Drunk? or just daft?

You ever been to a party where you're the only person who is entirely sober? Perhaps you're the driver for a cheerfully inebriated partner, or stricken by some lurgie which requires you to take antibiotics which suddenly turn lethal - or simply ineffectual - with the addition of alcohol. Perhaps you simply don't drink. Whatever the reason, you suddenly realise that just about everyone else seems to be on another planet, leaving you with your feet firmly on the ground. And you find their hilarity not only hard to enter but also downright irritating.

I guess this is how it was at Pentecost, when the disciples of Jesus were thought to have drunk "new wine" - the only explanation their listeners could arrive at to make sense of their exuberant joy in proclaiming the Gospel. And it's a bit like what people must feel when they meet my companions on last weekend's Cursillo in Perth - puzzled, excluded and somewhat irritated. How can perfectly sensible and sober people of mature years go off to a monastery for a few days and come back so inexplicably cheerful?

Now, you'd think that I'd be in a position to explain, wouldn't you? I mean, I was running the weekend - in charge of the team, making decisions about how things would be done, watching the weekend unfold. And yet when it comes down to it I can't tell you what happened, exactly. All I know is that these very different people arrived looking tense or uncertain and left transformed, smiling and joyful. As if they had enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine, in fact. And though I had a wonderful team of people working under me - people who also were unfailingly cheerful despite being worked off their feet - I am unable to put my finger on any one human contribution which would have brought about this transformation.

Of course, experiences like this are considerably more than the sum of their parts, and the team - paying to come and work and perhaps deliver a talk that they've sweated blood over - are motivated by something way beyond the ordinary. And the shared joy at the end of it is enviable - and in the end inexplicable. It just is.

Catching fire?

Pentecost. The descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples, 2,000 years ago. And, we hope, on us, renewing us – firing us up, in fact, to refer back to yesterday’s post. We had an interesting sermon on that this morning, noting how these first Christians had to share their good news with a Jewish crowd there to celebrate something else. We thought about the excitement that must have rippled through that crowd, and how it doesn’t always seem that way now. And I thought about yesterday, and how people do still catch fire if they feel free to do so. There are many constraints still in church life; some of them are to do with our personal inhibitions and some are imposed by the church itself, and by people being unwilling to take risks, and by the fear of overstepping the boundaries.

We had a visiting family today – an extended family from Hyderabad in India - in the UK to visit a son who is working here. They must’ve been frozen – when they left home the temperature was 49 degrees, and in Dunoon this morning it was all of 10 degrees – but they were obviously delighted with the service and the warm welcome. (Don’t know about the smell of melting carpet when there was a mishap with the thurible – but perhaps it was all part of the warmth bit). They were spending the holiday weekend in Argyll, and had looked on the internet for a church they could attend – and found us. Things are looking up, if we no longer have to rely solely on visitors sighting the church from the ferry. They told us that there is a congregation of 4.000 in their church, who meet in a building about the same size as ours but sit on the floor – and then go home and proclaim the gospel through a megaphone, and hold house meetings to tell their (Hindu) neighbours, who are apparently converting in droves.

When they left, I wondered to one of them – a girl of about 15, I think – if we’d ever see them again. “We will meet in Heaven,” she said, firmly. And I felt we’d had a sense of what that first Pentecost had been like, after all.