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Beddington, London, UK.

  • Worship and Prayer
    • Worship
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    • Inclusive Church
    • Eco Church
    • Bellringers
    • Choir
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    • Book Club
    • Volunteer With Us
    • Contact us
    • The Tower Coffee Shop
    • Donate
  • Visit
    • Worship
    • Find Us
    • The Tower Coffee Shop
  • Heritage
    • History of St Mary’s
    • History at St Mary’s
    • Registers and archives
    • Royal Female Orphanage
    • Virtual Tour
    • NLHF Project (2021 – 2023)
St Mary, Beddington
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Pentecost

Tongues of mortals and angels

The Reader’s Digest died last year, and nobody noticed. Not  anyway in the UK where it ceased publication in April 2024. It continues to be published elsewhere in the world, but not on these shores. Unless your dentist has a dedication to banal popular publications and decides to go to the expense of importing the rag, when the existing copies that have been sat in the waiting room since the mid 70s are finally thrown out  (they can never be destroyed of course- the three things that will survive the nuclear apocalypse are cockroaches, crimpolene and the Reader’s Digest) when they finally go, you will never again be able to flick listlessly through those pages hoping beyond hope for something in there that will block out the approaching terror of the dental drill. The Readers Digest is not strictly relevant to this sermon- rather like Agatha Christie, I’m throwing you a red herring at the start- but the one article I ever remember reading in the magazine is relevant, and so that’s why we’ve started where we have today.

What this article- some time from the early 1980s no less- excitedly reported was that neuroscientists- brain surgeons to you and me- had discovered that by using probes to pass electrical current over areas of the brain- not their own  brains obviously, never is, is it?- but by zapping the grey stuff of some hapless patient, they could make their subjects see God. Or at least think they were. The Reader’s Digest reported this as a revelation: just press here-zap! and you’re away with the angels seeing the heavenly glory. Maybe Paul was having a stroke on the road to Damascus; perhaps Peter’s visions were just signs of a neurological problem. Needless to say there was much atheist crowing, which could be summarised with that notorious early 80s tabloid headline  ‘Gotcha’: ‘This God stuff: ha! It’s all in your mind, or more to the point, in the wet grey stuff inside your skull. It’s all nonsense, just electric currents passing along your neural pathways.’

All, I think you’ll admit, very depressing. Not because the experiments proved religion wrong; depressing because atheists can be so desperate to be right they make such a rookie mistake about neurology. 

Because everything we experience happens in our brain: no brain, no experience. So in theory some neuroscientist could crack open your skull and poke around with a probe and get you to see a field of spring flowers, or the love of your life or smell fresh bread or be convinced you’ve been abducted by aliens or whatever, any of the myriad million things that comprise the multiplicity of human experience.  Because when you do experience any of those things, a bit of your brain fires in response. Everything you have ever known, loved, experienced, perceived has happened in your brain, because you are a creature with a body and your body is how you experience, well, everything. And so, your religious experience, at least that which you will perceive,  happens in a spirit which is embodied, and so it will have corresponding physiological expressions.Your body tells you what your soul knows.When you’re excited because you’re singing a hymn you love, your heart races. your pulse thumps, little spurts of adrenaline coast round your body perking you up. When the sermon extends past the ten minute mark, your sympathetic nervous system fires up your fight or flight response and the part of your brain that remembers being a lizard is clenching its fist and frantically searching for the exit.  Your faith is in your soul, and your faith is in your body.

Hold on to that, we’ll be coming back, don’t let go, because next we’re going to go and indulge in some extreme scripture thanks to St Paul. Don’t worry, it will all tie up eventually.

First, a warning: you always need to be very careful with St Paul. Not that he’s got wandering hands , or going to pick your pocket, though I guess he might walk off with your pen, everybody does that, especially at St Mary’s. But when you consider Paul’s key arguments- and there’s no disputing that for Christians they are pretty much the key arguments- you can’t cut him up and just have a small slice, thank you. He just doesn’t come in handily packed bite sized chunks. With Paul, you have to be a python, dislocate your jaw, and swallow the lot, whole. Why? Paul’s letters- which is all we have of the apostle- are written without punctuation or indeed without white space between words, such was the way with ancient Greek; his sentences run on and on and on breathless and tireless to make their point; his arguments continue chapter after chapter. Sometimes it takes a whole letter- after the Dear Sir / Madam, I hope you’re well and not eating meat sacrificed to idols, again- a whole letter to come to the point- if – and this is less well known- if he ever does. St Paul is often as confused writing his letters as we are reading them. Anyway, you really are living beyond dangerously if you take just a sentence or two of Paul and then go on to build something on it, especially if that sentence or two are  from the beginning of his argument.

Most famously (at least the bit I know best) is the letter to the Romans, whose first chapter, despite lovingly lavish interpretations of hate, is not condemning LGBT people in the twenty first century but goading religious bigots of the first (and probably the 21st too). But to know that, you have to read on to chapter two when Paul says- ok, that lot- they’re bad, but you? You’re so much worse. And that’s  all part of a bigger, really complicated argument about the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in salvation. So that’s  how Romans message is skewed. A less well known example, can be found in the most read of all of St Paul’s writings, probably in this day and age the most read of all Bible passages, period. It appears at pretty much every wedding in any church ever, as well as increasingly funerals and other occasions. That  reading is 1 Corinthians 13.

If you don’t know the reference, you know the text… If I speak in the tongues of mortals and angels but do not have love… Love is patient, love is kind… faith, hope and love abide, these three: and the greatest of these is love. (That’s the Readers Digest version btw).

We read it and hear it and know it as a hymn to love.

Which it is.

But

It’s not really a hymn to married bliss.

If you read the chapters before and after… you’ll find that with these beautiful words, what Paul is actually doing… is having a go at the excessive religious enthusiasm and self-importance of the first century church in Corinth. Again. Sorry if I’ve ruined anybody’s wedding. 1 Corinthians 13 is  about love, so it’s fine to make your  marriage vows with it still ringing in your ears, but the context is this:

The Holy Spirit, Paul says, gives a whole variety of gifts to believers: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, speaking in tongues.

So far, so good. The Corinthian Christians do all these.

But. 

So do the pagans. All these spiritual gifts can be seen in non-Christian religions. 

Let’s take speaking in tongues- glossolalia- as our example, because that’s what Paul in 1 Corinthians is mostly concerned with. It is, and long has been, a widespread  religious experience. People in ecstasy speak in tongues across all world religions. Not just Christians. Animists, Shamanists, Muslims, Hindus. Mostly, unlike the Apostles at Pentecost, it is incomprehensible, ‘the tongues of angels’.

Is every example of speaking in tongues the Holy Spirit? Is all of that- the animists, shamanists and so on the Holy Spirit?

Well no. What that is, is your body interpreting the religious experience of your soul in one of the ways it knows- remember the Reader’s Digest?  Across the world people’s religions are different, but their brains are the same, so when they experience the divine, they speak in tongues.

How then, do you tell if it is the Holy Spirit?

Here’s what Paul says: is there love? Prophecy, tongues, knowledge- it’s just something prodding in your brain unless there is love.

Because.

The Holy Spirit is God. God is love. The Spirit is Love.

And more.

These gifts of the Spirit- prophecy, tongues, healing, teaching-  are all fine, Paul says but finer than all is love. Above all, he says, pursue love.

In a few moments now we will welcome Isaiah into Christ’s church by baptism. He will be baptised in the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit. He will be anointed and we will call down the Spirit upon him. It is the beginning of his life long journey in faith. And as he grows and matures, as he journeys on the paths of life, how will we know that he is filled, as all Jesus followers should be, with the Holy Spirit? Will we be looking for him to speak prophetic words? Will we be looking for him to speak in the tongues of  mortals and of angels? How will we know?

If we want to know if, truly, the Holy Spirit is there in his life, as indeed in any of our lives, we will be looking for love. Where love is, there is God.

And what is love?

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant  or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;  it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.

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