June 2025 (taken from The Link Magazine)

“Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday dear Church! Happy Birthday to you!”

Pentecost, the Church’s Birthday, this year is on Sunday 8th June. It commemorates and celebrates the Holy Spirit descending on the Apostles in a great wind and tongues of fire, empowering them and transforming a little frightened group of men and women huddled together for safety in an upper room into a force that changed the world. Some of you may remember at an Open Doors Service once we brought up a big Birthday Cake with lots of candles & sang “Happy Birthday” to the Church, then the children blew the candles out – but they all relit! They were trick, relighting candles! This is a good image for the power of the Holy Spirit – it cannot be extinguished or overcome. Pentecost reminds us that the Spirit is God’s gift to us, to empower & enliven, and is a key to who and what we are.

Who remembers the Alternative Service Book (A.S.B.)? It came into being in the Church of England in 1980 (blimey, 45 years ago!), and was the first new Anglican Prayer Book since 1662. It paved the way for our current forms of services in modern language, namely “Common Worship”, which superseded it in 2000. Why bring it up now? Well, the compilers of the A.S.B. thought that Pentecost was so important that they named ordinary Sundays of the year “after Pentecost”, i.e.

“Pentecost I, II, III” etc. “Common Worship” went back to the old B.C.P.’s way of doing things, i.e. “Sundays after Trinity” – “Trinity I, II, III” etc. (which I personally prefer) but the A.S.B. usage reminds us that Pentecost is really the foundation of the Church’s whole Life, Purpose and Mission.

Each of us in Baptism and Confirmation receives the Holy Spirit to link us into the body of Christ and to empower us on our spiritual pilgrimage. Through this same Spirit, we are nourished by the Eucharist (as “Corpus Christi”, this year celebrated on 22nd June, reminds us!), and given food for our journey, that each one of us may be upheld on “the Way”, however fragile and weak we may feel.

Pentecost promises us that through the continued outpouring of the Spirit we have a powerful, unbroken link with those early Apostles and that through us the Spirit will touch the lives of generations yet unborn. And that is hugely heartening!

Happy Pentecost!
Love Fr. John