Pentecost and Science
Nicola Hoggard Creegan
A sermon given at Cityside Baptist May 21 2026
ACTS 2
Come, Holy Spirit,Fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your
We have heard this passage in Acts so often that we take it for granted. A great wind. Flames, and the rush of voices. No, they weren’t drunk, they were just drunk on the Holy Spirit.
And at times and places in history, people have read this and said to God, we want this too. Sometimes ordinary life seems so ordinary compared to this filling with the Spirit.
And at times revival has come, dramatically, even recently, but it fades, and the experience fades. We have to get used to living in ordinary time and to seeing the Spirit of God in the ordinary. Not just the extraordinary, though with the proviso that we should always be open to something more extraordinary when the Spirit wills. Perhaps even actively longing for it. For the time when:
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
While studying theology in Massachusetts, I was very taken with learning about the power of the Great Awakening in New England in the 18th century under Jonathan Edwards, and I loved hearing about the Shaker revival in the 19thcentury. Later, I even visited the Toronto Airport Church during a revival. I heard speaking in tongues that sounded like angels, and saw other things. But really, these are special events, very much like those we read about today.
And the disciples who were so blessed and so taken by God at the birthday of the Church went on very often to lead lives that were difficult and ended in martyrdom.
But they were transformed, and they did live as though nothing else mattered. Interestingly, just being with Jesus didn’t do that. It took the Spirit empowering them from within.
Their fervour and certainty compare very often with the reality of our lives and the disappointments that can stack up year after year, the unfulfilled hopes and plans, so that instead of being full of Spirit, we can become quite dispirited.
We might wonder, where does this astonishing power go in between the great highs. Are we meant to just recite this extraordinary event, and be reconciled to ordinary life?
I do think that the Spirit does not always turn up in such a showy way. Sometimes the Spirit comes with a whisper.
I grew up in a very Roman Catholic church and school. I really got religion. I got God. I got a God who was the scary part of the Bible. The one who was also a threat.
And when I think about why on earth I would still be a Christian (sometimes I feel I have to apologise for this), the answer has to be the testimony of the Spirit drawing me towards something bigger, towards the holy, the good, the beautiful.
Rather than the loud dramatic noise and tongues of today’s readings there is just the conviction that God is there and that this makes a difference to everything.
And that must be true of all of us in some way, that we are here, not because Jesus lived 2000 years ago as a fact, but because he still lives, and incarnation is still working its magic, and Jesus has sent the Spirit to comfort and convict us.
But the great insight of the present age is that the Spirit is more than that, more than the one who draws us into the Church and nurtures the Church. One day in my intense Catholic childhood I overheard my parents listening to a radio program on Teilhard De Chardin, and I suddenly got evolution. I got that God is the God of life, and of matter.
Chardin, a French Jesuit who spent much of his life in China, believed that the energy of God was love and was forming all of life and evolution in a hidden way, into an omega point in the cosmic Christ. Evolution was not just a series, a progression of creatures blindly leading from one to another, it was not just a series of causes, mutations or whatever, it was also being drawn into the future from ahead. Evolution does, of course, have causes and motion and mutations, and jumping genes that propel it forward, but more importantly, it was being driven from beyond…by the incarnate Christ, by Spirit.
That was quite a revelation for me. It gave me hope. I think we need these big ideas, these ideas of God that transcend us and promise to fulfil all our efforts and work and love. Ideas as big as the Spirit of God.
My revelation was also inconvenient. So much of the church is still opposed to evolution, and still thinks of it as some sort of conspiracy to deny God. Teilhard shows us that the opposite is true. If we have a vision of God as embracing the Spirit, evolution is a part of the greatness of God. Instead of a threat, evolution is a great gift.
And we live in extraordinary times. Not only because of the dangers, and the political and environmental recklessness we see everywhere, but because for the first time in history we have a glimpse of how we came to be, and of the grand story of evolution. We can see the breath of God, the spirit of God at work. Genesis filled out in more detail. This gives us a fresh view of our own existence, but also allows us to see that for most of evolutionary history, there were no humans, no thinking creatures. How extraordinary is that, and how extraordinary that we have evolved. We also have glimpses through the amazing telescopes of the universe beyond and of a world, if anything, more wondrous than any biblical story. And this is the Spirit’s world too. We live on the edge of a spiral galaxy with a really good view of the heavens.
We have, for the first time in history, a glimpse of how interconnected we are with God’s Spirit, with one another, and with every form of life. The same spirit that breathed into us also breathed into all life forms and all matter. Teilhard saw matter becoming conscious. And becoming conscious in the power of the love of God. He called this cosmogenesis.
The coming of the Spirit shook the early church. Suddenly they realized that they were a part of something huge. We also get that sense when we look back at evolutionary history and what Darwin called its grandeur. That grandeur gives us a sense of the holy and of how important it is that we find a way through our present difficulties. And some of you will have heard the story of the commander of the Artemis mission, Reid Wiseman, who had a religious experience when he saw the Earth emerging from the Moon’s shadow, and requested religious counsel. He, too, had, as it were, been shaken by the Spirit.
.
Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit and a paleontologist, spending long years in exile in China sifting through bones, and meditating on the rise of humanity. It was there at the very edges of the Christian church, really in exile, that he wrote and developed this remarkable vision of God working through Spirit and matter to draw the whole creation to an omega point in the risen Christ. His work at the time was under a ban from the Vatican. It was not published until he died on Easter Sunday, 1955. It has since transformed the RC church. And influenced almost everyone who interacts with science.
His work inspired the second Vatican council called by pope john 23rdin 1962. John prayed that the spirit would move through the churches and after that the charismatic revival was born, first in catholic churches and then moving out from there to other churches. Teilhard’s work has quietly influenced Pope Francis and his Laudato si’. It is behind the Richard Rohr’s Cosmic Christ who will be known to many of you.
When we think of the Spirit, we often think of the endless theological debates in the Church since the beginning. Was the Spirit equal to the Father and the Son, did the Spirit proceed from the Father or the Father and the Son? Do, we need two baptisms, or just one? These are the debates that colour a theological education, and many of you may have delved into these long theological arguments. But in many ways they are quite contrary to the hugeness of the spirit and the Spirit as the one who touches all matter with love and breathes into all life.
So for us, often feeling quite dispirited, and living in these dangerous and reckless times, Pentecost is a reminder that the Spirit of God is still with us, still completing our work, still deeply embracing the universe with love, still drawing all life into the future.
Humans are going to need the Holy Spirit just as the Church needed the Spirit to grow. We can’t do the work of climate mitigation and peace-making alone.
When we think of life as all arriving by a colossal random fluke, we also then think that anything that gets done will all be us. When we see the Spirit of God in creation and in all creativity we know that humans are needed, but that all work is co-creation with God.
So when we wonder where the Spirit is, she comes to our hearts and our churches and we can long for the times that Joel and Acts speak about. We can wonder what a new ecologically focused revival would look like. But at all times we can be certain of the wairua tapu who is propelling all life and matter into the future, and is creating and co-creating with us a future. We are part of a larger story.
So we can still pray
Send forth your Spirit and renew the face of the earth.
IMAGE:Photo by Mandy Henry on Unsplash
