Jesus is Lord

Pentecost Sunday (Year A) Acts 2:1-11 1 Cor. 12:3-7. 12-13 John 20:19-23 Sine tuo numine, nihil est in homine, nihil est innoxium. If thou take thy grace away, Nothing pure in man will stay; All his good is turned to ill. (Without Thy Godhead nothing can, have any price or worth in man, nothing can harmless be.)

“No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ unless he is under the influence of the Holy Spirit.”

Maybe I need to preface anything I say today with a sort of a little confession. For some strange reason my whole novena for Pentecost this year has been haunted by thoughts about language, communication and comprehensibility.

Although this year’s “Pew Survey” published a couple months back up in the United States is probably not the real reason for that concern on my part about communicating, a rather outspoken Jesuit’s commentary on this survey and a few tired old remarks about what poor preachers Catholic priests are have churned up a lot of people even here locally, as can be evidenced by Fr. Henry Charles’ articles last week and again this week in the Catholic News.

Let it be granted, and left at that, that our experience of Church today certainly represents a contrast to the account in the 2^nd chapter of the Acts of the Apostles as we just heard it read. Our lives are neither as exciting nor do they show the results the Apostles did on that Pentecost long ago.

“They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech. …’How does it happen that each of us hears them in his own native language? …we hear them preaching in our own language about the marvels of God.’”

Pentecost is a day for us to wonder and to give thanks to God for this explosion of life, this incomparable demonstration of God’s power which took place as the Church came to birth and streamed out of that Upper Room where the Apostles had been gathered in prayer with Mary the Mother of the Lord. Pentecost seals that same sending out which Jesus effected, risen from the dead, in that same Upper Room on Easter Sunday evening, as He breathed on them and said:

“Receive the Holy Spirit. For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained.”

Pentecost is optimal communication not first and foremost because of some sort of miracle of simultaneous translation and benefitting not only different people from all around the Mediterranean basin. No, Pentecost gets across what today seems to be an uncommon message “…about the marvels of God”. Be it stated that the marvels of God are not cosmic events taking place in our upper or lower stratosphere. The marvels of God are all the ways He touches our lives not theoretically, theologically or cosmically, but directly, personally.

As the Gospel says it and Jesus meant it to be, no doubt God’s greatest marvel is the power of the keys which He entrusted to priests, to His Church on this day:

 “Receive the Holy Spirit. For those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; for those whose sins you retain, they are retained.”

Pentecost Day was, yes, once upon a time, but the gift of the Spirit it announces and illustrates is for now. This is what St. Paul tells the Corinthians and us, namely about the gift of the Spirit, that which is varied, is always, and is always the same God, Who is working in all of us. A marvel indeed!

“No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ unless he is under the influence of the Holy Spirit.”

When we were small children, my two sisters and I used to do our school homework sitting at the kitchen table together. How old were we? Well, because we were all three there and all had homework that meant we had to have been 8, 9, and 11 years old. Anyway! A lady down the block with two children, the younger being a boy my age (11), asked my mother if she could send her Tommy over to do his homework with us, benefitting from the good example of the three of us at the kitchen table. Tommy wasn’t doing all that great in school. After one evening, my two younger sisters begged Mom not to let Tommy come back again as he was a distraction to them, wiggling, grinning and his head swiveling from one side to another.

For whatever reason, Tommy didn’t get it and probably never did. He’s like a lot of our world, even of our church going world. The forgiveness of sins, Love incarnate nailed to a Tree for us, none of it gets certain folk to stop fidgeting. Perhaps that was the real miracle of communication in Jerusalem that day, the noise of the powerful wind from heaven coming from that Upper Room gathered that crowd and they listened as these Spirit-filled men spoke about the marvels of God. I can be as polished, as clever and talented as could be, but it is the Holy Spirit Who touches hearts and lives; it is the Holy Spirit Who transforms.

Saturday morning in Arouca I was at the celebration of Pentecost which the Holy Ghost Fathers hold annually on the Vigil and use to commemorate all of the jubilees of their men. This year there was one 60 years of priestly ordination and one 60 years of religious vows, two 50 years of priesthood and one 50 years of religious profession! Father Anthony de Verteuil preached and spoke of the various ministries he and his fellow jubilarians had carried out as priests over all these many, many years. As he described each ministry singly, whether it was hearing confessions or celebrating Mass or teaching, he would pause and then say: “Thank you, Holy Spirit!”

“No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ unless he is under the influence of the Holy Spirit.”

Our world and all its fidgety Tommies needs to know Jesus and His Church, needs to know Jesus as Lord, needs to know what is really great or marvelous about life as we realize day in and day out the real reason for which we were created, made for God and Him alone, not fidgety but restless as St. Augustine said until our hearts rest in Him.

When we pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit we pray for a very special gift of comprehension or communication. It goes well beyond statistics or forms to a real and loving interpersonal exchange with God Himself. Please grant us this, O Lord, we pray.

Light immortal, light divine,

Visit thou these hearts of thine,

And our inmost being fill:

If thou take thy grace away,

Nothing pure in man will stay;

All his good is turned to ill.

Life in Hope

Pentecost Sunday
11 May 2008

“Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of persons ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be kindled and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire! But according to his promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” (2 Peter 3:11-13, RSV-CE)

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI… I heard a very fine Pentecost homily at the annual jubilee Mass of the local province of the Holy Ghost Fathers. The homilist also alluded to the above quoted text from the Second Letter of Peter, touching me in a very particular way, because this is the Scripture quote which stands behind and explains my Episcopal motto. Father’s allusion was drawn from a reflection he offered to the festive assembly on the nature of hope from the Holy Father’s Encyclical Letter Spe salvi.

WAITING FOR AND HASTENING THE COMING OF THE DAY OF GOD … Going beyond striving to live a holy and godly life and thereby contributing to shortening the time of God’s forbearance, lest “any should perish” and “all should reach repentance”, was certainly something that caught my attention when I picked my motto from this passage. I looked at it first and foremost from the point of view of cooperating with God’s grace. Father’s Pentecost homily this year hit me at an opportune moment and helped me to tighten and thereby light another bulb on that Christmas tree of my understanding of these words from Holy Scripture. He helped me better illuminate for my own understanding the aspect of hope involved in St. Peter’s call for zeal.

If you think about it, trying to hasten the day when “the elements will melt with fire” as an effort tied to genuine hope is a notion which needs some head work. Hoping for the establishment of God’s rule is not an instinctive yearning, like longing to be free from unjust constraints and respected by one’s peers. Eagerly awaiting new heavens and a new earth from God is an intelligent choice subsequent to our encounter with the Truth, with the Light and Life of the world. Godless men and women of good will and even non-Christians sadly content themselves with much less. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind about the difference which Jesus Christ makes. We need only reflect for a moment about the back and forth we find in the Gospels between Jesus and His adversaries, and even between Jesus and His disciples or would-be disciples. Not everyone expected as revealed in the Person of Jesus the Messiah, the Anointed One, the Christ Who was to come into our world! The history of Creeds and Councils helps us understand something of the struggle to preserve the fullness of that faith over the centuries.

PROPERANTES ADVENTUM DIEI DEI… Is it really more than a longing for the establishment of righteousness? Most certainly! The violent wind which was heard to blow in the Upper Room on that first Pentecost, those tongues of fire which settled upon the disciples gathered there with Mary, the Mother of God, in prayer, were certainly for them and for all who witnessed that event the foretaste and promise of the world to come. On that day, everything melted away in fire and hope’s object in faith may not have been seen but was certainly witnessed from afar. This was not only the birthday of the Church, but in a very real sense the Church’s Transfiguration, meant to strengthen the baptized for the scandal of the share in the Cross which would be ours, to make up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ.

Freedom’s nature and dignity certainly does not allow us to victoriously establish God’s reign by imposing it on the lives of others. As transformed through our share in the prayer and suffering of Christ and His Church, we stand eagerly on the threshold of Judgment and Eternal Life. It is enough. Holiness and godliness will draw others to the Day as nothing else can. The light on the lamp stand, the city on the mountain top cannot be hidden.

Sometimes we hesitate, terrified or at least stymied by the darkness which seems to have devoured us and to have claimed the victory. The Lord Jesus’ temptations in the desert are not always withstood so valiantly by us, His followers, as we falter in hope, while awaiting that Dawn from on High.

Pentecost: caught up into the Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity through the grace of that whirlwind Who is the Holy Spirit, we live in hope of God’s Day. It is more than enough.