My dear friends

It is a beautiful spring evening, as I write.  The bluebells are out; the robins in our hedge are giving their young their last evening feed; the rooks have been halted in their greedy devouring of our goldfish (humph! “nature red in tooth and claw” all right!) and I can feel May about to burst into view!

Browning’s favourite month was April; and indeed the sense of excitement upon seeing the first leaves on the trees that he captures in “Home thoughts from Abroad” is amazing.  But May is even more exciting.  There is nothing tentative about May.  The energy of May as everything becomes fresh and green and fragrant is just astonishing.  Moment by moment you see God’s creative power unfolding before your eyes.  As the teenagers say, it’s “awesome!”

Every time May comes around I remember a verse from Guenevere’s song in the musical Camelot:  “Hurrah! It’s May!  The lusty month of May!  That darling month when everyone throws self-control away!”

It sums up just how I feel!  May is so wonderful it just makes you want to dance and sing and do something crazy!

I’m so glad we live in this hemisphere, because here in the north, this wonderful month of energy and new life is also the time of Pentecost.  At Pentecost we remember how after the Risen Christ departed from his followers he gave them his Spirit.  And that was an astonishing gift of enormous energy, of overwhelming joy, of great love that brought people together and filled them with new hope, new purpose, new life.

When you read in the Acts of the Apostles of what happened to the first followers of Jesus, you see it was just what you would expect in the month of May.  They did utterly “throw self-control away!”  Of course they didn’t do it in precisely the terms Guenevere had in mind.  In the verse I quoted, the word “lusty” quite accurately sums up what she was thinking about.  But as the Spirit prompted those early followers, they let go of themselves and let the Spirit speak through them about a power and a love and a truth that could do amazing things. Often when we are trying to share the love of Jesus with people around us we get so self-conscious that we get tied up in knots.  We can speak so haltingly and cautiously that we appear uncertain or unconvinced of the truth of our experience.  But if we will just “throw self-control away” the Spirit will speak for us and make the hearts of our hearers ready to hear us.  If we let the Spirit speak through us, simply, earnestly and lovingly, those who hear will want to know more; and then the truth of the love of Jesus, which is irresistible, will be able to do its mighty work.

The first Christian sermon ever was delivered on the day of Pentecost by Peter, the man who out of fear and cowardice had denied our Lord, three times.  Can you imagine a person more self-conscious than he must have been?  No one had ever preached about Jesus before; what should he say?  Many of his listeners knew what a coward he had been; what would they think?  The centurions and the chief priests - who had crucified Jesus - were all over the place; would they hear and arrest him?  If ever there was a time for a bit of circumspection and that “better part of valour”, the day of Pentecost was it!  And what did Peter do?  The opposite: he threw self control away and let the Spirit take control.

We often speak of the Holy Spirit as a “gift to the church”.  Wrong.  It is not a gift to the church.  It is the church; without the Spirit there would be no church.  The church was born of the Spirit; it was born when Peter and the other followers of Jesus threw self control away and let the Spirit take control of all they thought and said and did.  And hurrah!  What a wonderful energy was unleashed.

In May, at Pentecost, we are reminded that this is what God wants of us too. He wants us to throw over all our self-consciousness and only be God-conscious. He wants us not to be under self-control, but under His control. And in allowing God to control all we are, we will be letting the Spirit once again do the work he is longing to do.

So, Hurrah!  It’s May!  Let us truly enjoy all the breathtaking beauty of this wonderful month and all the delight of the new life in our midst.  And let us also, “throw self-control away.”  Let us allow the Spirit to control our lives; and as the Spirit controls us and speaks through us, we will know the great energy of God’s creative power and see around us the true signs of his kingdom coming, here.

May God bless you richly and greatly in the month of May!  Hurrah!

Cynthia