Graceful Power
A sermon for St Mark’s Patronal Festival
Pentecost Sunday, 8 June 2025
Primary Texts
Acts 2:1-21
2 Tim 4:1-11
John 14:8-17, 25-27
Pentecost is often called the Birthday of the Church. We call it that because it marks the occasion when Jesus’ disciples, after their Lord’s resurrection and ascension, were infused by the Holy Spirit and made ready to continue Jesus’ ministry in the world in a concerted way, as a movement that progressively gained momentum over the first century – at the end of which it really was quite organized – quite churchlike as we understand the term.
We can chart the effectiveness of that injection of spiritual power through the pages of the Book of Acts, which takes us up to about the sixth decade of the first century. St Peter is a major character in Acts – in the earlier chapters (doing remarkable healings, on a scale akin to Jesus)– and St Paul (the archetype of muscular Christianity) becomes very prominent as things develop. Both were able to achieve great things because they let the Holy Spirit work through them to an extent that has seldom been matched.
Our second reading today, from Second Timothy, comes either late in Paul’s life (the traditional position) or was written by a disciple in Paul’s name perhaps a decade or more after his death (the position that a lot of biblical scholars have come to, but by no means all of them). I’m erring on the traditional side today. The passage we heard certainly sounds like it was written by a man, such as Paul, in charge of a real organization with key people pulling in different directions. The author refers to many people in quick succession, in a manner that doesn’t seem contrived, and his sense of frustration is palpable. For that reason, my tendency is to see this letter as authentically Pauline, but whether you agree with that assessment or not, I don’t think it is controversial to say that it gives us a window into a religious organization that has developed in complexity from the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2), to the point where factions have developed, which are vexing the author. This would go on to be a recurring theme in church history, but running concurrently alongside that disruptive element to corporate life was a force that built up believers and called them back to the task of being salt and light to the world; and that force was the Holy Spirit.
One of the individuals referred to favourably in Second Timothy is called Mark. Paul says of this Mark that he is ‘useful in my ministry’ (v11). We too wish to be useful in the ministry which we and Paul before us, inherited from Christ. Many of you here will be aware that there was a collection of memoirs published here in 1997 as part of the 150th anniversary entitled – Useful in Your Service. It was compiled by our late Church historian, Hilary Reid. Many of the people who left accounts of their labour in that collection have gone to God, but we should imagine them surrounding us as we celebrate 178 years, now, witnessing to Christ’s love through the irrepressible, graceful power of the Holy Spirit.
I say graceful power, because I don’t want to give the impression that the Holy Spirit gets things done in the same way that things get done in the world as we know it. In the world as we know it, things get done because there are resources – human and material – to do so, and people doing their best to marshal those resources to their personal advantage. At the individual and corporate level, it’s about ‘getting ahead’ and ‘staying ahead’ through acquisition of productive assets, and at the national level, it’s about increasing spheres of influence, extraction of value, all the way up to annexation, colonization or even brutal conquest. Left to its own devices, it leads to distrust between people, resentment, objectification and other dark states of mind which diminish peace.
The Holy Spirit empowers in a different way (which I’ll comment on a bit in a moment), and its action is manifest not in the grasping of resources, and the subsequent breakdown in social relations, but by a change in character of the person empowered.
‘The fruit of the Spirit,’ St Paul told the Galatians, ‘is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control.’ (Gal 5:22-23)
A lot of people who have sat in these pews over these last 178 years, had those attributes; a consequence of the Holy Spirit at work within them.
So, how does the Holy Spirit achieve this happy state, and get things done? It does so by giving each of us specific gifts that are meant to be shared for the mutual building up of the community.
In 1 Corinthians 12 (the chapter immediately before the famous chapter on the nature of love), Paul writes about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. What he is at pains to point out is that gifts differ markedly from person to person (some can heal, some can preach, some are particularly good at discerning what is right, and so on), but these gifts are complementary (v.7) – that is to say, they work together to cause a mutual building up of the community. This situation is a world away from the state where everyone is at war with everyone else for the same resources; here the resources are the people, empowered by God to help advance one another.
It sounds a bit left wing, and it has to be admitted that some communistic efforts have drunk heavily from this rich well, but –as I see it, there is nothing in what Paul writes here to require the adoption of a state-wide redistribution of wealth (which, as we know, can easily degenerate into an order with its own inequalities, given the vagaries of human nature) but what it doesn’t require of Christians, individually and corporately, is the constant examination of our life decisions and the motivations that lay behind them. The purpose of the questioning is to discern whether or not those decisions will ultimately be life-giving both for us and the people around us.
The answer will depend, of course on the decision in question (some pathways are not appropriate for any Christian – drug dealer, assassin), but, just as importantly (the answer depends) on the person making the decision. So, for instance, if you are a Christian who has a natural gift for business, the Holy Spirit may guide you into founding a company that gives satisfying, gainful employment to tens or maybe hundreds, makes lots of customers very happy, and places you in a position where you have the resources to help in other ways. In the course of its long history, St Mark’s has had a number of parishioners who fit that general mold. Another example might be a person who has very good people skills or emotional intelligence. It would make sense for them to use that gift of the Holy Spirit in the service of people struggling with life, or as a life-coach, community organizer – even a religious minister – roles that are just as important as entrepreneurship though they may not be as well renumerated. Importantly, were either of these individuals to decide to do the other’s job, it is likely that the common good – the building up of the body of Christ – would be negatively affected.
So, if we wish to be ‘useful in ‘the ministry that Peter, Paul, Mark and the other Apostles inherited from Christ, we need to put the special gifts we have been given by the Holy Spirit at the service of the same Spirit, allowing it to be our guide. If that process is going as it should, the fruits of the spirit that Paul wrote to the Galatians about ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control’ will be evident in us, and we will stand out in a world that often lacks those attributes. Which will make St Mark’s an incredibly attractive place for people to spend the next 178 years in.
May that be so, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Tony Surman