For one and all Pentecost - Peter Steele

Pentecost is the last day we see the Easter Candle lit for the year. It will reappear next year, at the Easter Vigil, with its flame to signify, once again, the vitality and the light of Christ. But before it goes, take a look at its flame. It is the equivalent of what is called in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles ‘tongues of fire’.

There, after the roar of wind that filled a room where Christ’s first followers were sitting, ‘there appeared to them what seemed to be tongues of fire, which parted and came to rest on each of them: and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.’ It was as if each of them, there, was fired, as the Easter Candle was fired at Resurrection-time. It was as if each of them, in turn, became a kindling-point for other candles.

The picture has often been painted: but pictures of the past matter only if they have dealings with the present, and today’s readings matter only if they reach today’s ears and hearts. What I want to stress to you today is both the shared fire and its parting.

One kind of Christian stress has always been on the community—the Christian community, certainly, but also the human community. Our Lord’s dying and rising was a process of bonding us with one another, and bonding us with our life-source, the Fire-that-lit-the-Candle, God himself.

If we, as a species, had not been largely at odds with one another, and largely at odds with God, the Lord’s bloody death would have been neither possible nor necessary, and neither, in turn, would his resurrection have been. And if we, as a species, were not still so deeply reserved about ourselves, one another, and God, the good news of God’s creative love would not be so achingly needed. Darkened hearts need a lot of light. Eyes carefully gazing away from each other need a fire to catch the common attention.

So Christianity, like humanity itself, cannot work as a solo project. To try to relate to God without relating to others is to try to relate to a false God—an idol of the mind. Christianity says, on every page of the New Testament, that if we will not function with and for the others, we will not function at all, not function as human beings are meant to go, meant to be.

And so, on Pentecost, the day on which the church was born, the day we celebrate today with one big candle, the first people to receive the Holy Spirit are fire-sharers. Fire is the energy-shedder, the heartener, the illuminator, the thing around which we can gather, the electric thing of a community.

We are challenged, today, to find the divine fire in other human beings, even the most unlikely. And we are also challenged, however unlikely it may seem to us, to offer divine fire to others.

The other part of the story, though, is that the fire ‘parted’, and when those who received it spoke to others, they did so in distinctively different ways. If Christianity, like humanity, is not a solo project, it is still true that each of us has a call, and a promise, and a blessing, which is given to her or to him in an absolutely unique way. Your fingerprints are unique, and so is your palmprint, and so is your voiceprint—and so is what might be called your heartprint.

You may not think much of your individuality—plenty of Australians don’t—but God treasures it more than you will ever treasure anything. You may be subject, as millions upon millions of people have been in this century, usually with disastrous consequences, to all sorts of propaganda which says that there really isn’t much to you, and that what matters is vogue or custom or the local tradition or the tide of history: but this is a lie, and a poisonous lie.

You have your own flame, and it is a flame touched-off by the God who made you and re-makes you every day. You have your own calling, your own promise, your own blessing, which is different from that of your parents, or your siblings, or any children you may one day have, or the person sitting beside you.

So today, like the church world-wide, join in celebrating what we have in common, and in celebrating the distinctive gifts we enjoy. God willing, and if we want it, we will not need the sight of the Easter Candle for a while. The candle will burn in our being.