The Transforming Fire of God's Love

Wandering through the market in first century Corinth, you might have been rather surprised to be greeted by a relative stranger and invited to come and join the ekklesia. Surprised not because you saw this as further evidence of what you had come to regard as the rather tiresome and inappropriate proselytism of a strange and subversive sect, but because such an invitation would strike you at first as rather odd, even absurd.

In the ancient world, an ekklesia was the word for an assembly of adult male citizens which had the ultimate decision-making power in a Greek city state. It was a familiar everyday secular term. It had little to do with religious practice. It was the equivalent of the local council. But if an ekklesia was the assembly of citizens, a body responsible for the governance and life of the city, then an invitation to join it would have been strange indeed. Strangers, foreigners and immigrants were not welcome at such gatherings. And yet, if you were intrigued by this invitation, and asked about the kind of gathering you were being invited to, you might have been stunned to discover that in this ekklesia women had a voice, slaves were welcomed with open arms, and Jews and others were included as valued members of this body.

This was one of the things that made those first Christian communities in major cities dotted around the Mediterranean so remarkable. And in the great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, straddling the trade routes between Europe, Asia and Africa, these early Christian communities were characterized by an extraordinary degree of diversity.

It is perhaps this insight that is captured so compellingly by our reading from the Acts of the Apostles. The day of Pentecost, often described as the birthday of the Christian Church, is described in terms of ‘divided tongues of fire which appeared among the apostles and rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

So when we hear the account from the New Testament, it is important to recognize that the author of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke the Evangelist, is not describing speaking in tongues or the kind of dramatic glossolalia, one of the gifts of the spirit described in other parts of the New Testament. The thing that captivates their unsuspecting audience is that there in the city of Jerusalem, where Jews had gathered to celebrate the Jewish Feast of Pentecost, fifty days after the Feast of Passover, ‘each one heard the apostles speaking in the native language of each.’

It is fascinating to reflect for a moment on the similarities and contrasts with another story in scripture, in the Book of Genesis. In the story of the Tower of Babel, the listener is confronted with a babble of languages – and there is a sense in which the story causes us to lament the confusion caused by diversity and difference. But when we contemplate the story of Pentecost, we see exactly the same phenomenon, and yet the lessons we draw from it are very different.

The proclamation of the gospel in different languages demonstrates that from the very beginning the good news was communicated in a way that could be understood by both Jews and Gentiles. The barriers of language and culture were transcended by the proclamation of the gospel.

It is one of the distinctive marks of the Christian Church that its scriptures exist in translation. The original scriptures used by the first Christian communities were probably the Greek Translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint. From The Letter of Aristeas, we know that this translation, with seventy different translators, was also imbued with an air of divine authority. We see a similar motif in descriptions of Jerome’s translation of the Vulgate, the Latin Bible which became the accepted version in the Western Church during the Middle Ages. And then the accounts of the translation of the King James Bible into English, a version which was said to be so inspired that as one public official in the state of Mississippi put it: ‘If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was good enough for me’.

The work of translation implies a much more dynamic understanding of the doctrine of inspiration. The Holy Spirit is at work not only in inspiring the writers of these texts, but also in the translation of these ancient texts, in patient scholarship and careful editing. And the Holy Spirit is at work as we read and interpret these texts as we make sense of them in our own lives. In all of this, we learn that the Holy Spirit speaks to us in local dialects and that the life of the church can take on many different local forms.

But more than that, the fact that the gospel is communicated in many different languages shows us that the church, the ekklesia, transcends the ties of family, language, and national identity. And this is challenging for us. It is not always what our political leaders and the echo chambers of social media want us to hear.

We live at a time when our political leaders seek to assert the importance of national identity. In recent years, they have sought to exploit the differences between us, sometimes quite cynically for their own benefit. Public rhetoric, with the language of a ‘hostile environment’, has often displayed a callous disregard for the plight of the alien, the stranger, the migrant and the refugee. We lock up immigrants in detention centres. We respond to the phenomenon of mass migration with an extraordinary lack of empathy. When our political leaders build walls, too many people in our society are tempted to applaud them. And yet, in recent months, as we have contemplated the plight of refugees from Ukraine, the public mood has begun to change.

From that first day of Pentecost, the Spirit of God has given us the strength and the confidence to reach out to one another beyond the barriers of language and race, to reach beyond the things which separate us and to dispel the divisions which lock us into relationships of suspicion and mistrust. The Spirit of God enables us to see the dignity of every human being, that every human being has a vital place in this assembly, this ekklesia.

In our reading from Acts, we learn that the proclamation of the gospel is not about telling unsuspecting strangers that they need to clean up their lives before they can belong to a holy huddle of the like-minded.

For when we make the grace of God conditional, we betray the vision of the ekklesia described in the pages of the New Testament. And this is why I believe it is so important for Anglicans to articulate what it means to be a ‘catholic’ Christian, particularly when that word ‘catholic’ so often gets used in a rather ‘tribal’ way. It’s a term we need to redeem and to own. The word ‘catholic’ means ‘according to the whole’, it embraces the fullest possible description of human excellence, it faces all the sicknesses and challenges of human living, it makes holiness possible for all kinds of people, it searches for truth, the whole truth, it declares the universality of God's offer of salvation.

To say that the Church is ‘catholic’ is to say that the Church is concerned with embracing the whole of life – and whether you are young or old, black or white, friend or stranger, gay or straight, male or female, single or married, town or gown, a new born infant or the longest reigning monarch in British history, you have a place in the household of faith – for as Peter reminds his listeners: ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved’. Everyone – and this is the work of the Holy Spirit. This is the gift we celebrate at Pentecost. And you belong here because this is a community where everyone can discover the transforming fire of God’s love, where everyone can open their heart to the gift of the Holy Spirit.