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When the spirit of truth comes,
he will guide you into all truth.
John 16:13

Anniversaries are very special occasions in our lives. They remind us of the original event which we are celebrating and enable us to recapture something of its excitement and promise. But anniversaries also remind us of how much time has elapsed between then and now, and how much things may have changed. Finally, anniversaries may be bitter-sweet occasions, if the original hopes and expectations have not been fulfilled.

Today, Pentecost, is the anniversary of the beginning of the Christian church, that day, on the Jewish Feast of Weeks following Jesus' death, when Peter proclaimed to a Jewish crowd in Jerusalem that Jesus, whom they had killed by the hands of the Romans, had been raised up by God and had sent forth his spirit as proof of his presence at God's right hand (Acts 2:22-24.33).

In those first heady days, even before Paul's conversion, Christianity was a brand-new religious movement, with unbounded confidence in its mission. Its competition came from Judaism, the mother faith which the Christian missionaries thought they were replacing, and a tired, cynical paganism which no one seriously believed in but which was kept alive for reasons of state.

Today how vastly the picture has changed! Now we are an old religion. Our principal competitor, world-wide, is the third Abrahamic faith of Islam, whose missionary zeal reminds us of our youthful ambitions, whose theology seems simpler than our Trinitarian faith, and whose profession of equality, at least among males, makes it attractive to many developing nations. On the other hand, we are confronted, closer to home, with an array of new religious movements whose strict discipline and social cohesiveness suggest comparisons with the early Christian church.

What is our role in these altered circumstances? Are we to learn to grow old gracefully, leaving the hustle of convert-making to other, more vigorous, faiths? Should we put our religious symbols at the service of social and political movements which still retain the dynamism which we have lost? Or may we hope for a new Pentecost, when God's spirit will be poured out again upon all flesh, when our sons and daughters shall prophesy, our young men shall see visions, and our old men shall dream dreams (cf. Acts 2:17)?

The answer, of course, depends not on us but on God. However, for us to respond to a new outpouring of God's spirit, we need to reflect on what brought us into this covenant in the first place. In an article entitled Standing by Words Wendell Berry observes that for perhaps about one hundred and fifty years there has been a gradual increase in language which is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. He believes that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.

How it is with our Christian language? Do we know what we mean, and do we mean what we say? Some years ago I presented a paper to a group of Anglican theologians meeting here in Toronto in which I surveyed the various meanings that word "gospel" has acquired in recent theology. There is a danger, I think, when a word which is so central to our faith is used in so many different ways. The danger is that it beomes a "shibboleth" (cf. Judges 12:6), which the dictionary defines as "a use of language that acts as a test of belonging to, or as a stumbling block to becoming, a member of a particular group."

The Feast of Pentecost commemorates not only the descent of the spirit but also a remarkable miracle, in which Jews from every nation under heaven heard each other speaking, each in his own language, and everyone understood everyone else (Acts 2:1-13).

On this Pentecost let us reflect seriously on "the G word" and ask ourselves: do we understand what we are saying? For only if we do, can we hope to carry on the Christian mission in our time and place.