The great truth of Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit has the power to enlarge and expand the human heart.

 

PENTECOST  2023

 

On this Feast of Pentecost, we come with grateful hearts always giving thanks to the Lord our God for Father Bob as we celebrate his 95^th birthday and celebrate my 55^th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. What both Fr Bob and I are both well aware of; it is not our skill or talents that energizes; it is the grace of God working through us. It is the grace of Pentecost, the spirit of Christ Jesus, that energizes our unending desire to minister in the service of our faith communities.

We come with an attitude of gratitude, having no desire to retire. Rather, we have the desire to serve. We discover the love of God best when we seek to minister in the name of Jesus.

Today’s Gospel describes the three gifts that define the priestly ministry of Father Bob and I, and further they are three gifts from God that are to characterize our faith communities.

The first gift comes from the first words of the Risen Jesus to his disciples: “Peace be with you.”  The first message of the resurrection is peace. To disciples who were fearful and kept behind locked doors as their leader had been tortured and crucified, Jesus comes and says, “Peace. Everything is OK.”  The message of the Resurrection is that no matter what happens to us, the Father will not let defeat and death be the end. He will raise us up just as he raised Jesus from defeat to victory.

The Peace of the Lord for Fr Bob and myself has been an inner resource, the spirit of Christ that is within us that defines our faith and our discipleship that the Lord accompanies us in all circumstances and thus there is nothing to fear.

But this peace is not a peace of stillness; it is not a peace of sleep. Immediately after wishing the disciples peace, Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

Peace is the first gift of the Resurrection, but mission is the second. Jesus gives the disciples and us a mission: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

We have the same mission today as Jesus had from His Father, to spread the good news of the Father’s love, of the Father’s compassion and mercy. Our mission, like that of Jesus, is to help establish the kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice, of peace and of love.

Even after many years of priestly between us, even though we could have retired some years ago, simply put, Fr Bob and I were ordained to carry on the mission that was given to Jesus and to all of us as the disciples of Jesus. Our mission continues to spread the good news of the Father’s love, compassion, and mercy.

The third gift of the Resurrection is the Spirit. Jesus breathes on the disciples and says: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  In John’s Gospel, we do not to wait for Pentecost. The Spirit is given on Easter Sunday.

 It is the Holy Spirit that gives us courage to take up the mission of Jesus. It is the Holy Spirit that transforms us into the Body of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit that inspires us with love for all our brothers and sisters. It is the Holy Spirit that gives us the power to forgive each other’s sins.

We see how the growth of the Church took place with the influence of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles. The Book of Acts is the story of the incredible growth of the first Christian communities. The Acts of the Apostles is kind of like a Gospel of the Holy Spirit. In the first four books of the New Testament, we learn the Good News of what God did through Jesus Christ in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In the Book of Acts of the Apostles, we learn the Good News of what God did through the Holy Spirit.

The first and foremost attribute of the servant church in the Acts of the Apostles is its daring openness to the Spirit.  It is our prayer that we the Church make room for the release of the Spirit in the life of the community and the courage to act when it does. We are not to fall back into being the safe and self-absorbed church, but rather a place of miraculous hope and extravagant hospitality.

God chose a young virgin named Mary to bear God’s Son, and Jesus chose a bunch of Galilean fishermen to share in His ministry.  God chooses Father Bob and myself to proclaim the Good News of the love of Jesus to the faith communities of St Joseph’s and Holy Spirit. Further, God chooses you to hear and witness to His message of hope and promise and love in this place and in our world this day.

The great truth of Pentecost – for the first disciples and for us as well – is that the Holy Spirit has the power to enlarge and expand the human heart if we allow the Spirit of Jesus to grow and enliven us from within.

 

The great meaning of Pentecost is that it was time for God to be born again not in one body that was Jesus but this time in a body of believers who would receive the breath of life from their Lord and pass it to others. We see how the growth of the Church took place with the influence of the Holy Spirit.

 Defensive Christianity is not a Biblical idea. The posture of Christian disciples is not hiding in fear to protect ourselves. No, the disciples are sent to proclaim the Good News of the love of Jesus to one and all. St. Joseph’s and Holy Spirit are called to be sister parishes who help and serve and love one another.

Now more than ever, we invoke the Holy Spirit to wipe away the darkness of anxiety allowing us to be guided by the light of Christ and to trust in God’s promise of new life.

On this day of Pentecost, may we pray for healing and unity for our Church and our nation as we now come to the Table of the Lord. May we all commit ourselves to using our God-given giftedness in the service of one another.

Have a Blessed Day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jesus' prayer to his Father: "I have finished the work you gave me to do."

 

Seventh Sunday of Easter A  2023

 

In today’s Gospel, we are entering upon very holy ground.  Throughout the Gospel of John, we see the compassionate heart of Jesus as He brings healing to sick people and food to the hungry.    In the Johannine Gospel, we find the love of God demonstrated and explained as nowhere else.  Then in John’s 17^th chapter, we are allowed to glimpse into Jesus’ very soul.

Perhaps we never get any closer to someone else than when we know about their prayer life.  As we eavesdrop on the prayer of Jesus in today’s Gospel, we are indeed entering holy ground.

The setting for this prayer of Jesus is the upper room on the eve of Jesus’s passion and death.  Jesus had just celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples and had washed their feet to give them an example of how they were to continue the mission of Jesus in the life of the Church.

Jesus’s impending death is not a disruption of God’s plan but part of God’s mysterious providence.  Jesus had accomplished His work, revealing the love of the Father for us.  Now it is the time to teach the meaning of that love by His willingness to lay down even His own life.  His dying is his greatest act of giving.

The Lord prayed for his disciples gathered around Him.  At the same time, he looked ahead to the community of disciples of all centuries.  In His prayer for disciples of all time, he saw us too, and he prayed for us.  He prayed that we be consecrated in truth.

“Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come.  Give glorify to your Son, so that your Son may glorify you…I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do…I have made your name known to those you have given me…They were yours and you gave them to me…Consecrate them in truth…I have made your name known to them so that the love with which you loved may be in them, and so that I may be in them.”

The prayer of Jesus to his heavenly Father was a prayer of gratitude that Jesus had finished the work that the Father had given Him to do.  He had made the Lord’s name known to His followers.

Jesus then prayed for us His disciples.  Jesus prayed that we would let God love us and live in us.  To do that, we need, first of all, to trust that God truly does love us.  As John says, we need to know and to believe in the love God has for us.  When we let the reality of God’s love for us sink deeply into who we are and what we believe, something dramatic happens.  We begin to love one another.  We become witnesses to God’s love by letting everyone else see what that love looks like when it is alive in a person’s life.   By being loved so deeply, we become lovers.  We become witnesses to the God whose love brings eternal life -- witnesses to the resurrection.

Jesus finished the work the Father had given Him to do.  What about us?  Do I have a sense of the work God has given me to do?  In other words, what is the purpose of my life.  As a parent, as a sibling, as a leader, as a parishioner, as a member of the community of the baptized, what is the work that God has given you to do.  We are very grounded in discipleship if we try to make the prayer of Jesus our own prayer.  This very evening, I invite you to reflect on the day and with a prayer of gratitude may we say in prayer that we have finished the work God has given us to do for this day.  If there is room for improvement, we ask for the Holy Spirit to be with us tomorrow.

Of course, it would be naïve to think that this is a simple process.  The first followers of Jesus knew all about the resistance to the extraordinary good news about God’s love that Jesus had brought to them.  They knew about the betrayal of Judas, about their own abandonment of Jesus, and about Jesus’ death on Calvary.  God created the world and everything in it good.  But in ways that are hard to understand, there is sometimes abandonment and betrayal of this goodness.  There is hostility and resistance in our world to the message of God’s love for us –  in the political warfare that takes place in the halls of our Congress, in the Church itself there can be hypocrisy and disillusionment, and in our personal and family relationships there can be too much brokenness.  We know all too well the demons we have within ourselves that keep us from witnessing to the forgiving love of God in all circumstances of life.

Jesus in His prayer to his heavenly Father prayed for us with the words:  This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ

What is so important for us as we seek eternal life with God is that eternal life is not just for the future:  it a gift partly given now in our faith.  To be in touch with Jesus is to be in touch with a rich and full eternal life.  Something is given which will last forever – the mysterious life of God.  We touch into that life in prayer.  We are enlightened by Jesus, the light of the world.

Being a witness to the resurrection is not just telling people what they can hope for after death.  Yes, such hope is so very important.   God will raise us from death to live with God forever. God’s love is stronger than death.   But being a witness to the resurrection begins in the here and the now.  Being a witness to the resurrection means letting people see in our lives what it looks like when we live in the God who is love.  It means making visible what happens when the God who is love lives in us.

John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus prayed for His followers.  He prays that His Father consecrate them in truth.  The truth he refers to is the truth of God’s love.  To be consecrated in the truth means being consecrated or made holy in God’s love.    God’s love is like the air we breathe – all around us, giving us life, sustaining us.    When we do this, we may experience some of the resistance and hostility that Jesus experienced, but Jesus has promised that God’s Spirit will be with us and will never abandon us.  This will enable us to be witnesses to God’s love even in a sometimes-hostile world.  Let’s trust in that love as we come to the Table of the Lord in  communion.

Have a Blessed Day.

 

:Do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in God; have faith also in me."

 

FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER  2023  A

 

 

There is the story of a grandfather and his four-year-old granddaughter Emily.  As a way of blessing his granddaughter Emily, he gave her a jar filled with dirt.  He simply told her to put a bit of water on the dirt each day, and you will discover life in hidden and unexpected places, but you must be faithful to the practice of putting a bit of water on the dirt each day. 

 

After the first week, Emily told her grandfather nothing is happening.  He again encouraged her to be faithful to the practice of putting a bit of water in the jar each week.  The second week passed, and nothing happened.  Then in the third week, a couple of tiny sprouts began to emerge out of the dirt.  Emily was so excited and rushed to her grandpa to tell him the good news.

 

Grandpa then asked Emily how did this happen?  Emily said I put water on the dirt.  Her grandfather more precisely said that Emily was faithful to the practice of putting water in the jar.  Life happens in hidden and unknown places, in fact, life happens everywhere when there is faithfulness.

 

Listen again to the Gospel:

 

 Jesus said: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.  You have faith in God; have faith also in me.”  To calm our troubled hearts, we are to have faith in God and in Jesus.   Indeed, our troubled hearts will be calmed insofar as we are able to trust that Jesus goes with us in all experiences of life.

 

The message of the grandfather to his granddaughter was a message of the need for faithfulness.  The message of Jesus to us in today’s Gospel is also one of faithfulness.  Ultimately, more than any medication or any other quick fix, our trust in God’s faithfulness to us is the way we experience a calming of our troubled hearts.

 

The Gospel proclamation of Jesus:  DO NOT LET YOUR HEARTS BE TROUBLED is valid for all times and under any circumstances.  Every beating human heart knows what it means to be troubled.  Given the reality of the human condition, the struggle to live in an imperfect world, the conflicts that arise from different political viewpoints and clashing cultural values, there is much that can certainly trouble a human heart.

 

In preparing the funeral liturgy for a loved family member, this passage from John’s Gospel is often chosen.  There is a longing in the human heart to experience the words of Jesus:  Do not let your hearts be troubled.

 

Does this mean we will not mourn the losses of our lives?  Of course not!  Are we to sweep under the rug the pain of our lives?  Absolutely not!  We all need to play the deck that we are dealt.  As painful as any situation that we experience, the Word of God is proclaimed to us:  Do not let your hearts be troubled.

 

A cynic might say:  You’re not smelling the coffee, or the tire isn’t hitting the road if you are not overcome with the pain of life.

 

Jesus continues:  Have faith in God.  Have faith also in me.  The invitation to trust in Jesus is the profound truth of our lives.

 

The word of Jesus is not a shield that protects us from the problems of life like a mother would want to protect her child from any pain in life.  That shield does not exist.

 

What Jesus promises us is an inner resource that cannot be taken away.  What Jesus promises is that when we are in touch with the Spirit of Christ Jesus that is within us, we have an inner resource that enables us to mourn, to grieve, endure the crosses of our lives in ways that our hearts are not troubled.  Our hearts are not troubled because we do not face the cross alone, because we have a strength that we receive in Christ Jesus that enable us to affirm that our future is always full of hope.

 

 This Sunday’s Gospel, as is true for the following two Sundays, is taken from the Last Supper discourse of Jesus recorded in John’s Gospel.  The mood of the Easter season is shifting, and our Gospel reflections turn toward unpacking the resurrection in such a way that it leads to Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit, and our discipleship.  Yes, we continue to be challenged in the Easter Season to encounter the Risen Christ.  The Scriptures today invite us to do the works of Christ and to recognize Christ in the other.  The very practical challenge here is that our baptism plunges us not to only into a relationship with the Triune God but also with each other.  Yes, in encountering the Risen Lord, we are to treat others in justice, mercy, forgiveness, and love.

 

In the first Scripture reading from the Acts of the Apostles:  As the number of disciples continued to grow, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution.  So, the Twelve called together the communion of the disciples and said we need to appoint others to respond to this need.  The point being it was not enough to say their prayers in a pious fashion to God.  The early Church found its identity and the meaning of the grace of baptism not just in belonging to God.  By belonging to God, we also belong to one another.  Their union as baptized believers superseded all their other differences whether of language, ethnicity, economic or social status.  In Christ, all had become Church and as Church we are to care for and serve one another without distinction.

 

In our parish life, may we have ministries that emphasize our service and care for one another.  As the community of the baptized, all of us, without exception, enter relationship with one another.  We are to serve the needs of one another.

 

As we reflect on the Scriptures, we express gratitude in the presence of the Risen Christ that is within us.  This inner resource enables us to live a life that is full of hope.  As we affirm the presence of the risen Christ that is within us, we are gifted with the vision to recognize Christ’s presence in the face of our neighbor.