Australia is a magical land, flush with natural splendour, acres of grapevines, sublime beaches, beautiful wildlife, majestic giant trees, epic distances. It is a prosperous, diverse and multicultural country. 
As I travelled around Western Australia at the start of Pentecost 2010, familiar and traditional images associated with the season were to be seen and felt everywhere throughout the Large State - red fiery leaves on Autumnal trees, a gentle breeze which blew over Freemantle’s harbour, a thunder and lightning storm which raged around Busselton Bay, the silence of early morning dawn on Scarborough beach, Perth. Another image of Pentecost which came into my mind whilst on holiday, and which I have been exploring since my return is the Pentecost image of space for as I discovered Australia is a big country, epic distances with large spaces.
Space! Not the final frontier but the area or arena we occupy in our homes, our places of work and in the community. My professional life has been spent arranging and shaping urban and rural spaces in many of the County’s towns and villages. Space also occupies our churches, both inside and out. Over the years many of the Northern Synods listed church buildings and halls have had their internal space modified and altered to fit new worship patterns and community uses.
But why you might ask is space connected to Pentecost? Space is significant for Christians. Orthodox Christians believe that since God’s feet touched the earth following the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the earth is considered a sacred and holy space. The Dean of Durham recently writing in “News from Durham Cathedral,” Summer 2010, suggests “that every church is a sacred space, a public sign of God’s presence in the world.”
During the last few weeks, ordination services have been held in churches up and down the land during which ordinands heard the customary and time-honoured lesson from the Old Testament, Isaiah 6. I was reminded at my ordination service that God’s presence is found not just in the sacred places of our churches and cathedrals (verse 1 tells us God’s train filled the temple), but in spaces outside the church where Christ was crucified, in an unfenced and unadorned place, the place where people like myself, self supporting minsters, ply their renewing ministerial craft. For it is in that place, outside the church, in the world, where God’s glory is to be found, as verse 3 from Isaiah 6 reminds us, not in church buildings. The poet Gerald Manley Hopkins affirms in his poem of the same name that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And later he reminds us that “The Holy Spirit over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.”
This is where we find God, in the urban spaces around the church, he is around every corner, celebrating in the skill and daring of the kid on the skateboard, encouraged in the neighbourhood’s tenant’s meeting, crying with the abused child of the addict, dancing with the swaying crowds of Pentecostal choirs, saddened by the profligacy of city bankers. I discovered whilst working in Newcastle’s East End you don’t have to look hard to find God in the spaces of our inner city, in our urban areas. There he is in the face of the woman who patiently teaches local children to cook or draw, in a man who talks to hoodies on the bus or street pastors in the midst of the night time economy of the city centre. As Laurie Green stated in the edited book Crossover City – Resources for Urban Mission and Transformation, Continuum Press 2010,” glory is to be found in colour and mixity, vibrant money and music making, oppressive selfishness and dirt, chaotic order and summer tennis courts. As St Paul found out after his conversion, God is not always where you expect to find him. The Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson writing in his book In the eye of the Storm, Canterbury Press 2008, writes “God refuses to be contained in the little boxes of space we create for God to live in, safely confined to the careful boundaries we set for God’s Spirit. God just won’t stay put!”
So here is a new and different approach to consider this Pentecost. How does the work of the spirit affect the spaces which we occupy in our homes, our places of work, our community, our churches. In the large wilderness spaces of my Australian holiday I discovered that the season of Pentecost might be considered as the celebration of God-given space in which we can grow and flourish, where all of us collectively, can discover and live out our humanity.
The origins of Pentecost lie in one of Israel's agricultural festivals, the Feast of Weeks, when the first ripe grain was offered fifty days after the Passover. The feast in Old Testament times was related to the gift of a land, the gift of land or space which was given to the Jews to inhabit, settle and fertilise, a land that was well-watered, productive, as the familiar phrase goes - a land flowing with milk and honey. This land of safety, plenty and rest is a familiar Bible image of deliverance, recovery and liberation. But what is interesting to note about the language of ‘salvation' in Hebrew is that it is closely related to the idea of space, a space in which as individuals and communities we have room to grow, to flourish and be truly alive. The converse of that space is a restricted space, a space that does not lead to potential growth, but a space to be confined, hemmed in, imprisoned, where possibilities are closed off. In that sort of space we die.
Sadly many of our world conflicts have been driven and are still being driven by the acquisition of space, land-hunger, the competitive struggle for territory to occupy. Even in the Old Testament the occupation of land was often a matter of conquer, divide and rule – one tends to forget that there were already people living in the evocative land flowing with milk and honey. The 1984 Nobel Peace laureate, the irrepressible Archbishop Desmond Tutu, shortly to retire later this year, once said “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”
In New Testament times the story of Pentecost is closely linked to the mission of the church. At Pentecost the disciples are in Jerusalem where the risen Jesus has told them to wait. But after the rush of wind and fire, they learn that they must take the gospel out of the city's confines. ‘Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the uttermost parts of the earth': those are the expanding circles of the gospel's influence that are acted out in the mission of the early church. The Book of Acts begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome, as if to say: there is a new geography of the Spirit here, a new way of mapping the world. It is space for the gospel to occupy. It is claimed by the risen Jesus in the power of his Spirit. It is God's. So the urban (and rural) space, this contested space, is a good position to learn how to live in God’s bright new world of Spirit filled space, to learn the lesson of the risk of the cross and its promise of resurrection life.
We could say that the Spirit's activity is always the creation of space in which to grow. And we can see that happening in the very first story in the Bible. In the opening verses of Genesis, the spirit or wind of God moves over the face of the waters: the Hebrew word suggests a bird hovering over her nest. It is the beginning of a journey that will see the chaotic flood pushed back into a place from where it can no longer threaten to overwhelm the world. With the waters' boundaries set for ever, space is created for the dry land to appear, and an ordered, coherent universe can begin to teem with life. In Genesis, where the Spirit of God is at work, chaos is driven back, and pattern, order, structure, life and consciousness have room to emerge.
So it is for us this summer, for those who follow the way of Jesus Christ. As Matthew’s beatitudes have it – “Splendid are those who follow the ways of Christ, they too are citizens of a Bright New World” from John Henson, Good as New translation taken from chapter 1 the Reflective Disciple, Roger Walton, Epworth Press 2010. Here is space, Spirit filled space in which the boundless grace of God abounds without end.
This season of Pentecost then opens up a vision of broad, generous spaces we might inhabit as the Spirit makes a home amongst us. The traditional images of the Spirit all imply space: without it fire goes out, water stops flowing, wind ceases to blow. But as the Spirit prompts and propels us into inhabiting our salvation, occupying the space God gives us to grow in, in our homes, our places of work, our communities, are there any limits to what we could become in his service? With this vision the church is poised for new mission filled activities in the world, like the first Christians in the Book of Acts. In Northern Synod the Mission4Life Mission Fund, launched in October 2009 is encouraging and supporting partners in mission initiatives throughout the Synod. Partners already supported include Grindon CRCW,
Newcastle City Centre Chaplaincy, North Northumberland Rural Adviser and St. Cuthbert's Centre Holy Island, church communities although small in number now on the cutting edge of mission.
Within our own denomination Vision4Life give us that opportunity to be transformed and renewed from within, galvanised by new reasons for occupying Spirit filled spaces as we live in God’s bright New World. Our society and our world freed from all that holds it in thrall to chaos and death, now begins to embrace the release and hope it longs for. Pentecost is our gateway to vast and generous spaces of an unprecedented experience of God-given life.
Revd Ray Anglesea
July 2010
Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister in the Northern Synod
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