Context

North and South Korea and the USA vacillate, but is there baffling new hope emerging of disarmament and healthier togetherness? Movingly, the World Food Programme were allowed to visit and see for themselves the agricultural work and closeness to the land of North Korea’s people, getting behind the caricatures of dysfunction we have allowed ourselves to form. 

Meanwhile, Iran's and Israel's mutual loathing raises the nuclear threat and has explosive results in Syria, as if she hasn't enough self-destructive jealousies of her own to deal with. 

Israel allows its sense of difference and threat from those around her to excuse the shooting dead of almost sixty people at the border, and over 2000 have been injured. Hamas allow their sense of difference to excuse hateful rhetoric about tearing out Israeli hearts. Each provokes the other to violent anger in order to be able to say how horrible they are, ironically looking rather similar, though not dying in similar proportions.

Britain's treatment of migrant citizens still brings shame on our judgemental systems. It emerged this week that some 63 Windrush generation neighbours have been wrongly detained and deported.

In a rather more positive story we observe how, although the British Royal Family has always had a cross-border character (Germanic and Greek influences, for example), in the last half century it has evolved a much more open, accepting attitude to difference. Contrast the controversy around Edward and Mrs Simpson to the Anglo-US, black-white marriage celebrated so glamorously in Windsor this weekend.

Difference becomes an excuse for hatred and exploitation. Caricature is used politically to bolster the myth that difference is negative. The deepest tragedy is that our difference is a gift of the creative Spirit. Pentecost is a chance to re-evaluate our judgement of difference.

Reflection

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. And God created all things. At God's Word, the wind of the Spirit brought order out of chaos, something out of nothing; things and, climactically, people other than himself. The Spirit's gift is otherness. But we have let otherness become a threat. Since Cain's jealousy and deep insecurity burned, we have struggled with the difference that is the Spirit's gift. Now, at the feast of Pentecost, an international gathering celebrating harvest ten days after Jesus' Ascension, the wind of God moves again in a new way. 

• The Spirit invigorates the disciples and makes them articulate and confident.
• The Spirit brings disorder in so far as she crosses our borders, hierarchies and falsely fixed categories.
• The Spirit brings people together, understanding one another's languages.
• The Spirt emphatically does not make everyone the same. This does not reverse Babel. It is much more exciting than that. All are still speaking different languages. What she does is enable people to imagine the world through each other's different eyes; to hear the world described in each other's languages.
• The Spirit accentuates difference and then helps us enjoy that difference.
• The Spirit chooses a festival about creation's abundant sustenance of life, so celebrating the otherness of all God's creatures and gifts, while challenging our unhealthy superior sense of otherness which has allowed us to abuse the rest of creation. (Indeed, Romans 8.22-3 again emphasises the relationship between humanity and all creation sharing pain in their otherness and longing.)

As John shows, to this day the Spirit convicts, which is to say reveals the truth about us wherever our perspective is distorted and we slip back to an incorrect default setting of jealousy. The Spirit can always, as it were, re-boot us and restore the creator's settings of perception. Her presence reveals:

• Our distorted sense of sin, where we fixate on categories of good and bad deeds, competing over them, when sin is really about broken relationship with God, worked out in broken relationship with people different from ourselves. Jesus is particularly concerned to expose the irony that some who think they believe the most (the religious authorities) trust God the least. 
• Our distorted sense of righteousness where our sense of goodness is dependent on others' failure and righteousness is all about respectable behaviour. Ascending, Jesus has taken all our human shame and sorrow to the heart of God for healing. Since we are given his Spirit, we need not see him again to continue sharing in his life of transforming difference from threat to blessing.
• Our distorted approach to judgement, where we allow resentment to govern the way we see others and constantly compete for superiority. God’s judgement does not conclude with a condemning sentence. God’s loving judgement is diagnosis before healing.

There is a risk of our mishearing John, and the letters of John, in recent weeks as they help prepare the church for life without the physical presence of Jesus. In our post- imperial Christian identity we may hear them as dualist and exclusive, so much of the emphasis on belonging or not belonging, acceptance and rejection, the world hating you, you not belonging to the world. However, if we remember the Johannine context of God making all things, loving all things, entering intimately into the world to save it out of love and the poignant tragedy of not being recognised (John 1 and 3.16), then they sound rather different. And if we remember the vulnerability of the early church and its experience of persecution, then such language sounds much more about encouragement than exclusivity. The sweep of the Gospel and letters is to hold on with confidence as people who have recognised him: to keep entering intimately into the world and its need, accepting that we will be unrecognised and rejected, but knowing we are abiding in the Spirit, which is to abide in Christ, which is to abide in the Father. The near-dualist language helps us hold together the experience of hatred - unhealthy difference – and at the same time love for the fallen world – healthy difference.

Prayer

Here are two Pentecostal antidotes to fear

A prayer of confession
Jesus’ three-fold description of the Spirit’s work could be turned into a Kyrie confession, asking God to clear our sight to see with the Spirit’s perspective:

• sin as relational
• righteousness as uncompetitive candour with God and sharing humbly in his work
• judgement as generous, always leading to healing.

 

A prayer of thanksgiving
It is our habit at All Saints to give thanks at the offertory for different aspects of our life. This week we heard wonderful news that one of our fellowship who is seeking asylum has been granted indefinite leave to remain. Given recent news, it seemed a good time to give thanks for members of our church family with origins beyond Europe. You may like to adapt such a prayer for your community.

Migrant Spirit; itinerant Son; ever present Father of all: 
Moses, born in Egypt, David in Judah, Mary in Galilee, Dorcas in Joppa, Monica mother of Augustine in North Africa, Romero in Nicaragua, Mother Theresa in India, – so may teachers and inspirers shift our proud gaze to alight on other places as centres of gravity in the faith.

We celebrate the friends who gently do the same for us today, their origins beyond the edges of Europe, bringing richness of insight, language, tastes, skill and different tones of laughter. 

We honour especially any whose memory of painful conflict and courageous journeys humbles our idealistic prayers. We behold their dignity and patience shaming the mean bureaucracy of immigration processes; their generosity out-shining the hostile frowns of the border agency. We wonder at the subtle chemistry of loss and gain that nuances the word ‘home.’

We eagerly await the wind rush of Pentecost, asking you to send your border crossing Spirit to bless them as we bless you for them.
Amen.

 

Questions

• Dwelling at Pentecost on our relationship with creation, if sanctions fall and we engage fully with North Korea, and without romanticising conditions there, how far is it possible for the west to learn from their agrarian culture and relationship with the land, before we share our apparently efficient but ultimately destructive industrial agricultural methods?

For future exploration, a resource for any book or study group or for personal formation, is The world ending fire. The essential Wendell Berry. Sharp, clear, provocative essays testing our relationship with creation from this American theologian poet farmer. Essays such as ‘The pleasure of eating’ and ‘Horse drawn tools and the doctrine of labour saving’ (see North Korea above) and ‘Faustian economics’ would each name a few excellent starters for discussion. Such studies could help your church towards an Eco Church award. 

• Remembering Jesus’ challenge to the authorities who did not believe in him, find and play the Leonard Cohen song ‘Anthem’. Hear and feel the line about ‘the killers in high places who say their prayers out loud.’ Do you identify anyone today in that way? If so, how might we pray for them?

 

All Age activity

Talk in mixed aged groups about the royal wedding, emphasising there are no right answers and we are free to like or be puzzled by different things:

• What did you find impressive?
• What did you find moving?
• Was there anything you think could have been left out without spoiling the occasion?
• Why do you think soldiers are such a visible feature of such an occasion? Do you find them a help or a hindrance?

 

Young People

Ramadan has begun. Celebrating difference, this week ask Muslim friends at school or college about their discipline of fasting, how it helps, how it challenges, and what kinds of togetherness they enjoy through the season.


David Warbrick is Vicar of All Saints Kings Heath in the Anglican Diocese of Birmingham. He digs a few square metres of soil in his urban garden to try to keep in touch with the earth, but struggles with creaturely difference as the slugs and pigeons decimate his seedlings. Perhaps he needs the advice of a North Korean farmer who does not yet have access to chemicals. 

 

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