8 Jun 2025
Pentecost Sunday
Romans 8:14-17, John 14:8-17, 25-27
Pentecost 2025
For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: “In returning and rest shall ye be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.”
Isaiah 30:15
The Turmoil of the World and the Silence of God Contrasted
In silence, not in the turmoil and noise, God enters into the innermost depths of our being. Father Marie-Eugene de l’Enfant-Jésus was right when he wrote…“This divine law surprises us. It goes so much against our experience of the natural laws of the world. Here below, any profound transformation, any great external change produces a certain agitation and noise. The great river, for example, reaches the ocean only by the sounding onward rush of its water.”Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise
How right Cardinal Sarah and Father Marie-Eugene are in these observations: what is considered worthwhile by the world is always measured in visible, often frantic activity, and in ways that be quantified, counted, evaluated, often in financial terms. Significant achievements are things that can be pointed out: great works of physical, economic or bureaucratic infrastructure.
And we almost always think of ourselves and our own lives in this way too: what is valuable about me and what I am is what I produce, what I can be seen to be doing by others, maybe also by God, maybe by myself. Every movement, every action is rushed, every step speaks of a desire to get further along a path to somewhere else. When we stop for a moment, it might seem that we struggle to be present to the place we are and to who we are.
Cardinal Sarah goes on: ‘If we observe the great works, the most powerful acts, the most extraordinary and striking interior transformations that God carries out in man, we are forced to admit that he works in silence.’
Indeed, when the Prophet Elijah sought the face of God, he found what he was looking for not in a great wind, not in an earthquake, not in a fire, but in a still, small voice.
The Holy Spirit’s Peace
I point this out because it brings us face-to-face with the question of Pentecost: that day when God poured out his Holy Spirit upon the early believers and the Christian Church came to birth. Many things are said about the person and work of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, but I want to focus on only one theme this morning, that which is spoken about by Jesus in our Gospel reading:
“These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things…Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”
In context, this saying comes after the disciple Philip has asked Jesus for reassurance and more broadly in the atmosphere of anxiety created Jesus’ talk of him leaving the disciples.
Again, everyone can relate to this context in a general sense: our lives are characterised by uncertainty, agitation and anxiety. It is part of the human condition, but it is also part of the modern condition.
I think of a TV programme from the nineties I used to watch. It was called ‘Stressed Eric’. It is about a man called Eric Feeble, a forty-year-old divorced father living in London. His daughter Claire is 6 and allergic to nearly everything. His son Brian is 10 and has learning difficulties and a fixation with putting everything in his mouth. His au pair Maria is an unreliable 18-year-old with a drinking problem. And his ex-wife Liz, now a Buddhist, constantly nags him. His wealthy and snobbish neighbours, the Perfect family, highlight his weaknesses. And in his workplace he has to contend with a rude and overbearing boss, Paul Power, and a useless secretary, Alison. As the events of his life grow ever more stressful, a vein throbs and pulsates on the side of his head.
Imagine how much more stressful Eric’s life would have been in an age of smart-phones and ubiquitous broadband internet and email.
In the modern world, we exist under the threat of constant demands upon our time and focus. Our attention can be fragmented and fractured in a hundred directions with the touch of an iPhone or the opening of a laptop. This is profoundly bad for what has come to be called our “mental health”. And it is no coincidence that, since the release of the iPhone in 2007, rates of depression, anxiety and suicide have skyrocketed amidst young people.
It seems to me that, as our technology has developed, our ability to live wisely has diminished. We have the capability to contact one another from across the globe. We can access any information about anything at any time. But we are missing the one thing which is necessary, which is the ability to flourish as the people we were created to be.
In contrast to all of this, Jesus offers us peace, a peace not as the world gives. “Let not your hearts be troubled,” Christ tells us. The word for troubled in Greek is tarasso, which means to be stirred up, disturbed or unsettled – again, a familiar feeling in today’s world.
This peace is also a silent peace. And this is because the work of the Holy Spirit is a work that happens within us, unseen by the world.
And here we might reference our reading from the New Testament for this morning: ‘For you did receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Romans 8:15-16).
In other words, the Holy Spirit reassures our hearts that we are God’s children. But, again, this is not something that can be represented in a slideshow or quantified on a spreadsheet. It is the silent and interior transformation that the presence of God brings about in us.
And I must stress at this point that this reality – the peaceful, silent, patient interior transformation of the Holy Spirit – is often something that the Church itself works against. This is because even in the Church we can be too busy, too rushed, too concerned with frantic activity and with the attempt to prove ourselves. We too embrace the performance mindset with a terrible effect upon our spiritual health
But the great truth is that the work that God wants to do in us is mostly achieved not through frantic activity but by the patient opening of ourselves to God’s presence and through attentive listening to interior voice of the Holy Spirit.
The Peace of Contemplation
Perhaps you hear these words of Christ – “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you” – and you desire to know this deep peace. How can we receive it?
We involve ourselves here in something of a paradox, described by the writer of the book of Hebrews who writes: “Let us therefore strive to enter that rest.”
There is, in other words, an aspect of this search which involves slowing down, stripping back, and switching off. But there is another part of it which involves an active seeking after the presence of God.
And here we can talk about the discipline of silence: silence is at once the greatest challenge and the greatest peace. It is the greatest challenge because, if we spend time in silence, we are confronted with who we really are: with our anxious thoughts, with our wayward desires, with our frantic minds. Sometimes when people begin to engage the discipline of silence they realise just how loud is the noise within their heads. It can be almost too much to bear. As Blaise Pascal said in his Pensees: ‘All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone’.
And yet, it is only in the place of silence that we can truly come to know this peace of which Christ speaks. This is not a reward for sitting still, but the result of quieting the mind and the heart, so that these frantic and demanding voices are diminished and so that the presence of God within us can be made known. I believe that this is the meaning of Jesus’ words in John 14:16 when he speaks of the Holy Spirit: “You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you”. And elsewhere when Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21), which expresses a similar truth.
That truth is that God is already present to your soul. He is already within you, which means that the Kingdom of God is within you. Why then do you not feel him? Why do you not know him? It is not because you have not found him out there somewhere in the world but because you have not noticed him dwelling in here. And you have not noticed him because the noise is just too loud and because you have not yet cultivated an inner silence.
I invite you, in closing then, to the contemplative life, to the practice of silence, solitude, and prayer. If you have not practiced these things then, never fear, you can start at any time. Again, you already have everything you need to find this peace within you. You have only to begin the journey.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.