angels’. On the other hand, there are many documented examples of anecdotal evidence where somebody heard a tongues-speaker use a language that the hearer knew, but the speaker didn’t. A minister of mine was one such witness: a member of another congregation received this gift and began using it, but was worried about it. She used it in the minister’s presence, and he was amazed: she had recited Philippians chapter 2 in New Testament Greek. He knew the Greek from his theological studies, but the woman had never learned it. So perhaps we should go for Paul’s fuller description of the gift: tongues are ‘tongues of men and angels’. The gift can be a known or an unknown language.

A third concern is whether this gift is irrational. We have to be careful before assuming that something, which doesn’t make sense to us, is irrational. Paul said that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom. Is it possible that tongues falls into this way of seeing things? By way of developing this thought, let me suggest that tongues is like ‘the language of love’. People who are very close to each other sometimes have a private set of words that they only use between themselves. This is often the case between lovers, and can be true between twins, especially when they are young. If ‘tongues’ is like the language of love, then it can from our perspective be a form of worship. Just as couples express their private adoration of each other, so tongues can be adoration of God.

However, the worship element may be more than praise: it may also include intercession. I know Christians who have begun to pray in tongues when they faced a difficult situation, and they did not know how to pray about it. Perhaps it was also wise for them not to know what to ask for, in praying for someone: the needs might have been too private, yet the person needed prayer. For one person I know, this first happened when out of his depth praying for a convert who had deep problems stemming from mental illness and drug taking. That same friend had another experience years later when praying for a female friend who was ill: he did not know that his friend had cystitis (which she was too embarrassed to talk about with a male friend), but as he prayed in tongues, she was healed.

(Such a private use of tongues needs to be distinguished from the teaching Paul gives about its public use, where an interpretation must follow, since worship is meant to be edifying.)

Maybe, then, if we can see tongues this way, we can relax on the question of whether it is rational, and rejoice instead in seeing it as a gift of beauty. Yet this thing of beauty is also a challenge. God may remind us that some of our concern for being rational is a disguised attempt on our part to keep control of things, rather than submitting to his Lordship. Well has one preacher observed that God sometimes offends our minds to reveal our hearts. ‘Tongues’ can be a reminder of our humility and dependence upon God. What could be more beautiful than remembering our need to trust God?

Another question I have heard is this: do I have to speak in tongues? One friend of mine came across some people giving out religious tracts, who told him that unless he spoke in tongues he wasn’t a Christian. It’s easy enough to kick such nonsense into touch, because nowhere in the New Testament is it made a condition of salvation. However, other Christian groups have made tongues-speakers first-class Christians and others second-class, and that is a problem to address.

I would respond to this by going to Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians. Different members of the Body of Christ have different gifts – not everyone has the same gift. Furthermore, he sees tongues as one of the minor gifts, and calls his hearers to aspire to the greater gifts, such as prophecy. Yet at the same time, he says he speaks in tongues more than any of the Corinthians do, and wishes everyone had the gift! On that basis, then, there is no compulsion to speak in tongues (but remember any gift of God is good), yet if it is a minor gift maybe it is the one that sets some people on the road into exploring the gifts of the Spirit. Moreover, if we do say it is only a lesser gift, then Scripture challenges us to seek the more substantial ones. William Davies, a former Principal of Cliff College, once said about tongues: ‘All may, but not all must.’

Perhaps after the length of this article you can see why I had to separate this out from my Pentecost sermon! I hope I have contributed to allaying fears on this subject, but I also hope this challenges you. Could each of us make this our Pentecost prayer? ‘Lord, fill me more with your Holy Spirit. I welcome whatever gifts you give me, that I may use them in your service.’

Technorati Tags: tongues, glossolalia, Pentecost