Pentecost, which we celebrate today, is sometimes called the birthday of the church. I’m never sure whether that’s quite right – though it was certainly the day when the church received an amazing gift. Coming, as it does, fifty days after Easter, Pentecost also marks the beginning of the church’s mission to the world.

Jerusalem was thronged with people who had come to celebrate the harvest thanksgiving festival. As the Holy Spirit settled on the disciples, the onlookers thought they were drunk. But the crowds were ‘cut to the heart’ by Peter’s stirring speech and three thousand believers were baptised and came to faith that day.

As we continue our whistle-stop tour through the New Testament, we see that the early church faced many of the same questions and challenges which we wrestle with today. Time has moved on and the culture was very different, but people are essentially the same. As the writer of Ecclesiastes observed about a thousand years earlier (Eccles 1:9) – What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

I don’t know whether that’s comforting or just plain terrifying. It certainly bears out the old adage that ‘History repeats itself. Has to. No-one listens.’

The crowds who thronged Jerusalem for the harvest thanksgiving festival may have received more than they bargained for. But we can also see that disciples and new believers alike were fired up (sorry!) to go out and share the gift they had been given.

Are we ready and willing to play our part in the history of God’s church by doing the same – receiving God’s gift and then giving it away?

“Listen, someone’s screaming in agony, fortunately I speak it fluently.” So said the late, great Spike Milligan and you’d be forgiven for wondering what on earth that has to do with the ascension!

Those who have studied languages will know that to have any hope of becoming fluent you have to immerse yourself completely in a language and live somewhere where you will speak and hear the language every day.

In Jesus, God immersed himself in humanity and experienced everything that it means to be human.  The ascension completes the incarnation. If the incarnation brought the divine to humanity, then the ascension brings humanity into the very throne-room of heaven. Jesus left his home in heaven to come to us, now he brings humanity home.

Now there is a human voice in heaven. Now God is fluent in ‘human’. God completely understands the language of the human heart; all our hopes, needs, fears and agonies. God completely understands the idioms of human nature: our strengths and our weaknesses.

Jesus brings us back to our true home with our Father and his presence beside him is a living, breathing, scar- bearing reminder of how we come to be there. With Jesus there, in heaven, I have one who ever lives and pleads for me. My name is graven on his hands; my name is written on his heart and I know that, while in heaven he stands, no tongue can bid me thence depart.