Next Sunday is observed in the Christian Calendar as Whitsunday or Pentecost. Along with Easter and Christmas, it is one of the great high days of the Christian year – though now the Whit Monday bank holiday is spring bank holiday and always comes in the half term week at the end of May, it tends to pass society by.

That may also be (if this is not too cynical a thought) because nobody has yet thought of a suitable ‘Whit present’ to rival the commercialisation of Christmas presents and Easter eggs.
The origins of the festival lie in the festival of Pentecost, 50 days after the Jewish Passover, and kept by the Church on the 50th day after Easter. It celebrates a mysterious and powerful outpouring of energy on the earliest Christian community, an event that changed lives and made the Church one of the most remarkable, outward looking and committed communities in the ancient world.
Within a few decades of the earthly life of Jesus that community was taking his message all over the Mediterranean world, and subsequently to every nation.
It is an important day for Christians to celebrate, but there is more to it than that. The energy that passed description – we hear of flames descending and mysterious tongues being spoken – had some consequences for those who received it that were utterly remarkable, and still have a meaning for our world despite the passage of time.
For the energy enabled a special kind of communication. Those who were gathered on that first Whit Sunday were from all over the world, struggling with all the difficulties of communication that we know so well.
Not only had that meant misunderstanding, but it had led to all the kinds of exclusion that we know in our time.
What that new energy did was to provide a kind of life together based on the love Jesus had brought. That meant people could communicate, understanding in their own languages the good news they were hearing. They were not deprived of their cultural distinctions; but those distinctions were no longer a barrier.
There is the energy we need to transform our world from a society of exclusion to one of belonging. Here is an energy of love that is promised to all, and which we all need to enjoy. May that new energy be there for us all.