Pentecost Sermon -

 The Call of the Wild Goose

 

Many years ago my husband Robin won a goose as a raffle prize, he brought it home, it was a wild goose so it had been shot, to pluck and draw, pheasants are one thing but this goose was both messy and smelly, and it wasn’t much of a prize because the thing was so scrawny when didn’t know what to do with it, let alone eat it, but we didn’t want to throw it away so we put it in the freezer and forgot about it, until several years later when we finally got rid of it as an unwanted inconvenience.

So when at the CMD conference on zoom  last Friday for Lay readers and Clergy our Bishop said that he preferred the Wild Goose as a symbol of the Holy Spirit as opposed to a dove, because Geese are messy, noisy and inconvenient. I remembered that encounter with a very inconvenient goose and thought hoe appropriate for the feast of Pentecost, because for most of us Christians how Robin and I treated that goose really is a parable for how we seem to treat the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

As I said in my June reflection ‘The Holy Spirit came not to a building but to people’ it came to the disciples huddled together ‘in one place’ and it came as a ‘rush of violent wind’ and  as ‘tongues of fire’, it completely overwhelmed them made them appear drunk, it was noisy, dangerous and inconvenient and it changed them utterly, it moved them, it called them insistently onwards. earth. And like the wild goose it was dangerous.

In ancient Celtic spiritual tradition, ”Chasing the Wild Goose” was a symbol for seeking to go in the way the Spirit of God calls us to go, and if  you “chase a wild goose” you don’t really know where you are going to end up and neither did the disciples.

Moving with the Spirit of God can sometimes be like that, Jesus, in fact, used the image of the wind to make this same point. “The wind blows where it will: you do not know where it comes from, or where it is going.” There is a sense in which, when we are captivated by God, there is that dangerous element to it. There is that risk; there is that excitement; and the image of the wild goose as a symbol of the Holy Spirit leaves us in no doubt that we cannot domesticate the Spirit  of God in our prevailing Western culture, the will of the individual is supreme. So God is becoming confined to smaller and smaller boxes, domesticated, crammed into a shape and size that seeks to place God at our disposal but the mere fact that the Spirit comes at Pentecost and comes not gently but like the wild geese, uncontrollable, uncontained and untamed,  ,strange, unexpected,  and unpredictable  to rest on the disciples means that God’s Spirit rests within people, comes to us if we will only accept it, and it calls to us as raucous, loud, passionate  and as insistently as the wild geese, and it call us all (not just you and me) but Christians everywhere to remember, remember that day, Pentecost in Jerusalem, where the wild untamed Spirit of God scattered the disciples and sent them to the ends of the earth.

And what about us, can we follow the call of the spirit, the call of the wild goose into the unknown land we inhabit in these days of change and challenge

 Can we allow the wild spirit to break free and to take  us to places we know not where, for the sake of God and for the sake of the world, and ultimately for our own sake. As we will sing later:

God’s lamplighting Spirit

Is dancing the way,

From dark into dawning,

From night into day.

Can we follow, can we dance along with the Spirit, can we be led by the spirit, by the call of the wild geese as they fly to  experience the grace and purpose of Pentecost? Amen

With thanks to Rt Revd Ian Paton, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane, & Rt Revd Karen Gorham, Bishop of Sherborne, whose reflections set me off on this training of thought.