Wind and fire are a volatile combination that can destroy people and property and tear apart entire communities and yet they can also, it seems, give birth to a community! Yes, it is Pentecost Sunday and we are celebrating today the birth of the church.
The church as a worldwide community has been living and breathing now for a lot longer than any of us can remember but it did have a beginning and it’s beginning was here, in the wind and fire of Pentecost.
A new community was being formed, and it was being formed out of a melting pot that combined persons of every race and language and people and nation.
Yet a point is being made, and it’s a point about the foundation of the church and the nature of the church – that from the very beginning, the church has always been a community that includes everybody! Of course, technically speaking, they were all Jews – the people who made up that Pentecost crowd, even if they were Jews from a wide variety of backgrounds.
The church begins by targeting faithful members of the temple community but before long she is drawing in foreign converts to Judaism, and then people who had never darkened the door of a synagogue at all.
What we see at Pentecost is the beginning of a dynamic process of exponential inclusiveness, where both the size and the scope of the Christian community continues to grow and move towards the point where Christ will be all in all! And this isn’t just a peculiar strategy for organisational growth.
Dividing people up has always been an effective way of limiting a people’s power, and we’ve seen any number of political regimes use the ‘divide an conquer’ strategy since.
Whereas at Babel human beings had banded together to build a community in which God had no place, at Pentecost God took the initiative of building a new community – the church – which had her creator at her centre.
Whereas the Babel community was built around a common lust for power, the church community would disavow power and centre itself instead on service.
So whereas God came down to Babel to miraculously confuse their language so that they could not understand each other or work together, at Pentecost God came down and miraculously bridged the communication gap, in order to make true human community a possibility again! What we have with the birth of the church is the birth of a vision – a vision of a truly inclusive community – and I don’t think we can afford to underestimate just how radical that vision is, for such inclusiveness, it seems to me, is almost by definition intrinsically irreligious, for it has always been at the heart of religion – any religion – to discriminate between who is a legitimate member of the religious community and who is not – to include and to exclude.
” Of course you can substitute whatever group of religious people you like into that joke and it still won’t be particularly funny but it does make an excellent point about how we religious people think.
Generally the community of the righteous that are identified as the insiders.
The community of the righteous are those who don’t lie, steal or commit adultery, while liars, thieves and adulterers are excluded from the community.
It’s not an attempt to build a community of the righteous, but rather to build a community of the theologically correct Here again there is a clear boundary line drawn between insiders and outsiders, between the saved and the unsaved, between the true believers and those who are destined to eternal shame, and it’s not an ethical distinction between who is morally worthy and who is unworthy, but a distinction between who has their theology exactly right and who has failed the test of orthodoxy.
For a lot of religious people before and since our vision of Heaven has been of a community of righteous people.
If that’s us, we need to expand that vision! And if we are laden down with a vision of Heaven as the community of the theologically correct then we likewise need to expand that vision and replace it with that vision that comes to birth at Pentecost – a vision of a truly inclusive human community where nobody is excluded – not because of their race or language, not because of their poor theology, not because they are black or white or rich or poor or slave or free or gay or straight or male or female.
For the Kingdom of God that Jesus spoke of is a feast to which everybody is invited, and so the church of Jesus Christ that comes to birth at Pentecost in order to bear witness to that coming Kingdom is likewise a community that welcomes everybody without grilling them first about their beliefs or their culture or their gender or their sexual orientation or even their morality.
Oh how much easier it would be if God had appointed us to build a community of like-minded white people! How much easier it would be to work with a homogenous unit, where all the difficult people were excluded.
How much easier it would be if we could send away the mentally ill, the socially inept, and those with poor dress sense so that they could be part of some other community.
What an attractive, hip and peaceful community we would have! The only problem is that it would not be the church of Jesus Christ – born in the fiery wind of Pentecost, always chaotic, always full of surprises, always hard work, but a multi-racial, multi-faceted community that is always testifying to a reality much greater than itself, and is always doing so with joy.
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