Sermon preached at Evensong on the Day of Pentecost 2024

Travel broadens the mind, it opens us up to people, places, ideas, cultures we might otherwise never have known. It must have been so for Egeria, an extraordinary Galician woman, who decided to travel to Jerusalem at the end of the 4th century. Travelling from her native Spain via Constantinople (contemporary Istanbul) she arrived in the Holy Land in the early 380s, where she stayed for three years. She also visited Alexandria and Thebes. But at its heart, this was a pilgrimage to the holy sites of Jesus’s ministry, death and resurrection. It was extraordinarily risky for a woman to embark on such a journey in the ancient world. But Egeria is a witness to early Christian tradition, a teacher of the faith, recording her insights into those communities which worshipped at the key sites of Christ’s life. She wrote back to those she calls her ‘sisters’ at home; by tradition she eventually returned to Galicia, where she may well be buried under or around the basilica of Santiago de Compostela.

Egeria was not a tourist in the modern sense. The focus of her journey was her desire to live Easter in Jerusalem. She did this at a time when the liturgical calendar (the pattern of the Christian year) was not yet quite settled, and so gives us a unique window into the worship of the churches of the Holy Land at that moment. Her travel journal records 24 hours of liturgical worship on the day of Pentecost. She tells us that this is a day of ‘great effort’ for the people, as after the vigil throughout the previous night, the account in the Acts of the Apostles (a portion of which we read this afternoon) was first read in the Great Church (or Church of the Holy Sepulchre), before a meal and short rest fortified them for a slow walk across the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives and to the place of Jesus’s Ascension. They stopped at each key spot to sing hymns and antiphons and read from the scriptures, before finally returning to Jerusalem. Egeria tells us, ‘when they arrive at the city gate, it is already night, and the people have brought hundreds of church lamps to help them.’ Accompanied by their lanterns, the great gathering goes once again to the Holy Sepulchre and to the site of Calvary, before ending at the site of the Upper Room on Mount Sion. Egeria concludes, 

‘Thus very great fatigue is endured on that day, for vigil is kept at the Anastasis (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) from the first cockcrow, and there is no pause from that time onward throughout the whole day, but the whole celebration lasts so long that it is midnight when every one returns home after the dismissal has taken place at Sion.’

Travel broadens the mind, indeed. Throughout Egeria’s account of these celebrations, the reader is captivated by the movement of the people to the different sites. ‘There is no Christian left in the city who does not go’, she tells us. Why are they moving around so much? Well, the late 380s is still a time in which the calendar is not quite settled, and the scriptural accounts around which much of the worship is based, contain a variety of testimony about precisely when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the infant Church. Can it be tied down? Was it at the Cross, as St John’s Jesus literally breathes out – or ‘hands over’ – his Spirit onto Mary and John, binding them together even as he is breathing his last? Or in the same Gospel on the evening of first Easter Day, as the disciples are given the power to forgive sins? Or was it at the Ascension when Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission? Or is it indeed on the Day of Pentecost, as they apostles and Mary receive the fulfilment of the Father’s promise in tongues of fire and new languages? When, exactly, is the culmination of Easter? The answer is that the Spirit is given at all these moments, as that immediate period after the resurrection when Jesus is physically with the disciples, draws to a close.

In dramatic terms, this is the conclusion of an act. It is not as if the spirit just ‘shows up for the first time’ at Pentecost: sometimes some of our hymns and imagery point in that direction rather unhelpfully, as if the Spirit has not been active throughout the ministry of Jesus, inspiring the hope of the prophets, underpinning the activity of creation itself from the beginning. But the Ascension and Pentecost are the culmination of calvary and easter, the culmination of the uniquely renewed Covenant now offered not just to the Jewish people alone, but to all through the risen Jesus Christ dwelling in the life of the Church. During his post-resurrection appearances to them, Jesus offered his beleaguered and sometimes baffled followers comfort and encouragement, but it is precisely as he is leaving them that he renews his promise to be with them always, to which they respond in prayer and patience in the upper room, importantly in the same place in which Jesus had given them the new commandment to love one another, alongside the gift of the Eucharist, the night before he died. On the day of Pentecost, Jesus’s followers encounter a previously unimaginable intensification of the gift of God-With-Us. Now, the Holy Spirit mediates the presence and ministry of the Risen and ascended Jesus to and through his followers in a totally unrestricted way.

Some half-century after Egeria was in Jerusalem, St Leo the Great preached, ‘What was visible in our Saviour has passed over into his mysteries.’ We often interpret these ‘mysteries’ as sacraments, those gifts through which Christ lives in the Church in particular ways. But everything the disciples had seen and known in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, has now been given to the Church in her ministry in a very full sense. The Risen and Ascended Christ’s ministry now lives in the Church as she proclaims the Gospel and makes new disciples, as she prays, as she teaches, as she cares for those around her, as she reaches deeply into the places and alongside people whom the world would rather forget. We experience the fresh indestructible gift of the Holy Spirit as we participate in the mystery of God made visible, triumphant over the barriers and corruption of death, changing the quality of all our potential interactions, our decisions, our relationships. In today’s second reading, St Peter quotes from the Prophet Joel, ‘ In the last days, it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh.’ These are the days in which we now live. This is the age of the Spirit. The age of the Church. The final act. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s history ‘pierces deeply into our order of time’, as Archbishop Michael Ramsey put it. The scene has changed.

There is no record of what sort of impact Egeria’s participation in the liturgy of Jerusalem had on the rest of her life. She settled in the Holy City for three years before returning home; we can imagine that such a time may well have changed her. Every year, we have an opportunity to go in heart and mind to the Holy Land during Holy Week, and during those few weeks after Easter. Our Christian engagement with these rites, not least through our imagination, can open new depths of discipleship. But the Pentecost story reminds us just how the call to a life of faith is life in this world, here, now, lived in the ever-expanding community of the Holy Spirit. That Spirit is the Spirit of the Risen Jesus, inspiring, reviving, comforting, challenging, restoring us. Through the same Spirit, we who are baptised dwell within Christ’s mysteries, anointed with his identity. Every year, our worship calls us once again to come close to Christ, as he comes close to us, broadening not only our minds but our hearts, entrusting us once again with his ministry and message, given for the life of this beautiful but fragile world.

‘O eternal fire, O source of love,
ignite our hearts and consecrate them.’