"COME HOLY SPIRIT."

Pentecost, Year A.  Acts 2:1-11. Gal. 5:16-25.

AIM: To help the hearers grasp the meaning of the Pentecost event for our lives.

 

          One bright Sunday morning Jason decided that he would sleep in. His mother was indignant. So, she did what mothers do best. Storming into his bedroom, she said: “Jason, it’s Sunday. Time to get up! Time to go to church!”

          “I don’t want to go,” Jason mumbled from under the covers. 

          “What do you mean you don’t want to go?” his mother retorted.  “You can’t stay home. Now get up and get dressed.”

          Roused now from his slumber, Jason sat up and said: “I’m not going. And I’ll give you two reasons why. First, I don’t like the people at church. And second, they don’t like me.”

          “That’s ridiculous,” his mother replied. “I’ll give you two reasons why you’ve got to go. First, you’re forty years old. And second, you’re the Pastor.”

          Jason was not too different from Jesus’ apostles after the Ascension. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus told them on that occasion, “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt.28: 19f). We heard those words in last Sunday’s gospel. Once Jesus left, however, they found that they had little appetite for baptizing people or making disciples. They knew their fellow Jews disliked them – and their message. Like Jason, the apostles preferred to remain in their beds, under the covers, rather than getting up and facing a hostile society.

          Aren’t we often like that? We go to church quietly. We receive Jesus into our hearts quietly, listening to his holy Word and receiving his body and blood in

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Communion. We go home quietly to say our morning and evening prayers quietly.    Here’s someone who confesses lying. Asked about the lie, the person says: “When I was leaving to come here, a friend asked where I was going. I was embarrassed to say I was going to confession. So, I said I was going to the mall.”  No big deal, you say? What do you suppose Jesus would say about that lie? Well, here is what he actually did say: “Whoever will acknowledge me before men, I will acknowledge him before my Father in heaven; and whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven” (Mt. 10:32; cf. Lk. 12:8).

          Many of us have a me-and-God religion. Jesus asks for more. Jesus wants us to be his witnesses in an often-hostile world. That’s difficult — and scary. If we’re too open, and too public about our faith, people may turn their backs on us. They may call us out of touch, old fashioned, hopelessly unrealistic. They say that about us already when we call abortion not the liberation of women, but a terrible exploitation of women by selfish, irresponsible men. And that is just the beginning of society’s hostility to those who try to witness to the message and truth of Jesus Christ. Like Jason, we’d rather stay home. They don’t like us, and we don’t like them.

             Fortunately, Jason had a mother who woke him and sent him out to do what he had been commissioned to do when he was ordained: to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. The one who did that for Jesus’ frightened and reluctant apostles was the Holy Spirit. He came to them on this day with “a noise like a strong driving wind,” and in “tongues as of fire.” That fire warmed their cold hearts. That wind gave them courage to speak in different languages the message Jesus had entrusted to them — a preview of his Church’s work down through history. 

           Friends, that fire is still burning. That we are Catholic Christians in a continent undreamed of by anyone in Jerusalem on the first Pentecost is proof that the fire kindled then was not lit in vain. “I have come to set fire to the earth,” Jesus says, “and how I wish it were already kindled” (Lk 12:49). It is our task to pass on the flame to others, so that they may catch a spark from the fire of God’s love burning within us. Christianity, it has been said, cannot be taught. It must be caught. 

          As fire burns it gives light. We are called to be prisms or lenses of God’s light, so that it may shine in a dark world. The inner quality of our lives is determining, right now, the brightness, or the darkness, of that part of the world in which God’s providence has placed us. St. Paul tells us what this means in characteristically memorable words. “Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you, inspiring both the will and the deed, for his chosen purpose. Do all you have to do without complaining or wrangling.  Show yourselves guileless and above reproach, faultless children of God in a warped and crooked generation, in which you shine like stars in a dark world, and proffer the word of life.” (Phil. 2:12-16)  

          What is the message we have to proclaim? It is very simple, really. We are to proclaim, by the quality of our lives, and by words if necessary, that God is — that he is real. That he is a God of love, who loves each one of us as if, in the whole universe, there were only one person to love; and that he looks for our loving response to his love. We are called to be witnesses to the existence of a world beyond this one: the unseen, spiritual but utterly real world of God, of the angels, of the saints; the dwelling place of our beloved dead — our true homeland, as Paul reminds when he writes, “we have our citizenship in heaven” (Phil 3:20).               
         Does any of that come through in your life? Is the Spirit’s wind blowing in your life? Is his divine fire burning in your heart? If you were arrested tonight for being a Catholic Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you? And if mere physical presence at Sunday Mass were not enough for conviction, would there be enough evidence then?

          The same wind which first blew in Jerusalem on this day 2000 years ago is still blowing today. At the beginning of Lent last year, a young man I had never seen started attending the Mass I celebrate five mornings a week at 6.30. At Communion he came forward to arms crossed over his chest to receive a blessing. When this had happened three times, I thought: I’m going to hear from that young man. Two days later he rang the rectory doorbell and asked for Fr. Hughes. “I’ve been expecting your visit,” I told him. “Now tell me your story.”

          His name was Charlie. He had graduated the year before from an elite university. With a vague Protestant background, he had more or less abandoned religious belief in college. “My mind has been richly nourished,” he told me, “but my soul is starved. I’m thinking about becoming a Catholic.” We started to meet two and three times a week. I soon saw in him a spiritual hunger deeper than any I had encountered in 56 years of priesthood. “Charlie”, I told him, “I think God is calling you to priesthood. You’re so hungry that you won’t be satisfied with anything less. But you have to become a Catholic first.”

          He was received into the Church at Easter last year. By that time, he had become involved with a girl, not a Catholic. “Charlie,” I told him, “if you have found someone you love, and who loves you, that is beautiful. Love is a gift from God.” Not six months later, however, he told the girl he wanted to be “just friends.” She had seen this coming, she told him. “The only time in the last two weeks that I have been happy, Charlie, is when I thought of you as a priest.” At Easter this year that young woman was herself received in to the Catholic Church. Charlie is now in seminary.

          Is the wind that blew those two young people into the Catholic Church, and which even now is blowing Charlie to priesthood, blowing in your life? Or are you afraid of that wind – of what it might do to you, and where it might blow you? Cast aside fear. The wind of God’s Spirit, like the winds of the sky, blows from different directions. But in the end this wind blows all who are driven by it to the same place. The wind of God Spirit blows us home – home to God.