Pentecost, Frankly.

To be perfectly honest, getting a flatmate had never been on my agenda.

I was quite happy in my own space, king of my own domain. It was messy and chaotic, but it was my mess and my chaos and it was great having the freedom to leave the place as I wanted it. It was my stuff, my story, my home.

I’d known Frank from a distance for a good while, we moved in the same circles and had spoken together quite a few times, and though I liked what I’d seen there was something about him that left me a little uncomfortable. He seemed just a bit too perfect.

He had that easy way with people that I coveted; he seemed to be at home with everyone which meant he was either fake or too good to be true. I’d watched him at parties; seen him move between the different cliques with ease, and wondered where his allegiances really lay. Wondered where that self-confidence came from. He certainly didn’t give the appearance of being anything special.

The day he arrived, I almost didn’t hear the knocking – I had the telly up loud because I was working in the kitchen – but on the edge of my hearing I thought I picked up a rhythmic thumping and went into the hallway to explore. A fist was softly hammering on my door. It was Frank. I hid my surprise behind a smile that didn’t reach my eyes.

I’m not sure who told him there might be a vacancy. I’d flirted with the idea of sharing the flat for a while and maybe I’d said something in passing – these things have a way of getting around. But it’s a whole other thing having someone standing on your front doorstep with a rucksack on his back and asking, in a very matter-of-fact fashion, if he can move in.

What can you do?

The truth was, I had space aplenty. I just didn’t want anyone invading it.

But in that split second, confronted with the 6 cubic feet of another human being filling my doorway, my brain went absent without leave and I found myself saying – “sure, come on in; you can stay as long as you like”.

And so it began.

It’s strange how having another person living with you in your home can change the way you see things. It’s not that they start nit-picking or dropping those dreadfully obvious hints that they want something done instead of just coming right out and saying it. Frank had the good grace never to do that.

But with him around I started noticing things I hadn’t noticed before. The toilet door that didn’t shut properly; the piles of books in the hall I’d been stepping over and around for weeks; the habit I’d developed of always having the radio or the telly on for the sake of having a bit of noise about the place.

He never once said anything, but I began to see my place, and to a degree, myself, through different eyes. I began to notice things, and ever-so-slowly, began to change the way I behaved. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

Frank was around the place a lot – he worked from home – and we soon settled into a routine where at some point during the day we’d sit down for a coffee and a blether. I quickly realised that he was a good listener, and over time he became a good friend.

He’d listen to my tirades when things were getting me down in my work or my relationships. He had the good sense to allow me to let off some steam, and then when I’d calmed down, we’d pick our way through what had happened to try and get to the nub of it.

Sometimes, having listened to me rant, he’d call me an idiot; sometimes he’d assure me that I wasn’t an idiot, despite what everyone else was suggesting.

He was Frank by name and Frank by nature: he tended to speak the truth whether I wanted to hear it or not. Didn’t make him a comfortable person to be around at times; but even when we exchanged hard words I knew that deep down he was rooting for me and that I could trust him.

We talked a lot, especially in those early days, but I learned almost as much from just watching him going about his life. That ease I’d noticed at parties wasn’t fake. He was an enthusiast when it came to people.

I remember one night we were out for a meal with some friends and he got into conversation with one of the waitresses: he wasn’t chatting her up – he was just chatting. The rest of us had done what convention dictates and treated her as a waitress – Frank treated her as a person and in his company she opened up like a flower, laughing and joking with us, making recommendations, joining in the banter as she cleared the tables and brought more drinks. He did that kind of thing all the time.

It’s hard to define, but Frank was one of those rare people who bring a little more zest and colour into things. He didn’t take life at face value; he liked getting to depth. He loved to savour the richness of people and experiences. He noticed things, and in noticing them, he gave them worth.

At first our friendship was pretty one-sided, I guess. I did most of the talking and learning and changing, he did most of the listening. But after a while it felt like we were on a more even footing: never equals, but allies. I stopped offloading so much and began to listen more; trying to find out what motivated him, what is was that he really wanted in life. He seemed to value having someone to share his thoughts and his plans with.

And between you and me, I wonder if what brought Frank to my door that day wasn’t his own need, but a need he perceived in me. And I wonder if this whole thing wasn’t some kind of a ruse, cooked up so that Frank could get alongside me and teach me how to live. God knows, he has his work cut out. But I’m glad that he took on the challenge.

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True story. Or not!?
95% true, if you substitute the name ‘Holy Spirit’ for the name ‘Frank’.

Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day in the Church’s Year when we remember the remarkable events that we heard read to us from the book of Acts. The disciples, gathered together in Jerusalem, have a profound experience as the Spirit of God, who had been withheld from all but a few select individuals in Old Testament times, is poured out on the infant church in tongues of speech and tongues of fire, to their own amazement, and that of the thousands of Jewish men and women gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost.

In one sense, it was the birth of the church and it’s rightly celebrated as such.

But it’s very easy to get distracted by the fireworks of Pentecost Sunday, and the church often has. Parts of the worldwide church want every day to be Pentecost – they strain and strive after profound spiritual experiences; and there’s nothing wrong with that, I guess, as long as the spiritual experiences don’t become the focus.

When anything other than God becomes the focus of our worship, we risk making it into an idol, and we’re especially prone to idolise our feelings. We go looking for that experience, or that feeling in worship, and if we don’t find it we assume God’s not there, when he might very well be there, seeing how we cope without the experience we thought we needed.

So some in the church spend their days trying to re-create the feelings or the experience of Pentecost, But there are other parts of the church where folk look back to the first Pentecost like a history lesson. Wasn’t that marvellous what God did back then, the tongues of fire, and the strange languages and all that. Wasn’t it wonderful?!! And the silent majority in the pews think – well maybe it was wonderful, but I wasn’t there to experience it. What’s it got to do with me?

Well in our reading from John’s gospel, Jesus tells us what Pentecost is about for you and me, and it’s not really about the fireworks at all. It’s about Frank, or to give him his Sunday name, the Holy Spirit.

The Scriptures teach that we are all made in God’s image. All human beings are created in the image of God – we share that in common. And as part of that image, we all have spirit – the life force or essence within us that makes us more than bags of meat and bone.

But the Spirit we’re thinking about today is not the individual human spirit, or even the collective spirit we experience from time to time when people gather together in churches, football stadiums, theatres and concert halls.

The Spirit we speak of today is God’s Spirit, as much a part of the Triune God as the Father and the Son. As much a person as the Father and the Son. And the role of the Spirit is to open up to us, in a personal way, the truth about God and the truth about ourselves. And having done so, to help us to change.

There are many words used of the Spirit in the Scriptures – here Jesus uses ‘Helper’ but elsewhere he is spoken of as a Counsellor, or a Companion, or a Guide.

And though the Spirit is around us and at work in the world in countless ways, what Jesus is promising here as he leaves his disciples is something more that that. He’s promising that if we ask God, the Spirit himself will come to live, not near us or around us, but within us.

It’s a preposterous notion. But it’s exactly what Jesus says.

“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, who will stay with you for ever. He is the Spirit who reveals the truth about God. The world cannot receive him, because it cannot see him or know him. But you know him because he remains with you and is in you”.

There are plenty of new-age spiritualities which – in spite of the evidence of several millennia – still like to think that buried deep in our souls or psyches there’s a god or a goddess just waiting to be unleashed. That’s just Narcissism by another name. It’s all about us.

Christianity makes a different kind of claim, though it’s no less outrageous. Our claim is that the Spirit, knowing full well that we are neither gods nor goddesses, still wants to come and live with us, and will put up with our mess, and get involved in the saga of our lives, so that through his patient persistence we can become the children of God that God always wanted us to be.

He’s a kind of midwife, I guess. Bringing to birth within us all the good things that make for a rich, deep, satisfying God-centred life.

And something you need to know about the Spirit is that he’s a persistent so and so. He’ll stand and knock at a door for ages. But he’ll never batter it down. He was brought up well, you see. He only enters when he’s been invited in.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock” says Jesus in the book of Revelation. “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me”.

Jesus, Frank, the Spirit – it’s all the same, really. It’s God, softly hammering his fist against the door of your life and trying to get in.

Don’t be distracted by the Pentecost Fireworks. It’s really not about the tongues of fire and the funny languages. Marvellous though they were, they were never the focus. The miracle that Pentecost reveals is that the God who seemed so far beyond, is ready to make his home in you.

There’s plenty of space in there.

The question is, are you ready to share it?