RAVENSTHORPE  Whit Sunday 2004
When I sing hymns I often find myself, perhaps you do too, paying more attention to the sound of my voice and following the music that I do to the meaning of the words that I am attempting to sing.   Too much attention, one might say. to musical form and not enough to spiritual substance.
Yet through both their words and their music, in equal proportion, hymns are there to inspire us.
 
Now, Pentecost is the time for inspiration.   Everyone needs that inspiration from time to time, whatever their beliefs. Without it we would be very dull creatures.  As our gospel reading for to-day says “ Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams” 
The results of the  inspiration of  the Christian faith are all around us in, for example,  the great cathedrals  and churches of Europe, in much of  the art that fills our galleries, and  our music and  in the lives of the founders  the great social movements that our country has given to the world : William  Wilberforce and the Anti-Slavery Society;  George Williams and the YMCA;  William Booth and the Salvation Army;  Robert Baden-Powell and the Scout Movement; Peter Benenson of Amnesty International ; Gilbert Murray and Oxfam.. 
We gathered here in Ravensthorpe this morning  may not all have the talents to rise to inspiration  like those men, to compose like Handel  or Stamford,  paint like  Rembrant or Caraveggio,  BUT we can be inspired by example to try to better the world in which we live, according to Christian principles because
“Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime and in passing leave 
behind us footsteps in the sand of time”  
“Your young mern shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.”  In what has come to be regarded as one of the greatest  speeches of the Twentieth Century,  Martin Luther King described his inspiration on that sweltering August day in 1963 in Washington
“ I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. “
The hymn I have chosen asks God for that inspiration   “Come thou holy spirit come… and shed a ray of light divine. ….”  The author  is Stephen Langton one of the greatest figures of Mediaeval England, theologian, historian, Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who was present at Runnymede when John sealed the Magna Carta – another great British contribution to the betterment of the human condition. A visionary if ever there was one. 
So, as we sing Hymn 92, let’s think how, we can with inspiration from the Holy Spirit, lead more fulfilled lives and leave, each of us, our  footsteps in those sands of time. 
