For all the learned qualifications that I have acquired, some of you have realised that my theological knowledge has really come from 30 years of singing and memorising hymns. And you can do a lot worse than learn the Christian faith from the singing of hymns, because hymns not only teach us the eternal truths of the Christian faith, they also offer us a range of perspectives on those truths from the historical periods and contexts in which they were written. Nowhere is that more true than in hymns about the Spirit because they enable us to articulate what we fundamentally believe about what God is doing in the here and now, in the present life of the Church and the world. So on this Pentecost Sunday, the Vicar has allowed me to pick three hymns to help us explore where and how we might see the Holy Spirit at work in the world.
The first hymn we sang comes from the Victorian era and expresses a great deal about how Anglican Christians of that period understood the Spirit to be a work in the world. It is an optimistic, idealistic view of progress of human society. Amidst all that is going on, all that we are doing in the world, “God is working his purpose out”. You might well point out that the Spirit is not in fact named in this hymn, but it is very much about an understanding of the Spirit, namely the spirit described by the German philosopher Hegel whose optimistic view of history and progress profoundly shaped the Anglicanism of this period through figures like T H Green and later William Temple. In response to biblical criticism and scientific discovery, these Victorian idealists sought to free Christianity from both history and doctrine, understanding it through Hegel’s philosophical lens: God was at work in human society (or least in British society!) bringing prosperity and learning, wealth and health to those in need. In an age of discovery, industrialisation and unprecedented wealth, Christians saw the work of the Spirit in their own human endeavours. “What can we do to hasten the time when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God?”
We now take a less glorious view of the Victorian era. For all the good intentions they had, the many messengers who “marched forth with the banner of Christ unfurled” spread an Empire that, far from being the Kingdom of God, brought its own oppression and exploitation. And the idea that history was on an inevitably progressive course took its fatal blow with the two global wars of the 20th century and the genocides that ensued. Hegel’s understanding of the Spirit of God was found to be complacent and misguided. We may still want to see something of the movement of the Spirit in the providential outworking of history. But if we delude ourselves that things are as they are in the world because that is how God intends them to be, then it’s likely that we are putting the Holy Spirit at our own service, to justify an order of things with which we are comfortable.
That’s not just a Victorian temptation. And if we note that the A.C. Ainger who wrote this hymn was the son of a vicar of Hampstead Parish Church, then we should perhaps be reminded that it is always the temptation of the privileged to see the providential activity of the Spirit in a system that’s brought us out on top. Where the Anglican Idealists really went wrong about the Spirit is in failing to recognise that the Spirit is not just there, making everything we do holy; the Spirit needs to be invoked, and when the Spirit comes, as happened on that first day of Pentecost, things may look different. The Spirit comes to change things.
This “invocation for change” is at the heart of the Gradual Hymn we have just sung. These are the words of the Italian mystic Bianco da Siena who, as a Franciscan monk, knew that to be a channel of God’s Spirit would require living in a way that would contrast with many social norms. Having exchanged his fine Italian clothes for the brown Franciscan habit, Bianco asks the Spirit to change his disposition as well: “Let holy charity mine outward vesture be, and lowliness become mine inner clothing.” For Bianco, the Holy Spirit is not a generalised force in history; the Spirit is a force who enters and transforms the human heart. “For none can guess its grace, till he become the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling”.
The trouble is that if we did not know of the way in which Bianco lived his life – the way in which the presence of the Holy Spirit in his heart made him an agent of transformation in the world – then we would be tempted to think that the Holy Spirit belongs solely to the province of the heart. We might think that the Spirit shapes our disposition, perhaps our emotions, perhaps our thoughts, but could scarcely be described as a force in the world. At least the Victorian Idealists saw the Spirit of God as something outside of themselves.
And this is what we’re seeing in many understandings of the Holy Spirit popular in the world today. In much of the developing world the liberation theology of the 20th century which wanted to change the structures of society is giving way to a much more personalist Pentecostalism where receiving the Spirit is reduced to emotional intensity and escapist disengagement from the difficulties of life. I saw a lot of this when I worked in the chaplaincy at the Oakington Detention Centre for failed asylum seekers. African prosperity Pentecostalism offered an irrational consolation to those with little hope. Not much harm in that, you may think. But when the company running Oakington appointed this kind of Pentecostalist as its Senior Chaplain, one couldn’t help but notice how much more convenient it was for them to have someone who pedalled internal spiritual consolation and failed to raise the gospel questions of the justice of detaining children, of deporting people to corrupt regimes and of imprisoning people who have committed no crimes. If the Victorian Idealists’ understanding of the Holy Spirit was inadequate it did at least talk about “setting captives free”, this retreat into the self seems to me to be even worse.
The hymn that we’re going to sing during the Offertory is a set of new words set to a familiar tune. And it seems to me that Michael Forster, a Reformed Church Minister, sets out a much more helpful understanding of the doctrine of the Spirit for our age. It has nothing of Ainger’s complacency about providence and the Kingdom of God. As in Bianco’s hymn, this is an invocation of the Holy Spirit, recognising that the ways of God are not the dominant ways of the world. We need the Spirit to come and “transform heart and home”. Forster alludes to the opening verses of the Bible where the Spirit moves over the waters to transform chaos into an order that brings light and life. It is sometimes remarked we live in an age of chaos (certainly complexity) and that we crave some kind of coherence and order.
But in our age we cannot rely on an order brought about in the manner of Hegel’s Spirit, with its uncritical sanctification of science, capitalism and Western superiority. Reflecting the recovered confidence of our age in the story of Jesus, Forster writes instead about the Spirit that proceeds from Christ. This Spirit follows “the humble path Christ trod” and shames worldly convention with what appears to many as foolishness. There is surely much received wisdom in our age that the Spirit might expose through inspiring what Forster calls “the prophet’s voice”: perhaps the worldly wisdom that unbridled markets lead to human flourishing; the worldly wisdom that exploitation of natural resources can go on indefinitely without consequence; the worldly wisdom that people born in one country deserve a higher quality of life than people born in another.
He articulates that prophetic role of the Spirit in our age in two particularly important forms: First, the Spirit is present in emancipation. The Spirit set people free. Forster sees this liberation in political terms when he speaks of “exposing to scorn the tyrants lies” and he sees it in social terms when he speaks of the “removal of all prejudice”. This is very important because there are many within the church today who view the modern emancipatory movements such as feminism and gay rights as threatening to the Christian faith. But the Spirit works inside and outside of the Church and we have to ask ourselves: wherever we see people liberated from discrimination and stigma, as well as from poverty and disease, are we not seeing the Spirit of God at work in the world and should we not be a part of it?
Second, in verse five, Forster sees the Spirit of God at work in a dialogical process. In contrast to Ainger’s demand that “ye continents, ye isles, give ear to me”, Forster reflects more deeply on what is going on in the Pentecost story through dialogue – the speaking and hearing of different. Our age is characterised by difference, not least in matters of religion, so he prays that the Spirit might “enable us to hear the words that others bring, interpreting with open ear the special song they sing”.
There are more hymns to be written about the work of the Spirit in our age and how we can be more a part of it – hymns perhaps that engage with the ecological questions that become more and more pressing. But as we sing these hymns about the Spirit this morning let’s allow them to open us to what God is doing in our age and to how we can find the prophet’s voice in these troubled times. But most of all let’s open ourselves to what the Spirit brings to truly transform us into agents of transformation. And that is what Bianco describes as “the yearning strong”, or as Forster puts it, “that self-consuming holy fire, the perfect gift of love!”