Lately, I have rediscovered my nose and realised again the delight of walking as the fragrances waft by me.  Simply coming from my house to the Abbey this morning (of course, nature’s scents are always stronger in the morning or evening) I smelt first mown grass, then a fir tree / evergreen dark smell; then something cool and minty and then the wonderful warm sweet smell of Honeysuckle flowing abundantly by the pond.  Going on, I am now entranced, lifting my nose in much the same way as my dog does, to see what is in the wind.

I say I have “rediscovered” my nose because I cannot remember being so aware of smell in London.  I did not find the smells there unpleasant. Odd as it may seem, I like the scent of a dusty street on a hot day in London and I don’t mind, if it is not overwhelming, the smell of traffic.  Even in London I would have been stopped for Honeysuckle.  But just as one reason for the sparrows deserting London is because their mating call cannot be heard above the noise of the traffic, it is now so loud, so one reason I could not enjoy the scents that blossomed in the gardens there so much was because other smells were over-powering.

The human mind, body and emotions are a sensitive instrument; the senses, a most wonderful gift from God given for our joy and our pleasure.  But too often we are overwhelmed by one or two things which are so demanding of our attention in one way that we are ‘blinded’, ‘deafened’ or ‘numbed’ in ourselves as to the riches on offer.  This is true in all areas of our lives.  We get into habits of thinking and behaviour that demand so much of us that we begin not to see anymore what is important.  Worse still, we cease to feel what is important.  We cease to care.  To find ourselves again we have to stop and smell the flowers, as the saying goes.

This is the importance of the idea of Sabbath.  “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” said Jesus.  Stopping, getting in touch with ourselves; our minds, bodies, spirits, hearts – this wonderful experience of being human, is what Sabbath is all about.  The interesting thing about the “Sabbath” is that it is a commandment of God that we should all have a day off, a real day off, and yet it is the one thing that most of us feel we don’t need and those who make law certainly don’t think we need.  I have to tell clergy sometimes (and myself, for that matter) that keeping a Sabbath is one of God’s commandments.

Of course, human beings with their oft repeated ability to take a gift of God and make it into a burden for people, have in the past made the idea of the Sabbath rather unattractive and many people today will say that they do not like Sunday because “there is nothing to do,” meaning nothing to entertain themselves with.  There is everything; go, smell the flowers.  Rediscover the lost sight, the acute hearing, the sense of emotion.  Rediscover the sensitive instrument you are and enjoy it.  God gives this wonderful world for us to enjoy.  It is the inheritance of Everyman (and woman.)

The news is not good.  A week ago we were hearing the latest twist in the “Trojan Horse” saga, the ‘plot’ to infiltrate extreme Islamist views into Birmingham schools.  On the radio this morning the Middle East was described as imploding, with stories of Isis, a Jihadist group sweeping across Iraq from one direction while Kurdish separatists took another part.  There is the ongoing terrible situation in Syria.  Alongside this the Ukranian government accused Russia of sending tanks over Ukraine’s Eastern border;, South Sudanese people continue to starve as the civil war storms on, and another terrorist group, Boko Harem seem to have made certain parts of Nigeria into no-go areas.  No wonder we feel anxious and helpless, particularly when we hear of young men brought up in Britain going to join these extreme organisations which we tend to blanket describe as ‘terrorist.’

The response to the Trojan Horse situation from the government was that we must teach British values in our schools.  But hold on; what values are we talking about here?  What are the underlying messages of our society?  What do we applaud in our culture?  What are we inviting young people to reach for?  What sense of meaning or purpose do we give them for their lives?

Young people are hungry for meaning and purpose.  That is why the big political movements of the past were so often made up largely of the young.  Think of the Ban the Bomb marches, the anti-Vietnam War protests.  Jesus chose young men as his followers.  Perhaps one reason that so many Muslim men from this country are leaving to fight against Assad (and then finding themselves fighting other rebels instead) is because they have a desire to live for something bigger than themselves.  Because they are young and hungry for meaning they are vulnerable to manipulation but that doesn’t mean that the original longing in them was not for something good.

Britain does have strong values but they are largely hidden under the more obvious traits exposed in the media of greed and selfishness.  One of our values is unity.

Unity…is more than solidarity and more than uniformity.  Unity, ironically, is a commitment to becoming one people who speak in a thousand voices.  Rather than one message repeated by a thousand voices, unity is one message shaped by a thousand minds…The kind of unity that is born out of difference and becomes the glue of a group has four characteristics: it frees, it enables, it supports, and it listens.

(Joan Chissiter, “For all that has been, thanks.”)

We recognise that whatever we might once have been we are now a diverse nation, made up of many peoples with their cultures, religions and histories.  All our justice is undergirded by law based on the Christian faith.  Jesus by engaging with all sorts of people in his ministry paved the way for the early Church to include slaves, women, foreigners and the poorest of the poor.  He taught that everyone is valued and loved by God, so let us go on seeking unity in diversity.

We do not have to force people to become Christian in this country.  Let the faith speak for itself and let us honour other peoples’ religions and listen to them.  But it is about time we honoured our inheritance and stopped shrugging it off as being of no consequence.  Let us celebrate and teach what is good for all people.

I have a vivid memory of my mother grabbing my brother by his collar at a Billy Graham rally in the early 1960s to ‘save’ him from being ‘saved’ again.  It wasn’t that my mother was in anyway against any of her children finding faith.  It was she, after all, who instigated the visits to various cathedrals, chapels and Salvation Army halls and this rally.  It was that my brother, in his early teens, a warm and emotional person, always responded to the call to ‘come forward.’  He had been saved so many times that it was becoming farcical and the saving didn’t really appear to stick.   On top of that, I think my mother was afraid she would never find him again in the crowds of Wembley Stadium.

In the season of Pentecost we start to look at the saving mission of the Church.  On the Day of Pentecost we are always instructed that we must read Acts 2: 1 – 21.  It is a story we all know well if we are long term Christians: that of the Holy Spirit coming in power on the disciples; an experience so powerful that they were thrust out into the streets of Jerusalem where every passer by heard them speaking in their own language.  It is easy to hear the story and miss it because we think we know it so well.  But this year I was brought up short by verses 12 and 13, which describe the reactions of the onlookers.

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

I thought, a few years ago I would have been in the latter group, the ones who sneered.  My reaction to the revivalist meetings my mother took us to as children was always that of feeling like an outsider, like an observer looking on at something I didn’t feel part of and didn’t really understand.  As an adult I felt uncomfortable with ‘born again’ language even after I became a Christian.  I felt hostile because I didn’t understand.

Very often many of us in western Christianity have talked of the Holy Spirit either as a distant maiden aunt whom we don’t really know but who sends us a cheque each Christmas (and we respond with a formal thank you.)  Or we have thought that receiving the Holy Spirit had to be an experience almost as dramatic as  that of the first Pentecost.  This has meant that many British people have held the Holy Spirit at a safe arm’s length.

That is not the way I feel now.  I have never had flames on my head or been ‘slain in the Spirit’, but slowly, slowly I have become aware of the Holy Spirit working deeply and persistently in my life and, as I have observed it, in the lives of many other quite ordinary people.  The Acts reading goes on to say that many different nationalities, all in Jerusalem for the Jewish Festival of Booths (the original Pentecost), heard the disciples proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ in their own language.  If we look around the world today and see the many languages in which the same good news is being spoken we can see Pentecost as a prophetic moment, pointing forward to what the Spirit would do and the power with which he would do it.

But for me more poignant is the fact that the message of Jesus Christ is discovered by every human being who turns to him, spoken to them in their own unique language.  We all have an exclusive language which comes from our own unique histories, burdens, joys, longings and desires.  And Jesus Christ speaks uniquely to each of us as we need to hear.  Jesus gives us the freedom to be ourselves – this is the sign of genuine saving – and to know ourselves, with all our weaknesses to be very precious to the God who created us, irreplaceable in his sight.

Many moons ago, when I was still a relatively young Christian, I did not like the feast of the Ascension for the very simple reason that physically speaking Jesus was no longer on earth after the Ascension. This must sound very odd. The bodily Jesus isn’t on earth at all now. But somehow, I felt as if he was from the moment of his birth as we celebrated it at Christmas to the moment of his ascension, Every year I felt ‘Emmanuel, God with us.’ God was somehow closer and more approachable.

Perhaps it was also something to do with my ability to comprehend God as long as he was in human form but not to begin to fathom the transcendental God, a God so mysterious and so other. All I knew of that God was,

“My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.” (Isaiah 55:8)

I had not yet grown into the understanding and, more importantly, the experience of the “otherness” of God as not being “an other,” in the usual sense of that word: alien to me, foreign to me, someone strange and outside me. No, God’s otherness is ‘an other kind of otherness.’ He is so different that he pays those who have worked for an hour as much as he pays those who have worked a day; that he runs out to meet the younger son who has half destroyed the family inheritance and celebrates as if it were the son’s birthday; that instead of condemning a women for her sexual infidelity he makes those who accuse her realise that they are little better, and thereby saves the woman from certain death. God is so ‘other’ that he hears those who cannot cry out loudly, touches those who others believe are full of infectious diseases, pays special care to those who because of their gender are not allowed education, enjoys the company of those considered beyond the pale, and dies a criminal death on a rubbish heap. God is totally other because his ideas so often oppose our meagre ideas of human justice and care and show us deeply wanting.

I stopped feeling an “orphan” at Ascension time, when I realised that Jesus’ leaving the earth was not the end but the beginning of the gospel, as someone said. It is as if the gospels are the first book of a trilogy and we are in the second. The second book begins with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and once we have had even the slightest taste of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are not only comforted (the Holy Spirit is sometimes called the Comforter) but we understand.

In the Acts of the Apostles, despite Christ’s departure, there is no need to speak of an “absentee Christology”. Though absent as a character from the narrative of Acts after chapter 1, the influence of Jesus throughout the rest of the narrative is profound. His name occurs no less than 69 times in Acts. He is at the centre of the church’s controversy with the Jews. He guides the church in its missionary efforts; he empowers the disciples to perform miracles. The ascended and exalted Christ, though absent as a character, is nonetheless a constant presence throughout the narrative. (Mikael C. Parsons)

And as we walk with God, we realise through his presence with us in the Holy Spirit that we have not been left alone to deal with life’s issues, either. God is always very much, Emmanuel, God with us, guiding us and holding us close.