Learning the Vocabulary of the Holy Spirit - St Martin-in-the-Fields (2024)

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on May 19, 2024 by Revd Richard Carter

Desert Island Discs is one of those programmes I enjoy listening to, wondering what will be the sound-track for a person’s life. Wondering what is the sound-track of my own life. They sometimes play some of the Desert Island Disc classics and I heard Kirsty Young interviewing Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks in so many films plays a character who presents a role model of American integrity and down-to-earth courage in the face of extreme adversity, but in the interview he tells how his parents split up when he was 5 and how he went to live with his father. By the age of 10 he’d lived in ten different houses in five different cities. He tells how he started going to the theatre on his own and all the time he was asking himself, ‘How could I find the vocabulary for what was rattling around inside my head?’ Kirsty Young asks, ‘What was it that was rattling around inside your head?’ Big Tom Hanks suddenly breaks down and can’t speak and then says ‘What have you done to me…’ and then very falteringly he answers that what was rattling in his head was ‘the vocabulary of loneliness.’ That phrase ‘the vocabulary of loneliness’ stuck in my mind. All the great dramas are about that struggle with the vocabulary of loneliness.

A couple of weeks ago at the International Group one of our guests who has been in hospital because he has a very badly swollen infected leg told me the doctor had told him when he sleeps to keep his leg elevated. The problem is he said, ‘I have no way of doing that because I have no place to lay down at night because I am homeless, no way to keep my leg elevated as I am always either standing or sitting.’ That same day by mistake he left his mobile phone and his wallet in his pocket when they were doing his washing in the laundry. After going through a washing machine of course the mobile did not work. ‘Don’t worry,’ I tried to reassure him, ‘we can get you another one.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, bravely smiling, ‘the problem is it has all my contacts on the SIM in that mobile phone, my family and friends.’ I was amazed at his resilience, but my heart bled for him. I tried to imagine what it would be like, alone on the streets of a foreign country, with an infected leg and no way to contact anyone. I felt the vocabulary of loneliness and my fear of it fill me. And I was overwhelmed by his courage.

Have you ever been separated from someone you love? A gulf you cannot cross. And your whole being filled with the realisation that you cannot turn back the clock or return and this haunting void within you – the void that the one you loved once filled but will not or cannot come back or return. And inside of you that great silent shout of despair that no one can hear.

The song writer and singer Nick Cave in his memoir Faith, Hope and Carnage speaks about the tragic death of his son, Arthur, and how it changes his life forever. He speaks about the way grief can take some people to dark places from which they never return. ‘People constricting around an absence, growing hard and mad and furious at the world… there is nothing to lead them out the abyss.’ Nothing to confront the vocabulary of loneliness and despair within. And he talks of the way the rejection of religion in tragedy can also be a denial of all the potential good religion can bring – comfort, community, forgiveness and redemption.

Yet for him, in this time of overwhelming loss, the layers of suffering, the recognition of one’s own powerlessness and inability to control, the precariousness of life, the fragility of our lives and the enormity of death – there was he says also the realisation of life’s rareness and preciousness. And he says, ‘Arthur showed me that the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world. Love that most crucial counter-intuitive act of all, is the responsibility of each one of us. Love the only thing that can cross the divide. Waiting for you. Waiting for you…’ Nick Cave sings, ‘to return.’

(Waiting for You by Nick Cave begins)

Somehow it is in the absence that we experience the greatest longing and recognition of all we are waiting for – and that love, all that we are waiting for, is the love of all that we eternally are. It is in the way that the grief itself, if we allow it its full expression can become gift, the empty space within us can become the heart of love. I remember listening to this song by Nick Cave grieving for his son… and the words of this song connecting deep within to that deepest human experience within – love, loss, the longing for return.

(Music louder to end of track)

Waiting for you to return. Longing for resurrection not only of the beloved but of self. Love that life force within.

Is not our religious faith so much part of this journey and struggle? I mean the real issues of how we face up to the meaning of our lives. Why am I here? What do I belong to? Who do I love and who really loves me? How do I face death? And how do I face the death of those I love and witness the suffering of the world. The vocabulary of our loneliness, the vocabulary of human mortality – have we not or will we not all taste it? As we leaf through an old photograph album and see the fading pictures of those we love. As we wait for a doctor’s report, or try to discern a decision crucial for our future, or agonise over the health struggles or dementia of an elderly parent and wonder where all our shared memories are disappearing, or contemplate the nature of a relationship upon which our whole lives seems to depend, or struggle to overcome a grief, or a broken heart for someone we love deeply who is separated from us forever. The vocabulary of human mortality and loneliness is as deep and as unfathomable as an ocean.

I think of that group of first disciples unable to make sense of all that has taken place not knowing what the future held on that first day of Pentecost. They too must have been traumatised by all they had witnessed. They were living through layers of unexplainable experience. The most brutal death. Then resurrection appearances that must have left them feeling exhilarated but also perhaps delusional and destabilised – reality so shaken that they must have been unsure what was real and what could ever follow on. But now Pentecost. The day when the Spirit of Jesus – the Spirit and the love that had led them up mountains but also to the desolation of Calvary, then the confusion of an empty grave and the ecstatic bewildered astonishment of resurrection-but then again separation. Here they are on this day. Still fearful. Locked in an upper room in fear. Waiting. Waiting for Jesus and their love for him to return.

Pentecost. That’s what happens at Pentecost. The vocabulary of loneliness and mortality and fear is transcended and a new language is born. It is a language no one ever believed possible. It began at the very point of abandonment. It began in the very wounds which were the symbols of brutality shame and loss. How can we describe that moment?

Well in the place where words and formulas fail we behold signs and experiences which speak a language which transcends the mortal. What is Pentecost like? Well like all we have just seen and heard – like tongues of fire reaching the place that we feel the coldness of shame and loss and death. Tongues of fire like an energy from beyond but now within – igniting all that felt like dust and ashes. Like a rushing wind being breathed into us and filling our blood stream with the oxygen of God’s love. Like the first breath God breathed into Adam and Eve blowing his divine life into what has been formed in the dust. Or the breath that Jesus breathed and still breathes into his disciples filling their lungs and bloodstream and bodies with the life giving breath of God. What is this Spirit? Well John’s Gospel calls it the Advocate, The Comforter, Paul called it the Holy Spirit- it is the Spirit which overcomes our separateness and gives us the courage to break out of our locked rooms. It is the Spirit that says: ‘You are not alone. You belong to God and God is bigger than family or tribe or nation or the prejudices that contain you.’ It is the Spirit that says: ‘I am not going to be defined by fear or locked into the vocabulary of loneliness, fear of mortality and self-preservation. God has taken away my heart of stone and given me a heart of flesh and through his Son given me as gift, the vocabulary of his love.’ And the love within me is not dead. I am not dry bones as Ezekiel realised. I know that my redeemer liveth’ as Job proclaimed. That love does end in betrayal and death as Peter three times proclaims – Yes Lord you know that I still and will always love you.

I am incredibly aware that everyone can be the bearers of that Holy Spirit. And the most amazing thing about this Spirit is that in God’s sight everyone, everyone, whether you are a King, a steward, a homeless asylum seeker, aged 1, 7 or 87, in all our difference and diversity we are all equally loved, equally longed for, equally made in God’s image. Ultimately we are all refugees longing to find our way to return home. Pentecost says that home of God is here and now and within you. And in the vocabulary of your own loneliness and mortality you can meet that Same Spirit – the Spirit which abides, which comforts, which teaches and advocates, and leads us into the paths of truth. As you wait for love. That Spirit of God is waiting for you. To return.

Pentecost transforms a group of frightened and overwhelmed disciples into those capable of witnessing to God’s love to the ends of the earth. Acts of the Apostles is really better named acts of the Holy Spirit for it records the record of how this Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ breaks open locked doors, brings forgiveness for sins, brings deep inner healing, breaks down divisions and prejudices that have divided and brought enmity and hate – reveals that God is the God of Jesus and Gentiles – overturns hierarchies of repression and inequality. This Holy Spirit is a Spirit of Peace greater than all human understanding. What are the fruits of this Holy Spirit? Paul lists them in Galatians chapter 5 – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, self- control – in short – the Spirit of Jesus. This is indeed a Spirit that can transform the world. Today, Pentecost- the vocabulary of loneliness and death is replaced with the vocabulary and energy of love and life. It is this vocabulary of life and hope that is Christ’s gift to you.