In Pentecost, God is born again in a body of believers that is the Church.

 

 

PENTECOST 2024

We usually think of the great feast of Pentecost as the feast of the Holy Spirit.  Would invite you to enlarge this feast day to be the feast of the Church that has received the Holy Spirit.  We are the Church of the Holy Spirit.   We are the People of God who have received the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

In the great Feast of Pentecost, God is born again not in one body that was Jesus but in a body of believers that is the Church.  Pentecost is the Feast of the birth of the Church.  The Spirit of the Risen Christ is in the Body of believers, in the community of the baptized, in the whole Church.

The feast of Pentecost brings to a close the season of Easter because the gift of the Spirit is the inevitable outcome of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The church understood clearly that what happened to Jesus on Easter Sunday was not just an amazing miracle to prove that he really was the Son of God. It was rather the next step in God’s desire to heal, once and for all, the relationship between himself and a broken humanity. Now the outpouring of the Spirit of Jesus means that our relationship with God is fundamentally transformed. So, let’s celebrate of our new life in the Spirit and the birthday of the church as the new people of God.

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.  Now God chooses you and me to hear His message of hope and promise and love in this place and inour world this day.

Initially the disciples were locked in the upper room out of fear.  On the Day of Pentecost those locked doors were thrown open; the fear in the disciples was replaced with a Spirit-filled courage and enthusiasm.  They were now fearless proclaimers of the Word of God.

What had changed for the disciples?  They received the Holy Spirit.

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.

Some people call this feast of Pentecost as the feast of locked doors.  And so, we ask ourselves what are the fears and anxieties of our lives that keep us imprisoned, that keep us behind locked doors our of fear?

Perhaps our locked doors is that we are divided into liberal and conservative camps.  We have been so committed to our private little wars that we no longer see ourselves as a communion of faith and love.

And so we pray: “ Come Holy Spirit fill the hearts of your faithful and renew the face of the earth.”

And so, we don’t just commemorate the coming of the Holy Spirit on the first disciples on the day of Pentecost.  On this feast we celebrate not just the original outpouring of the Spirit upon the Church two thousand years ago.  We also rejoice in God’s ongoing outpouring of the Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is God’s dynamic presence in the Church.  It’s the Holy Spirit who inspires to us live lives of love and service, who encourages when we falter, and who forgives us when we deliberatively turn away from God.  Without the constant presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, we could never live the kind of life that God intends us to live – the kind of life that Jesus lived when he walked this earth.

The Scripture readings call us to a deeper awareness that the gifts of the Holy Spirit call us to a missionary people who seek through the presence of the Spirit to enable us to seek unity among God’s people.

The Church is, in the words of The Second Vatican Council, ‘missionary by its very nature’.  All its members, all who are baptized in the Spirit, are consecrated as missionary disciples of Jesus and called to take responsibility for the evangelization of the world.  A Church that turns in on itself and stops being missionary is no longer the Church of Christ but simply a sodality, a group of like-minded people who simply like each other’s company.  Pope Francis, in his first Apostolic Exhortation, the JOY OF THE GOSPPLE, urges the Church to be true to its missionary calling.  He wants the Church to reach out towards those on the margins and bring healing and hope to the wounded of this world.  He states:  “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.  We need, he insists, a church that knows how to open her arms and welcome everyone.

 

Now you may rightly ask if we are the Church of the Holy Spirit and we believe that the Spirit is God is present among, why is there is so much craziness in our world, why so much pain and hardship, why so much war and acts of terrorism, why is that so much division in our world.  Why do some experience the church as harsh and judgmental rather than witnessing to the love and forgiveness of God.

These realities in our Church and in our world force us to recognize that we are a part of an imperfect Church and are left wondering whether ours is the kind of Church that Jesus hoped for, the kind of Church that Jesus shed his blood for.

Be assured that we are not yet the Church that Jesus hoped for, but we are the Church that Jesus suffered and died for.  As St Paul teaches in his letter to the Romans: ”God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

And so, we pray again and again:  “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and renew the face of the earth.

 

Have a blessed day.