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Before training for the ministry I was a Primary School teacher. One my reasons for opting to teach young children was the sheer exhilaration I experienced when one of the pupils would suddenly comprehend something they had not understood before. I loved to see the expressions of their faces when suddenly; ‘the penny dropped’. This was made all the more special when a child who struggled to comprehend even the most basic of things overcame what seemed impossible to them. Their joy and mine was great.

Peter, was one of these children. Nothing came easy to him including bodily co-ordination and appropriate behaviour. His own shortcomings frustrated him, greatly, and the thing that frustrated him the most was the fact that he could not climb to the top of the ropes in the hall.

Peter always tried so hard to get to the top but his general lack of co-ordination and body shape hindered his every attempt. Until one morning, when after repeated attempts Peter got to the top of the rope. Out of sheer joy he shouted at his classmates and me to look at him. The children clapped and we all shared in his happiness and achievement. Nothing could dampen his joy or his spirits, even after sliding down the rope and burning his hands. Peter had overcome his barrier, at last he could climb the ropes, at last he knew how to do it.

The coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Earth at that first Pentecost, is not unlike that day when Peter overcame his barrier in rope climbing. Pentecost was the day that the barriers came down for the disciples, the day that their perceptions of Jesus were changed and they discovered that they could and should talk to people of all languages and of all nations.

Pentecost, was the time that the Spirit burst upon the world. The day that barriers between Jew and gentile, men and women, between one race and another were swept away; and the day that Jesus’ disciples were fired with energy and confidence to preach the Gospel, to the world.

Pentecost, follows Jesus’ ascension, and without his ascension, without his leaving of his disciples, the Holy Spirit would not have been able to freely fill the Earth and I doubt that we would be here worshipping today. Jesus had to ascend because his ministry as a human man was limited. Limited by time, place, people and language because we human beings have our limitations and constraints. With the Holy Spirit there are no such restrictions and as such Jesus’ ministry could now cross barriers it was unable to cross before.

The Holy Spirit, is however, dangerous!

We cannot control the workings of the Spirit, we cannot contain it and manipulate it. Neither is there anywhere the Spirit cannot go or cannot permeate.

Before being ordained deacon, I was told that I would be fundamentally changed by the sacrament of ordination. I was not too sure of this before the event but as the then Bishop of Oxford laid his hands on my head, I felt myself shot through with ‘fire’. A surge of energy seemed to flow into me and I believe it did change me. It wasn’t just me who felt this, my colleagues being ordained did too, the cathedral was filled with so much static electricity that not a single photograph came out clear. Sparks ready did fly!

The change, I believe I experienced was both perceptible and imperceptible. I felt that I had been empowered to begin my life as an ordained minister of Christ. I believe this to be true because repeatedly I have been enabled to go into situations and to cope with events that I would rather not have had to do so or that I felt I was incapable of understanding or dealing with.  I also believe that I have been given the right words, at the right time too. As Matthew records Jesus telling his disciples:

“… do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say: for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”           Matthew 10:19-20

Again and again, I have known this to be true. At time people have said to me; ‘thank you for what you said, it really helped me’. Often I have no remembrance or idea let alone memory of what I said but the Spirit obviously spoke to the right thing to the people concerned at the time. I suspect that the same thing will have been said to you too.

I acknowledge the role that the Holy Spirit has in my life. I know that without it I could not be an effective priest nor could I minister to you either and I give thanks regularly in my prayers for this agent of change.

The Holy Spirit uses all of us as ministers of Christ’s Good News. It uses us to take the message of the Gospel to the ends of the Earth; to the Earth’s far corners and darkest places. It also helps us to take that message to the dark places in each other’s lives too and into our own hard hearts as well. 

Recently I came across an article on the back page of the Church Times by the poet Malcolm Guite. He wrote this about Eastertide and Pentecost and I think it helps to sum up what I have been saying:

“ … Easter Day is really just about lighting the blue touch paper on the joyful rocket of resurrection, the 40 day Easter season that will culminate in Ascension Day, and then come down in a shower of glorious sparks - tongues of flame at pentecost - to ignite our inner fireworks and send us out into the world to kindle hearts for Christ.”                                                                           Church Times 25th April 2025

It is our duty, as people ‘born in the Spirit’ through Baptism to tell others about the love of God, to be evangelistic in the ways in which we live our lives. Not only in the way we live but in the ways we respond to each other, our attitudes to life and our fellow beings and the myriad of ways in which we love. We are called to lead others to the ways and person of Jesus by gentle encouragement, supporting them along the way, all the time, never assuming that they or we will know the way on our own.

A daunting task? Yes, it is. But, it is not a task one should worry about because the Holy Spirit will guide us in every step we take, if we allow it. If we keep our hearts and minds open, allowing the Spirit to change us at will, then God’s will, will be done. 

The greatest sin, we are told, any of us can commit is a sin against the Holy Spirit. I interpret this to mean that we sin if we shut ourselves off from the workings of the Spirit. In order to be loved and to love we have to be open, to be prepared to lay ourselves bare before the Lord, to trust in him, to allow him to use us as he wants.  

This scary but being a Christian is a risky business. Life is risky but as a Christian living in the Spirit you cannot afford to be complacent, to sit back and to take it easy. You have to get out into the world and work for God’s Kingdom.

On this Pentecost Sunday we are reminded to keep ourselves open, to allow the fireworks of the Spirit into our lives and to be encouraged by it to take risks for the sake of the Gospel. Wee Peter took a risk and achieved that which he believed to be impossible - what might God be calling you to risk?

What does today’s epistle reading make you think of?

It makes me think of a sandwich! The Alpha and the Omega providing the bread - slices of God’s presence that enfold who we are. Separate bits creating a unified whole. 

“I am the beginning and the end” and “I in them and you in me.” 

These verses, the first from Revelation and the second from John do I think say the same thing:

that if God is both our beginning and our end, then God is also in us as much as we are in him. 

What I think this means is that we can never be separated from the love of God simply because we are made in God’s image and share something of his being in our bodily make up. God is totally and utterly intimate with us at all times. As Scripture tells us (and whether or not we like it); the fact remains that because we are made in God’s image, then we can never be parted from God, even if we choose to turn away from him. 

In both life and death God remains our beginning and our end and as such offers us eternal life because we cannot be separated from him.  

We can as I say, choose to turn our back to him but God loves us enough to allow us to make that choice.Should we do so and turn from him, we are not ‘apart’ from him. To be apart from God would imply that God cuts us off from his being and the God of unconditional love that I believe in would not do that because he would always wish to offer to us that second, third or umpteenth chance to turn again to him. That’s what unconditional love looks like. Never giving up on what might seem to be a lost cause. Always hoping that bad might turn to good and that through repentance all can be made new in the blood shed by Christ. 

Personally, I am deeply comforted by the fact that I can never be parted from God; even if I did turn my back on him. To know that despite myself, I am always welcome in God and can return to him time and time again, after walking away or denying him. I know this from experience as I tried to do just that when training for the priesthood but God welcomed me back after my ‘crisis of faith’. I found that I was still ‘bothered’ by God, even when I did not wish to be!

I hope that you too will be re-assured and encouraged by today’s readings that you too are so loved by God that you can never be apart or separated from him either. That you will know, that despite what you may or may not do or think, God is always going to be a part of you, both your beginning and your end. He is like the bread of the sandwich holding you together. 

Never think either, that God has abandoned or will ever abandon you. There may be times when you can’t see him or feel him but he is still there. What we have to learn to do is to look again or just take the barriers down to allow him to touch us and embrace us with his all encompassing and never ending love. This is what beginning and end means - a never ending bond of love. A love so powerful that we cannot fully comprehend it in its all encompassment of us both in our earthly and eternal lives. 

Yes! We will all die one day, just as we have all been born but it does not mean that we will be put out of God’s love or beyond God’s care. To be beyond God is impossible. We are of God, made in God’s image and containing God’s divine spark of life. We may abandon God by choice or by our actions but God amazingly never abandons us. I suspect God may mourn or despair over our actions or stubborn hearts but he will always love us. He will always offer us a place deep in his being if we truly repent and walk towards his total and all enveloping love. 

God is our beginning and our end. We exist in him as much as he exists in us - Alpha and Omega - us in God and God in us. 

Have you even stopped to ponder why there are 40 days between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension into heaven? 

One might have expected Jesus to return to his Father almost immediately after his rising to new life. As a sort of affirmation that he truly was the Son of God, who now after his work on Earth was completed had nothing more to do except rejoin his Father. Jesus, however, as we know never did anything that was ‘expected’ of him. Nothing that we humans might think to be logical. Jesus does things in his ways and in his time.

In those 40 days of post-resurrection life Jesus continued to minister but most notably to his disciples and those closest to him. We have seen some of those encounters as we have journeyed through Eastertide. Think of; his appearing in the upper room, his journeying to Emmaus, his interaction with Thomas. All very important events because they taught the disciples more about Jesus, more than he could have taught or shown them before his resurrection. 

Through the post-resurrection events Jesus is showing them who is TRULY is - the Son of God. His resurrection was proof of his identity and was so necessary for the disciples to truly believe in it in a way that could not have done before his crucifixion. They might have thought they knew who he was but now they had the proof to who he actually was.

I feel that Jesus stayed with his followers for those post-resurrection 40 days in order to remove any doubt in the disciples minds that he was who he said he was. For if they had had lingering doubts they would not have been so extraordinarily effective at spreading the Good News. If you cannot commit 100% to something you never achieve what might be possible. You will easily give up at the first hurdle. By staying with his followers for those 40 days, Jesus helps them to relax in to their understanding and belief of who he is and what he came to do. He also begins to guide them in how they are to continue his ministry once he has ascended. One final push of inspiration to fuel the disciples to go and:

“… make disciples of all the world.”

as he commanded them to do at his ascension. When one realises what he was doing during the 40 days before his ascension one can understand more fully what he meant by that charge and how he had prepared them to undertake it. It probably didn’t come as a surprise that he told them to do that but more a final word on what he wanted them to do - and, do it they did. 

We can see how the disciples responded to Jesus’s last words as we journey through the Book of Acts and not only his immediate followers but those like Paul and Lydia who became followers after his ascension. So good were the original followers of Jesus at spreading the Good News that they led others to belief by what they said and did. We in our turn are the successors of those original converts and we like them will have enabled or brought others to Christ in our own way. 

We might not have had an experience like Paul or Lydia had but we will all have had an effect on someone else but we will probably never know how or why. It can be those; ‘When you said … you changed things for me’ moments. You probably won’t have any recollection of what you said but when God works through us we usually don’t realise that he is doing so. We are, however, still the inheritors of Christ’s teaching and commissioning of his followers in those 40 post-resurrection days and if we can relax into our faith we will fulfil the command he gave us at his ascension to:

“… go and make disciples of all the world.”

Acts 11: 1-18        Revelation 21: 1-6      John 13:31-35

Today’s three readings fit together splendidly. Our Gospel tells of Jesus issuing a new commandment:

…that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

Our reading from Acts shows one of the ways in which Peter and the other Apostles came to realize that this the commandment would involve radical changes in their outlook and their relationships with other people and our reading from Revelation looks forward to a future in which Jesus’ new commandment is fully implemented.

“…the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples.”

Searching on the internet for a way of illustrating those themes – commandment, change and fulfilment – I came across a quotation from one of the chief engineers who worked on the Panama Canal. 

The Panama Canal is in the news at the moment because President Trump has recently threatened to take back control of it. The back story is that it was built with American money and expertise after a French attempt to construct it failed. The building of the canal was a hugely challenging project. The terrain was very difficult, with jungle to cut through, hills to circumvent, primitive living conditions for the workers and the danger of catching Yellow Fever and Malaria as a result of mosquito bites. There were a number of setbacks and disasters, and the plans for building the canal changed over time. 

The American project began in 1904, and the first two chief engineers appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt resigned in frustration at the difficulties of the task and the criticisms that they received. The second of those engineers, John Frank Stevens, was the one who realized that the attempt to build the entire canal at sea level was doomed to failure. He explained to Congress that success could only be achieved by building locks and they took his advice. 

When Jesus commanded his followers

…that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

he set them an enormous challenge. He wasn’t asking them to believe in a particular set of theological propositions, he was asking them for something far simpler and yet much more difficult, a call to join a process of love which has the potential to transform the world.   

To contribute to any process involves accepting change. Our reading from Acts shows Peter accepting that the commandment to love one another involves change. He had been brought up as a devout Jew, committed to the law of Moses. Then he had been called to follow Jesus and had watched his master hanging out with publicans, sinners and gentiles, affirming women and even praising the faith of a Roman centurion. And now more of his assumptions were being questioned. The vision he experienced challenged the Jewish dietary laws which he had always observed. The message he heard was:

‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’

In response to that call, and prompted by the Holy Spirit he travelled to Caesarea, understanding that

“The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us.”

Them being, of course, Gentiles – non-Jews, people with whom law-abiding Jews would not share table fellowship because doing so would render them unclean. 

He found that the Holy Spirit has got there ahead of him. The people he met were already receptive to the Gospel. He didn’t even need to preach. 

“And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.”

That testimony of Peter’s was a hugely important moment in the process by which Christianity ceased to be a sect within Judaism and became the world religion it is today. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Christians have continued to question the assumptions on which “us and them” thinking is based and moved to being a more inclusive church. That’s a process which remains incomplete, a process which we are called to pursue in love as we continue to discern what it means to live out the new commandment that Jesus gives in today’s Gospel:

…that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

A call to join a process of love which can transform the world.   

The process of change has at times been messy, and Christians have, and still do, fall far short. Our secularist critics are quick to point out the lamentable failures to obey Christ’s commandment that have happened in the past – the horrors of the Crusades, the cruelty of the Inquisition, Christian support for slavery – and that still happen in the present; think of the scandal of Christian leaders abusing children and vulnerable adults. 

And those criticisms bring us back to the story of the building of the Panama Canal and the quotation that I found on the internet. The third chief engineer, Colonel George Washington Goethals, was appointed in 1907. He faced enormous criticism about his handling of the project and there’s a well-known anecdote about him. One of his colleagues asked him

“When are you going to answer your critics?”

“In time”, he replied.

The colleague persisted.

“But when?”

And the Chief Engineer’s answer was simple:

“When the canal is finished.”

He brought the project to completion in 1914.

I think it is legitimate to answer secularist criticisms about the many ways in which Christians have and still do fall short of obeying Christ’s commandment in a way that is similar to Colonel Goethals’ answer to the colleague who asked him when he was going to respond to his critics. The process of our trying to obey Christ’s commandment isn’t yet finished. Our reading from Revelation gives us a visionary glimpse of what the end of that process will be like, how it will fully be realized in a new creation in which

“…the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples.”

That is a heartening passage for it teaches that with God’s help and grace flawed human beings like ourselves can make the changes in our outlook and behaviour that are needed if Christ’s command to love one another is fully to be realized. Each generation of Christians is challenged, just as Peter was challenged, to discern the changes that are needed to move the process forward to its glorious completion.  

The fact that the word peoples in that passage from Revelation is plural is very significant. It points us to strive for a perfected human community in which difference is acknowledged as a glory rather than a problem, and it reminds us of the lesson that Peter learned, that God does not confine God’s love and grace to us and withhold it from them.

“I am the Good Shepherd”

Hearing these words exactly as the disciples heard them is impossible for us, not least because they were almost certainly spoken in Aramaic. We all have some sense of what the word shepherd means, but we need to do a bit of digging to understand what Jesus meant when he identified himself as the Good Shepherd.

It turns out that there are three Aramaic words which can be translated as “good”. One of them means pleasurable or beautiful, the second means good in a moral sense and the third is all about having good relationships. Several centuries after St John’s Gospel was written, it was translated from the original Greek into Aramaic, and when the translator tackled the passage we heard just now, the third of those words was chosen. In that version of the Gospel, still used by Syriac Christians in the Middle East, Jesus is the shepherd who has good relationships.

The shepherd who has good relationships. One reason that this version of the saying makes sense is that it was customary in Biblical times for the job of shepherding to be done by one or more of the sons of the owner of the flock. You’ll recall that when Samuel asked to see all the sons of Jesse, the youngest of them, David, was absent looking after the sheep and had to be summoned to meet the prophet. If the owner of the flock had no sons, then it was necessary to hire a shepherd, but the hireling shepherds were, as Jesus suggests in today’s Gospel, less reliable. A good shepherd is, therefore, the son of the owner of the flock, and when Jesus says “I am the Good Shepherd” he is painting a word picture which conveys the truth that he is the Son of God. 

It’s likely that he had in mind a passage from the book of Ezekiel in which God tells the prophet:

“I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down…I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak…”

And the prophet, in his turn, clearly drew inspiration from the 23rd Psalm, a source of comfort for many generations of Jews and for Christians of all denominations. 

The word “comfort” can be misleading. We apply it to things which soothe us and which are restful - comfort blankets, comfort food - and there’s nothing wrong with that, but the word is derived from a Latin verb, confortare, which meant “to make strong”. And that’s an important reminder that as Christians, as members of the flock of Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd, we are called, we are made strong, in order to be shepherds ourselves. We are called to the active striving for the welfare of others of which today’s Epistle speaks:

“…let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” 

Active seeking for the welfare of others is, of course, central to the mission of Christian Aid, whose work and whose 80th anniversary we celebrate today. The charity was originally founded to help the many millions of refugees displaced during the Second World War and that’s a reminder that Thursday of last week saw the 80th anniversary of VE Day - the end of that conflict in Europe and the defeat of a regime characterised by racism, by a perverted version of national pride and by a lust for territorial expansion. While we rightly celebrate that anniversary, no victory is ever complete, for racism, perverted national pride and the lust for territorial expansion continue to fuel conflicts and to threaten peace and democratic values. Remember, for example, the conflict in Ukraine and the savage cuts to overseas aid made by the Trump administration.

We rightly commemorate the service and sacrifice of that wartime generation who enabled those us to live in peace. We also rightly commemorate the work of those who, perhaps in small ways, worked for reconciliation between former enemies.

If you go to the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London you will find there some correspondence between former German officers, recently repatriated prisoners of war, and a young woman then living in Lancashire. The officers express their gratitude for parcels of clothing sent by the young woman and other members of the Women’s Fellowship of the church to which she belonged. The museum has the letters because I deposited them there. They were written by my aunt Edith.

That initiative of reconciliation arose out of the fact that my father, a Methodist minister, was asked by the commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp in Northumberland to offer pastoral support to a badly-wounded German infantry colonel who belonged to the small Methodist Church in Germany. After VE Day, the prisoners were allowed out into the local community and my aunt met some of them at my father’s home, as did her father and her sister, who was then my father’s fiancée. When my parents got married, the wedding presents included a number of items crafted by the prisoners of war my father had befriended. I have one of them here. It’s a beautifully carved bread plate and in the centre of it, in old-fashioned German script, are words which, when translated, will be familiar to you all and which we will use later in this service.

”Unser täglich brot gib uns heute”

“Give us this day our daily bread”

The story serves as a reminder both that we belong to a Christian flock that is world-wide, a reminder of the value of the ecumenical partnership that is Murrayfield Churches Together. And it reminds us also that Christ calls us to be be shepherds, shepherds who have good relationships, including good relationships with that wider flock which we call humanity, all made in the image and likeness of God. That is what Christian Aid seeks to do.

To return to those words from today’s Epistle:

“…let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”