• Acts 2:1-21
• John 7: 37-39

Some of us went to see "Get Real" on Friday night. For anyone who does not know, the film is about a gay school boy growing up in Basingstoke and falling in love with the head boy at his school. It is a really witty and perceptive film and I'd recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it.

For many of us, particularly those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered, our school days were a fraught time. It is the one time in your life when it is very difficult to be the person you want to be. Your parents have expectations of you. Your teachers have expectations of you. Peer pressure is at its most ferocious. If you don't fit in, as I most certainly didn't, it was often a frightening place.

The film wasn't in any way gloomy, but it captured the feeling of powerlessness, of wanting to be yourself but having little prospect of actually doing so. What made it particularly resonant to me was the ordinariness of it all. The lead character had an ordinary family in an ordinary house in an ordinary town. He went to an ordinary school. While he was lucky enough to get up to some extraordinary things, I'm sure it wasn't difficult for many people in the cinema to see a little bit of the truth in their own lives in that film.

Enough of the film review, today is Pentecost. The day when we celebrate what many regard as the founding of the Christian Church. The day when we give special thanks and praise for the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives day to day.

In MCC we have recent memories of the foundation of our denomination. Many of the leading people involved are still around and we have had the pleasure of a visit from Rev Elder Troy Perry, the founder of our denomination. We can actually remember the reason why this Church came into being.

It is more difficult searching back to the days of the original Christians. Collective memory has grown faint. We have to rely on historians, archaeologists and, of course, the various versions of what happened contained in the Bible.

So what do today's readings tell us?

The first thing that always strikes me is that there was a functioning Church already. Now I appreciate that not everyone considers the Jewish religion of that time to be a "Church". That is as may be. It may be, in the end, a question of semantics. To m, a Church is a collection of people of faith with a common purpose of worshipping God together. The Jewish religion of that time worshipped the same God as we do today. The Jewish religion remains on of the world's great communities of faith and I do not doubt that God worked through the Jews then and does so today.

So, why did we need to see the birth of a new Church? Why couldn't we just brought Jesus' message within mainstream Judiasm?

In our reading from Acts we are told that Jerusalem was filled with devout people from every nation under heaven. That must have been some gathering of faith! Surely, that alone would have been good enough to make God's Word real in the world?

What does this story tell us about what God is trying to achieve?

The first and strongest point in all the stories of Pentecost and the work of the Spirit is that God is empowering ALL of us. Jewish religion had its priestly cast. It had those who could do certain things in the Temple and those who could not. There was the distinction between Jew and Gentile. We essentially had a God whose power to transform was limited by rules and regulations.

Before the Church could start its ministry it needed the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit would equip them to do what was needed to be done and everyone who was called to ministry would be so equipped.

As St Paul says in his letter to the Corinthians:

Each and every person has the possibility of being touched by the Holy Spirit. It is not just the great and the good, the holy, the chosen. The Holy Spirit is the truth and the power and the glory of God living within the lives of all of us all. We all may be different, have different gifts, different backgrounds, different experiences, but, according to St Paul:

So if we regard this as the foundation of the Christian Church, we have to consider the Christian Church, we have to consider the Christian Church as being a worshipping community where we are all regarded equally to be able to call on the Holy Spirit and all be blessed by access to God's truth and empowerment by God's gifts.

We must ask ourselves if we are being that Church. Liberal Christians like me go on and on about how bad it is when Church structures take away from ordinary Christians the power to do ministry by insisting that only clergy get on with the job. But it is just as wrong, if not more wrong, when we sit back and let our Church life be something that happens to us.

St Peter in the reading from Acts quotes from the prophet Joel when he says:

The revelation of God that the Spirit continually brings forth will not and is not restricted to a narrow group of people. The gifts of the Spirit will touch each and every one of us and by denying our own ministries or those of other people, we are denying the possibility of God touching us through the Spirit in our lives.

That doesn't mean that we all should be preaching or leading worship or evangelising on the Street corner.

St Paul tells us:

The Holy Spirit is God working in our own lives. God empowering us to do God's work. God revealing the divine truth to us in our daily toils. There is no limit to where that can happen and in how that can require us to respond.

The Spirit moves in us when we exchange a welcome to a new person in Church or make the tea or count the offering as much as when we celebrate communion. If we fail to see the possibility of the Holy Spirit in even the most mundane aspects of our lives we are cutting ourselves off to communication with God.

We are often told that Christianity should not just be about Sundays. Often this is a way of telling us to behave ourselves on other days of the week. But to me there is the much bigger issue of being of being open to God touching our lives when we watch a soap opera or tidy the garden or do the shopping rather than restricting God's possibilities to when we are singing hymns or looking prayerful.

My favourite line from our reading from Acts tonight is the reply from one of the spectators to the activities of the apostles. Faced with a group of people suddenly preaching in a variety of languages, the onlooker exclaims:

A throwaway remark maybe but also one that makes a great point. In those days there were special ways of talking to God and almost a special language for use when praying in the Temple. My parents, who are catholic, still remember the time when the a Catholic worship service in Scotland was conducted mainly in Latin.

We can easily be tempted to make our Church lives separate from our real lives. We use special words. We do special things. In some traditions you dress in special ways.

But how much more powerful is it when we experience God on our own turf, on our own terms? When we hear of God's deeds of power in our own language.

One of the reasons why MCC came into being was that many LGBT folk had to separate their sexuality and spirituality if they were to be allowed to worship God at all. As a Church we soon found out that it was not only LGBT people who were forced to separate out who they were in a Church setting. Many people were, and still are, told that there were parts of their lives that would have to be put into the closet if they were to approach God.

MCC called initially for the integration of spirituality and sexuality. Soon this came to mean an integration of our whole selves, our whole lives, whoever we may be, into our relationships with God.

We didn't need to hide anymore. We could be divorced, single parents. We could be alcoholics. We could be people who had difficulty with faith. We could be gay. We could be black. We could live with life threatening conditions such as HIV and AIDS. The possibilities were endless. We could be who we were (with all the good and the bad wrapped up with that) and invite God's Spirit into our lives.

The film on Friday night was so resonant to me because it was similar in some ways to my own childhood. We could have had drama, poetry or some majestic presentation of what God feels about me and mine. But how more powerful it was by letting the simplicity of an ordinary boys ordinary story touch us.

As a Church we must never let ourselves fall into the trap of seeing certain people or things as worthy and others as unworthy. Living a Godly life can never be about keeping ourselves away from worldly things which we fear will corrupt us. To me, if we believe in the reality of the Holy Spirit living within us, we must have the courage to go out into the world and live our lives, remaining open to the Spirit moving within and amongst us whether that be in a beautiful Church building or on the dance floor off CCs.

One of my favourite hymns, which we will not sing this evening, tells us that "The Spirit lives to set us free". Let us not be condemned to a dried up, uptight, rule bound life. Let us commit ourselves to a real, living relationship with God, where we can be nourished by the Spirit in all that we do and bring a God-given, loving perspective to the whole world and not just the Church world. As Jesus tells us in our Gospel reading:

"Out of the believer's heart shall flow rivers of living water."

Friends, let those rivers flow! Let Christ's life giving water touch us and all around us in all aspects of our lives. Let us accept and celebrate the possibility of God's deeds being revealed in all situations, in all languages, to all people.

Amen.

This sermon was delivered by Stephen Harte at Holy Trinity MCC Edinburgh on Sunday 23rd May1999.

© Stephen Harte 1999. Moral rights have been asserted.