Thought for the Day, 12 May 2008
The Rev. Joel Edwards
History is more than a list of dates. It's also the way in which we capture life-changing moments for our collective memories. So 1903 wasn't just the year when the Wright Brothers pioneered the miracle of flight; it was the moment we all began to travel by air.
Yesterday, a billion people around the world paused to remember one of the most significant Christian festivals: Pentecost.
Precisely 50 days after the Jewish Passover - Pentecost means 'count fifty' - Jewish people would begin the Celebration of Weeks and the first fruits of the harvest. According to the first Christian historian, Luke, it was when the Jewish feast was at its zenith and Jerusalem was in full throttle that the Christian church found its first corporate expression in an upper room in Jerusalem.
In that moment 120 men and women emerged from prayer and reflection to become the catalyst for a global movement.
And it's a moment in which a billion people still live out their faith in the real world.
Pentecost was anything but the privatization of piety. Christians who spent yesterday in a holy huddle missed the point entirely! For Pentecost was anything but that. Out of a prayer gathering sprung a radical egalitarianism. For as the inaugural sermon made it patently clear this movement was to be typified by a fundamental re-alignment of human relationships and concepts of justice. Both old and young would become visionaries; women were included in the movement. And God would pour his liberating Spirit on every culture under the sun.
Yesterday thousands of Christians relived that moment as they met for a Global Day of Prayer in Millwall football stadium joining half a billion people around the world - not just to pray for other Christians, but to celebrate and pray about the problems in our world. They prayed about war and famine and asked searching questions about their responsibility as UK citizens.
In the ecumenical service where I preached yesterday morning there was nothing incongruous about our intercession for teenager, Jimmy Mizen who became the 13th victim of knife crime in London on Saturday night. And it seemed natural to redirect our giving in response to disaster victims in Burma.
As the German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann put it: 'no corner of this world should remain without God's promise of a new creation through the power of the resurrection.'
The greatest travesty of any faith is allowing it to become a parochial hegemony of self interests. And for Christian faith, this is the very antithesis of the spirit of Pentecost.