Sunday 24 May 2026 | The Rev’d Clare Barrie
Based on Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, John 7:37-39
May I speak in the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life. Amen.
+ + + +
“On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”
– John 7:37-38
Of all the ways Christians speak about God, the Holy Spirit is perhaps the most elusive and difficult to describe.
And perhaps trying too hard to “make sense of” the work of the Holy Spirit is where we fall into a trap. It can’t be made sense of – rather, we need to live into it, let it come to life within us, overflow us. And that is not necessarily a safe or comfortable thing to pray for. The first Pentecost was not calm or tidy or carefully controlled – it was noisy, overwhelming, disruptive, and full of passionate energy.
A few years ago at our diocesan ministry conference, the wonderful author Martin Smith spoke about how he came to a new understanding of Jesus’ words in John’s gospel which we heard this morning – and I think I’ve shared his story once before, but it bears retelling. He’s also written about this experience in his book, A Season for the Spirit. (I also had the immense joy of taking a course on spiritual formation with Martin on one of my study trips to Sewanee – just a profound experience of faith and humanity and challenge and good humour.)
Martin told us about an experience early in his life when he decided he would set off into the countryside one summer holiday, and find a certain ancient Roman well that other archeological explorers had failed to find. Full of confidence, he spent a fruitless day in the hot sun, searching about in the fields where the well was thought to have been.
And in the late afternoon, he suddenly realised that the one place he’d avoided was a boggy, stinking patch of mud, covered with cows and the – er – mess that cows leave behind. Finally, Martin waded into the bog and began to dig about in the stinking mess with his shovel. And before long, he found it – fresh, clear water that had been springing up under that patch of earth for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Martin came to realise that this powerful image offered a way to understand what Jesus meant when he said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” A better way to translate this verse would be, out of our bellies, our gut, shall flow living waters.
The Greek word here which we most often translate as ‘heart’ is in fact a word closer in meaning to viscera, or belly, or womb. Just like the stinking mud and cows covering the ancient spring, ‘the home of the Spirit,’ says Smith ‘is not in a refined interior sanctum of spirituality, but in the guts, the deep core where our passions have their spring, the place of conflict, confusion, vulnerability, and desire.’2
Here is where the Spirit dwells. Here is where the core of human identity and emotion lies in the ancient world; and therefore, here is where God is to be met, and here is where the Spirit rises. So you can’t avert your gaze from this muddy mess, and try to find the Spirit in some other more lovely, holy place – you will fail. The Spirit is already there, within your real self; the task of Christian faith is not to be ‘better’ or ‘other’ than we are, but always to start where we are and grow and deepen.
Martin went on to talk about how people often come to him with the question, but how can this be when I am so broken/sinful/messed up. In short, when I am not a good disciple…(this can’t be true of me). He believes that so many of us (and this resonated with me) are formed in an environment where we internalise this self-understanding, rather than the notion that as a mundane human being, we are sacred. And perhaps many of us feel this even more sharply now – under the loud pressures of our media-saturated world, we carry anxiety, exhaustion, loneliness, and the quiet feeling that we’re somehow failing at being human.
Let me say that again: as mundane human beings, we are all of us sacred.
Not after we become perfect; not once we have ourselves all sorted out spiritually. Not once we become calm or wise or have ourselves together. But now – in the middle of our ordinary, complicated lives.
And here is where we come back to Peter, rising boldly to his feet to preach on that first Pentecost – imagine that, for a moment. Here was the man who in weakness and fear, had denied Jesus three times. And the risen Christ had met him there – in his denial, and mess, and confusion, and struggle – and called him and given him a new name.
So Peter, of all people, was the one who knew how to speak to the broken world and the broken people around him. He knew how to connect, and how to relate, and how to offer forgiveness and grace; he knew how to speak honestly to wounded and frightened people because he knew his own weakness – and that was the broken, messy ground where he met Christ, and out of which living water flowed.
One of my other favourite writers, Rowan Williams, puts it another way. “…those who receive the Spirit, from them something overflows, creating in that overflow not only the community that is the church, but creating wherever it goes moments of understanding, of shared sense, moments when without realizing it we speak in a way that makes sense to someone else, we make a bridge into the loneliness of someone else. From this celebration of the Spirit…it is for us…. to go and create community wherever we are, to make a bridge into the meaninglessness and the darkness of other lives, because our own lives have been broken open by God, in joy and in grief.”
It is with that sense of the Holy Spirit overflowing in each of our hearts like living water, that we will extinguish the Paschal candle at the end of this service, the candle that has been lit at all our services during the Easter season. Pentecost celebrates the fact that the presence of the risen Christ is now with and within each of us, living and breathing, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, and we carry that overflowing Spirit of life and light with us everywhere we go.
Pentecost isn’t the end of the Easter story, but the beginning of the Church’s life – the beginning of ordinary people like us, filled with the Spirit, becoming signs of God’s love in the world.
Amen.
1. http://web.stpeters.org.au/views/sermons/other/RW02pentecost.shtml ++Rowan Williams, Pentecost, St Peter’s Eastern Hill Melbourne, May 2002.