Et renovabis faciem terrae

Send forth thy Spirit and they shall be created; and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.

What is preaching for, anyway? My favourite preacher asked me that a few weeks ago, and I have been worrying at the question ever since, and the answer I have come up with – not very earth-shaking, I think you’ll agree, but appropriate for Pentecost - is that it is has to be about communication – real communication. Thomas Aquinas insisted that if we reach the heights of contemplation of God, it is our duty to come back down and transmit to others the fruits of our contemplation. We are not all contemplatives – I am not – but all the same, preaching must be along these lines.

When I was studying Ancient History at university – so long ago as to be almost ancient history itself – our supervisor’s main strategy to make us THINK was to cover the margins of our essays with the word “Evidence?” interspersed with “Was it?” “Did he?” and so on. They say a good teacher can make all the difference to your entire life, and Liz Rawson certainly did to mine.

Her insistence on evidence and her refusal just to accept bald statements (which were in any case probably pinched from a book she knew far better than we did – or indeed, had written herself) have had profound effects on me.

One of those effects was to make me rather picky in what I read and hear, whether it is an academic book, an article on fishing, or a sermon. Very often, when I listen to a sermon (and if there are any preachers here, may I reassure you by telling you that it sometimes happens to me with St Paul’s epistles too) I find myself silently arguing with the preacher. “Evidence! Evidence! Evidence!” “How do you know?” Or when they say “We so often think...” “Aren’t we all inclined to...” I silently shout “No, I don’t!” “Well, I’m not” and so on.

Don’t you? Ah, yes, I see you do. Or at least, you are now.

I think this is a good thing. I think a sermon should come out of serious engaging with the Word of God and with the Christian life as lived; and sermon-hearing should also be a serious engaging; with the Word just heard (it is not by chance that the sermon immediately follows the readings) and with the words of the preacher, in the context of one’s own experience. The sermon should not be a ten-minute slot of extreme boredom, of half-listening to stuff you have heard a thousand times before (Guilty as charged, m’lud).

You can’t get up in the middle of a sermon and challenge the preacher, despite Edinburgh’s honourable tradition of stool-throwing, and I have only known one preacher who invited comments at the end of his sermon (you can, maybe, guess who was the only person to get up and make a comment on that occasion!). But if you are carrying away with you a niggle, a disagreement, or even just a cry of “Evidence!” you can stop her as she tries to slink away un-noticed or you can get her e-mail and argue with her that way. If her sermon has come from something real in her, and your niggle has come from something real in you, then at least one of you is going to gain something.

We can’t all be “original thinkers” in the usually accepted sense of the word. But since we are all unique, we are all original liv-ers, and if we think at all, we think “originally”. Each life is different, each mind is different and each soul is different. Which can make communication incredibly exciting; and I believe that real communication is part of the purpose of life.

God appears to think so too. Looking at the Bible, one of the things that leaps out at me (and very definitely in the two readings we have heard this evening) is just how important it seems to be to God to communicate effectively with us, and to get us to engage with him. To the extent that the Second Person of the Trinity is called The Word. It has been said – and I wish I remembered by whom – that if the Son is the Word, the Holy Spirit is the Voice.

If we are to understand the Trinity in any way but the most academic and theoretical – and I am not sure that it is worth bothering to understand it at all in that way – then we have to see it as an expression of the truth that relationship, and communication, are essential to the very nature of God and of ourselves. You know the blessing – “may the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you”. In Latin the last part of this is “et communicatio Sancti Spiritus” “the communication of the Holy Spirit”. If you take that word communicatio apart, you will get “the making-one”. The very nature of the Holy Spirit would appear to be communication, or “making one”; within the Trinity, and between the Trinity and creation.

That seems to be God’s main purpose: by his very own unity to make us one. His own unity, his own love, is so – dare I say “solid”? - as to be a Person in its own right. That is who the Holy Spirit is. That is the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity whose visible descent we celebrate, and whose spiritual descent we pray for, today.

But in what sense do we pray for the Holy Spirit to “come down”? The Holy Spirit does not come again every Pentecost as if she had been absent. The Spirit of Jesus, is “with us always, even to the end of the age”; and indeed always has been, ever since she brooded over the formless void that she hatched into our universe. It is for us to tap into the ceaseless ebb and flow of the love within the Trinity; and tapping into that union, that comm-unicatio within God, is what we call prayer.

Prayer is, for many, a scary word. It’s hard enough to communicate properly with another person without hiding behind ready-made phrases and opinions, behind talk of the weather and the price of cheese, without censoring our thoughts and the less attractive or interesting parts of ourselves. And that’s when you can see the person you are communicating with – though, be it noted, you can’t see their thoughts. But God is worse. God does not answer in a way we are used to; he can’t be seen (unless you are Moses); he knows us better than we know ourselves, and he knows our needs before we tell him. How are we supposed to communicate with God?

No. Prayer is not scary and it is not difficult. What is difficult is praying in a way that does not suit us. Just as I find maths difficult, while you might find languages difficult. Maths may be a breeze for you. I pick up languages out of the air. Well, I spent nearly twenty years faithfully trying to “do” contemplative prayer. And it was only towards the end of those twenty years that I began to understand what “my” way of prayer is, and to discover that it has a respectable history, in both the Eastern and Western parts of the church. Some of you may have been faithfully trying to “meditate”, or to “recite prayers” or to “practise the presence of God” – or whatever. And failing. Because we have been “told” that this way, or that way, is the only way, or the best way, to pray. Nonsense. The best way to pray is the way that suits you; the way in which, as Walter Hilton put it in the fourteenth century, you “find most savour”. Prayer – like preaching, and like responding to preaching – has to come from something real within you. As soon as you stop listening to “the authorities” and instead do some research into the myriad ways in which people have prayed over the millennia and then...TRY IT...you will discover the language in which you and God communicate. It may be silent contemplation. It may be imaginative meditation. It may be walking in the Pentlands and responding to him in communion with the natural world. It may be a ceaseless conversation, as if he was walking next to you wherever you go. But find out for yourself, and don’t worry about doing or saying the right thing – Paul tells us quite plainly that God isn’t bothered about that: “"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness: for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words" . As the slogan from that famous brand of sports clothing has it: JUST DO IT!

..........and so:

may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communication of the Holy Spirit be with us all.