11th May 2008PENTECOST SUNDAY

Fr Julian Browning

Acts  2  :  1 – 21 ; 1  Corinthians  12  :  3b – 13 ; John  20  :  19 – 23

For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. 1 Corinthians 12.13.

Do we want our children to be free? ...the Christian Church is the only free society on earth, Jesus Christ the supreme example of a free man. His service is perfect freedom.

Danica and Evangeline are children of God. They have been loved by God from the moment they were conceived, and He will continue to guide and protect them to their death and beyond. That is the God we believe in, a God who is loving and merciful. Baptism is not a rescue operation. You might think so from our service. It's complicated, we talk about moving from death to life, the symbolism of light and water is overwhelming. There are two thousand years of tradition holding this service together. It keeps the clergy in business. But all those questions you are going to answer could be reduced to just one question.

Do we want our children to be free? People often say today, I don't want my children to be baptised, it's not fair, they must make the decision themselves when they're older. There's a baptism that's unlikely to happen. We include our children in everything else when they're little. We give them a home, why not give them a spiritual home? Why make them wait for an inheritance which is theirs by right anyway: life in the Kingdom of God? In the Kingdom Christians are free, not always to follow the devices and desires of our own hearts – there is nothing more stultifying or imprisoning than that, but to live unselfishly because we have nothing except what God gives us. We are free to believe or not believe. We are free to love or not to love. We are free to go our own way. We are not clones, we have, as St.Paul says, varieties of gifts, varieties of service, varieties of working. But these things, which make each one of us special, are not our achievements, they are gifts from God. We are free to use them or not. The Christian Church is the only free society on earth, Jesus Christ the supreme example of a free man. His service is perfect freedom. Why is this difficult to understand? Because we don't want to be free, not really. Human beings want to be slaves, not free men and women. Slaves to ourselves, slaves to our obsessions, slaves to money and possessions, slaves to our own ideas. We would rather be ruined than changed. Christians are free to change, to change ourselves and to change the world around us.

God's sign of this freedom to act is the Holy Spirit. Today is Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles in tongues of fire. Danica and Evangeline are Pentecost baptisms, and that's very special. We welcome them into the Church on the birthday of the Church. It's such a dramatic story, the Apostles being filled with the Holy Spirit, that we easily make the mistake of thinking of this as God's capital investment. God sends down the Holy Spirit, and we then have to work like crazy to keep it going down the ages.  The story of Pentecost is the story of what's happening now. God gives to each of us his Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit came down in the story, it didn't come down as a sort of fog. It came down  in tongues of fire, like heat seeking missiles, resting separately on individual persons. God's Holy Spirit is personal to you. God gives to you His life, his whole life, so you can make it yours, do with it what you can, in perfect freedom. The unity which is so important in Christianity, that image of one body, comes from the one Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit brings us together.

Danica and Evangeline are members of that one body, the Church, and the Holy Spirit rests on them  today. God gives them His life, God gives life to us with the same generosity and love with which Jesus gave up His life. They will know as they get older that they are free to live with God's life. The Church is not just for those who fit in. The Church is not just for good people getting better. The Church is for those who are flawed in many ways, sometimes right, often wrong, in other words ordinary human beings, but who to God are entirely beautiful. This is the way of God's love. God's love is freely given and freely received. This is the way we want our children to live, in the fullness and the power of the Holy Spirit. This is why we want them to be free.