Today is Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, and we celebrate the Holy Spirit. Many people call today the birthday of the church because it is the day when the Holy Spirit came like tongues of fire to give those who were gathered together the ability to speak in many different languages. I see that we have lots of red candles alight - they can be birthday candles - and those of us who have remembered are wearing red in honour of the day.

As I was thinking about the Holy Spirit I wondered if our ideas might be too small if we restrict our understanding to one day - after all, when we look at the Bible, we find the Holy Spirit there from the beginning. genesis chapter one, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Right from the beginning of time, God is breathing the spirit of life into the universe, for the Holy Spirit, the wind of God, God's breath, is what brings all things into existence and give them life. In the psalm today we sang of the creatures of the great oceans, saying to God, "When you send forth your spirit they are created and you renew the face of the earth." and in psalm 33 it is written, "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and the numberless stars by the breath of his mouth." also, John records that Jesus breathed on his disciples and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit."

The Holy Spirit is the breath of God and the life of all that is; so we should be rejoicing not just on Pentecost, but every day of our lives.

This does not mean that we should ignore Pentecost, far from it. At Pentecost we recognise that the Holy Spirit fills the Church with life. Without the Holy Spirit, the Church is dead. All true life, all good gifts come from God, so if we want to live truly and to receive the good gifts of God, then we need to be open to God's Holy Spirit.

St Paul reminds the Corinthian church that they need the Holy Spirit - they cannot even be Christians without the Holy Spirit, the moment they open their lips to say, "Jesus is Lord." it is the Holy Spirit at work in them. Not only that, the Holy Spirit inspires all the gifts and services and activities which are for the common good. Paul lists nine gifts here, wisdom and knowledge and faith, healing and miracles and prophecy, discernment, speaking in tongues and the interpretation of tongues. Of course this is not all the gifts that are given, The hymn we began with referred to the seven-fold gifts of the spirit - that is not right either, God's gifts, like God's mercies, never come to an end. So it is utterly right that on this day of Pentecost we should celebrate the Holy Spirit at work in us and in the church, and pray that we may show in our lives the gifts of the Spirit.

I could finish here, but it is important to understand that by opening our hearts to God's Holy Spirit, we will almost certainly find that God will disturb and trouble us as well as bringing comfort and peace. Jesus promised that those who love him would receive a comforter, an advocate, someone who would stand by them and speak to God on their behalf. But this same Holy Spirit is like the wind, says Jesus, blowing where it will. It blows the dust of our lives about, disturbing us, making us restless. We are like little boats floating on the surface of the water over which the wind of the Spirit is blowing. It tugs at our moorings, ruffles our sails and threatens to carry us away from where we are.

And this is another reason that the church celebrates the Holy Spirit. It is worth celebrating the very fact that the Holy Spirit searches out our inmost thoughts and makes us question all that we thought was fixed. The Holy Spirit makes us look at our prejudices and the assumptions we make. The Holy Spirit makes us look at the way we do things and the things that we do. The Holy Spirit makes us ask, what is life-giving in what we do? How do our actions build each other up, are our actions for the good of all?

Above all, the Holy Spirit asks us, "Is this loving?" St Paul, in his letter to the Corinthian Church, lists some of the gifts of the spirit in chapter 12, as we have heard today, but at the end of the chapter he says, "These are all great gifts and we should be glad to use them, but there is a more excellent way." and he goes on to describe love as the perfect, enduring gift of the Spirit, which never ends. When all the other gifts of the Spirit are gone, love endures; and love becomes the test of all our actions.

This frightens some people because neither the Holy Spirit nor Love is easy to measure or to control. There is a freedom in Christ which some people cannot deal with, so they try to turn the gospel into rules and regulations. They refuse to allow the Spirit to question their prejudices and assumptions; they are frightened to risk being wrong. They demand a rigid certainty which the Holy Spirit will not allow.

I believe that if we, the church, are to be true to our calling, we need to learn to trust the Holy Spirit, to be attentive to what is happening in the world, to question always where justice and mercy are and to be aware of the leading of the Spirit. God's spirit gives life to every aspect of our lives and we have many choices. It is important to test the ideas before us, committing them to thought and prayer. Discernment and wisdom are needed, but God has given us many different gifts through the Holy Spirit. Let us then respect and honour them, listening to each other and building each other up, always seeking to do what is loving to one another and to all.