May 1998 - St Peter's Church, Berkhamsted, Herts

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Revd Peter Hart
gives us a
powerful message
for Pentecost.
The month of
May is associated
in many peoples
minds with bank
holidays, the FA
Cup Final and the
beginning of
warm weather.
However, in the
Church’s calendar, May always brings
Pentecost, the release of the Holy Spirit
into frightened disciples, which transforms
them from tongue-tied individuals into an
effective body of evangelists, boldly
speaking to all the people in Jerusalem and
further afield about the death and
resurrection of Jesus. This should be one
of the greatest festivals of the Church, but,
because it coincides with a bank holiday,
and the weather is nice, we do have a
tendency to make the best of a long
weekend, and disappear for a well-earned
break.
Whitsun has therefore become a lesser
festival. Gone are the days of the Whitsun
tea, the big outing in a charabanc or in a
specially chartered train, and white shoes
and gloves to mark the day. Gone too are
the parades through the street and half-day
holidays from school for Ascension Day.
Our world has become so secular, that one
of the Church’s major causes for
celebration is blamed for the lack of
productivity in May because of the two
public holidays, and the joy of the early
Church in receiving power and confidence
is confined to a few.
All Christian festivals are characterised
by a special message: the message of the
angels at Christmas, the news that Christ is
risen at Easter. But the message of
Pentecost is the most powerful and the
most compelling of them all. It is the
message that the Holy Spirit of God can so
fill our lives with his presence that we can
be transformed daily to be like Jesus
Christ in his lifestyle and confrontation
with injustice and hypocrisy; that the
Spirit is alive in the Church, to enable it to
worship and to serve Christ in others. It is
a message of freedom, as the power of the
Holy Spirit is unleashed upon a waiting
world, to comfort, to heal and to renew, to
breathe new life into tired structures, to
give a new direction where previously all
seemed hopeless, to usher in justice in the
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