Homily for Sunday, 28 May 2023– Pentecost, Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23

I invite us to think of how often we gather together in a place only to set out from that place. This is a very ordinary human experience. We might meet with one or several friends, and then set out for home happy and grateful that we have had that time with friends: The joy and the strength that we receive from friendship. If we work, many times we have regular meetings in our workplaces, to discuss individual and collaborative tasks in the workplace. And then we go forth to do the work. Some of us may gather for regular family or household meetings, or pray together at home.

In a religious sense, on Sundays (and, for many of us, on weekdays also) we gather in this place, in a church. We celebrate the Eucharist. And after we receive communion—a word that literally derives from gathering in one place as one, in union—we are sent forth to put into action in our world what we hear from the word of God: “Go, the Mass is ended”!

Pentecost is a special occasion of gathering together so that we may then be sent forth. Many of us may think of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church. The Acts of the Apostles recounts for us today the first time in Christian history that people of such astounding ethnic, linguistic, and geographical diversity—“Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome…Cretans and Arabs”—were all gathered into one place and heard Jesus’ apostles proclaim the word of God in their own language.

Acts’ account of the first Pentecost is truly an amazing story! Yet, if we have ever read Acts, Chapter 2, beyond the end of the reading we have just heard (and I encourage us to open our Bibles and do so at home, especially if you have rarely or never done so), we quickly notice that what we have heard from Acts today is only the beginning of the story. It is only the beginning of the first Pentecost event! The earliest Christians from all over the Roman Empire at the time stay in the one place long enough to hear a long speech from Peter, covering the earthly life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. But then, at some point, all those people need to return to their homes. They take their Pentecost experience back home with them and tell of it to their friends, families, neighbours. And, by the end of this chapter, the Acts of the Apostles says, the number of believers—the number of “those who were being saved”—was growing astoundingly “day by day” in all those parts of the Roman Empire and beyond.

But that first Pentecost would not be the first time, nor the last, when God would gather great numbers of people together only to send them forth with something to nourish the whole world; to nourish their homes, their workplaces, their relationships. It is no accident that Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, coincides closely with the Jewish feast of the “weeks of weeks” (Shavuot) or of “seven times seven” days after Passover.

On that first Pentecost day, of which we hear in Acts, Jewish people scattered all over the Roman Empire and beyond are on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the holy city that is the center of their faith. Shavuot is originally an agricultural holiday; it had been the day on which Jews gave thanks to God for the harvest and made a sacrifice of part of their harvest at the temple in Jerusalem. By Jesus’ time, Shavuot had developed into a feast of thanksgiving not only for the harvest but of thanksgiving to God for the gift of the Law, the Commandments on Sinai God gave the Jewish people through Moses. There are seven weeks of seven days between two great Jewish pilgrimage feasts: Passover—when God delivered the people of Israel from Egypt—and Shavuot, when God gave the same people of Israel the Law on Sinai.

Between Passover and the Festival of Weeks (Shavuot), the particular gift that God gives to God’s people, as a sign of God’s loving promise of salvation to us, changes. First, God gives freedom from slavery in Egypt. And then second, God gives the harvest—food from the earth to sustain our bodies—together with the Law to sustain our souls. But together with this second feast, God gives us yet another gift: God gives God’s own Holy Spirit. This divine gift of God’s Holy Spirit is the most universal yet. If the feasts of Passover, of the harvest, and of the receiving of the Law of Moses had been Jewish feasts, even if they were for all Jewish people living everywhere, God’s Holy Spirit would be for all people and all nations, starting with the Jewish people and then those who had come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah.

The Book of Acts is clear about this: God’s gifts to us keep escalating. God’s gifts to us keep becoming more and more universal. God’s gifts (and God’s ultimate gift of salvation that awaits us at the end of time) are not static; they keep becoming greater and more widespread. This is why God waits until all the pilgrims from all over the known world at the time were in Jerusalem to give them his Holy Spirit through the preaching of the apostles. The Holy Spirit descends on the apostles “like the rush of a violent wind” and as tongues of fire. But then God gives the Holy Spirit to everybody present as the sound of speech, each speaking—giving the Holy Spirit—to one another in their own languages.

God waited to give this astoundingly expanding, audible gift of the Holy Spirit to the nations until all those people were gathered together in pilgrimage to the Holy City, Jerusalem. But this gift was not for the people who received it to hold onto it for themselves. Those whom God had gathered together in Jerusalem, God now would send back to their homelands, to give God’s Holy Spirit to all the people there. And so the Church, those baptized, those being saved, would keep expanding, becoming more truly universal. Pentecost is the birthday of the Church. Yet it is only the beginning of the story of the birth and rebirth of the Church in God’s Spirit. The first Pentecost was only one of many times God has gathered God’s people together to receive a great gift, only so that God might send us forth to offer to all people the gift we have received.

God gathers together only to send forth. Every time we gather for Mass is a celebration of this reality. Every Mass is a little Pentecost!

But we can resist going forth with the gifts, with the Holy Spirit God offers us to give to all peoples and all nations. We are free to do this. And to resist or even try to impede God’s gift of the Holy Spirit in this way is easier for us than maybe we would like to think. Just ask Jesus’ apostles, huddled in the upper room after Jesus had died, for fear of the Jewish authorities who had had him crucified.

This is the setting as our reading today from John’s Gospel begins: Hardly an auspicious start for the apostles, to the history of our Church! Like the apostles, we may find ourselves afraid to emerge from where we are gathered, holding onto God’s gift of the Spirit for ourselves, sometimes not even realizing that we possess it. We might find ourselves afraid of, mired in, our own sin. We might find ourselves in a state of pessimism about the world, or our own relationships: What good will my going forth with the Holy Spirit, living my faith boldly yet lovingly and kindly, do amid all the problems and even evil of the world?

It is into this anxiety, this pessimism, our own sinful state, that Jesus breaks through and offers us, once again, God’s Holy Spirit. And once again, it is audible: Jesus’ voice proclaims, “Peace be with you (shalom)… Receive the Holy Spirit.” And, yet again, we whom God has gathered together are sent forth: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

That is some power God gives us, to forgive and retain sins! This was a power Jews of Jesus’ time—including Jesus’ own apostles—would have said that only God possesses, no human being. Now Jesus gives us the height of divine power, the power over sin, evil, and death itself! God’s gift of the Holy Spirit is not to be kept for ourselves. It is not static but living and dynamic. It is meant to be given away. It is meant to grow. It is meant for all peoples and all nations, this gift for which God continually (and here, yet again) gathers us together only to send us forth, to proclaim audibly, for the rest of the world to hear: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Homily for Sunday, 5 June 2022– Pentecost

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23

John’s Gospel is peculiar in many ways, not least of which is John’s account of Pentecost, Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit on his disciples, which we hear today.

Remember that, one week ago, for our celebration of Jesus’ ascension to heaven, we heard Luke’s version of these events. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to remain in Jerusalem until he ascends to heaven, and then he sends the Holy Spirit upon them: “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection and his gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples happen all at once. We hear today how, on the very day Jesus rises from the dead, he stands among his disciples in a house where they had gathered, behind locked doors “for fear of the” Jewish leaders who had handed Jesus over to the Romans to die. Jesus appears in his disciples’ space, despite the locked doors, and greets them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And Jesus sends his disciples, as John makes a point of saying, with the gift of the Holy Spirit that he had promised them during his ministry and at the Last Supper: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

So, which is it? Did Pentecost—Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples; the birth of the Church—happen after or before Jesus’ ascension? Or did Pentecost happen more than once?

The renowned Sulpician Bible scholar Fr. Raymond Brown caused no small controversy at the time when he wrote that Christians should consider that Pentecost has happened not only once; not twice, before and after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, but many times. And the Holy Spirit still descends upon and inspires our Church to action, to mission today. We have all experienced Pentecost-like moments, sisters and brothers, many times in our own lives. I am not only speaking of our celebration of Pentecost once a year, fifty days after Easter, but much more often than that. And, most of the time, we are not even aware when we are experiencing an encounter with the Holy Spirit; a Pentecost-like moment.

The first Pentecost-like moment in each of our lives as Christians is at baptism. Now, at baptism if, as most of us are, we have been baptized as infants, we will not have been aware that we have just encountered the Holy Spirit. But our parents and godparents will have been aware of this Pentecost-like moment. They will have spoken for us at our baptism, when they respond, “It is,” to the question of the priest or deacon just before the baptism: “Is it your will that [this child] should be baptized in the faith of the Church, which we have all professed with you”? At the anointing with chrism after baptism, the Rite of Baptism clearly speaks of the effects of this sacrament: “The God of power and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin, given you a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into his holy people.” The moment of our baptism is our first encounter with the Holy Spirit as members of “God’s holy people,” the Church. It is our first Pentecost-like moment.

In baptism we (or our parents and godparents for us) make our first profession of faith, one St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians says today is only possible by the grace of the Holy Spirit: “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” And St. Paul connects the moment of our baptism back to those first Pentecost moments Jesus’ apostles experienced, in the locked room when Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon them; in Acts when tongues “as of fire” descended upon them. St. Paul says, “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body… and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

In confirmation we are again anointed with the chrism oil we received at baptism: “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.” If, for most of us, our parents and godparents witnessed for us and assented to the work of the Holy Spirit in us from the moment of our baptism, in confirmation we have the chance to assent; to agree to, witness and consciously receive the Holy Spirit for ourselves. For us, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, the singular “gift of the Holy Spirit” becomes a remarkable diversity of gifts that spur us on to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ by all we say and do. In confirmation, this vast array of gifts of the Holy Spirit is summed up in a formula of seven: “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence… the spirit of wonder and awe in [God’s] presence.”

We may sum up the gifts of the Holy Spirit in this kind of list of seven but, as St. Paul knew and we know, the Holy Spirit’s gifts to us are unlimited by any of our human categories or language. Still, all these gifts of the Holy Spirit, without number, is meant to serve one purpose in us; in the Church. St. Paul says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” And our ultimate good, sisters and brothers—the good God desires for all of us together—is eternal life.

Each of our Church’s sacramental rituals include a moment when we call upon the Holy Spirit and his gifts without number to direct us toward this “common good” and ultimately toward eternal life with God. I will not analyze each time in our sacramental rites when we call upon the Holy Spirit. This would take me far too much time, and I would be keeping us from (eventually) leaving here to proclaim the Gospel to the world with the gifts the Spirit has given us. And I do not wish to do this.

But I want to draw our attention simply to the Mass, since we are in the midst of it now. Most of us, if we are paying attention, know the first major moment at which we call upon the Holy Spirit during the Eucharistic Prayer at Mass: The priest extends his hands over the bread and wine and prays that the Holy Spirit transform this bread and wine into “the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Yet I often wonder if even the most faithful, attentive Catholics at Mass realize that there is a second moment during the Eucharistic Prayer when we call upon the Holy Spirit. There is no change in the position of the priest’s hands, or much of anything, to indicate when this happens, except that the priest prays that the Holy Spirit might descend not upon the bread and wine a second time, but upon us. We pray that the Holy Spirit might transform us to “become one body, one spirit in Christ.”

“Just as the body is one and has many members,” St. Paul says, “all the members of the body, though many, are one body.” We pray, every time we celebrate our Eucharist, that the Holy Spirit might transform us to make this unity in multiplicity of gifts and members of the Church a reality.

I find it astounding, every time I hear our reading today from Acts, that “every nation under heaven,” people speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own languages, were “all drawn together in one place.” All witnessed together, in unity yet phenomenal diversity, that first Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended like wind and in tongues of fire on Jesus’ first apostles.

They—Jesus’ first apostles; the vast multitude of people, each speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own language—are a lot like us: Gathered together in one place before God; gathered to receive gifts of the Holy Spirit without number but all oriented toward “the common good” and toward our eternal life with God. That, if anything, is amazing. Only the Holy Spirit of God can do this. Only the Holy Spirit can gather us together “in one place” to hear the Gospel; gather us together to be transformed, more and more, into “one body, one spirit in Christ”; gather us together where we may receive the strength and inspiration to proclaim the Good News and communicate the Spirit of God to our world.

This is our Pentecost: Not only a one or two-time communication of the Spirit to Jesus’ first apostles, but a Pentecost moment projected into our history and our memory as a people of God. We celebrate here and now an ongoing Pentecost; our encounter now and forever with the Holy Spirit that draws us all “together in one place”; that orients us toward the common good and that will bring us to eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 9 June 2019‒ Pentecost

Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; Pentecost Sequence; John 14:15-16, 23b-26

This homily was given at St. Kateri Parish, St. Margaret Mary Church, Rochester, NY, USA.

A proverb I heard not long ago says this: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” How might this proverb speak to our culture, including how we understand and live as Church? What might this kind of proverb have to do with Pentecost, which we celebrate today?

If I were to ask us when each of us thinks the Church began, historically or otherwise, how many of us would answer, “At Pentecost”? But then what is (or was) Pentecost? What is Church and why?

Might the readings we have heard today give us a clue toward the answers to these “brainstorm”-type questions? Fifty days after Jesus had risen from the dead (which is the meaning of the word “Pentecost,” fifty days), the Acts of the Apostles says to us that Jesus’ apostles, if not a larger group of Jesus’ disciples, those who had followed Jesus during his public ministry, passion, death, and resurrection, “were all in one place together.” It was at this point, when Jesus’ disciples “were all in one place together,” when the Holy Spirit descended upon them “like a strong driving wind” and in “tongues of fire.”

The rest of this account of Pentecost we hear from Acts also speaks of togetherness among the disciples of Jesus and an even larger group of “Jews from every nation under heaven” gathered in Jerusalem at the time. But this togetherness was not and could not be a too-simple and artificial uniformity. The group that witnessed to this first Pentecost, the birth of our Church, was too large and too diverse to be so uniform. All these different people from all over the world would witness together, but each “in their own tongues” to “the mighty acts of God”; to the power of God’s Holy Spirit; to the birth of a Church.

Does this not sound a lot like the Church today; like our reality here in Rochester and at St. Kateri? “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I do not believe that proverbs like this are meant to be a criticism of those who “go alone” in our Church or civil society, or in our St. Kateri Parish for that matter, as if acting together is always better than acting alone; as if going far is always better than going fast.

The rightful diversity within the Church will forever welcome the faithful who view change in the Church—in decisions made at various levels of Church leadership, the people who lead, or sometimes even the teachings that guide and result from those in leadership—as more often good, and the faster the better. And the same rightful diversity within the Church will necessarily welcome those with usually the opposite view, who are wary of change or who stress caution or consensus before allowing change; who prefer going far to going fast; going together to going alone.

Instead of serving as an indictment of people with either view, I think our experience of Pentecost, in a similar way to that first Pentecost of which the Acts of the Apostles speaks to us today, has two effects on the Church and on us as the Church’s faithful. First, our experience of receiving the Holy Spirit, our experience of Pentecost, puts in right order these two complementary movements in the Church of going alone and therefore faster, and of going together and therefore farther. Second, our experience of Pentecost purifies our intentions behind preferring either to go alone and therefore fast, or together and therefore far, or a bit of each preference depending on our particular circumstances of life.

Our experience of Pentecost, like the very first experience Jesus’ disciples had of Pentecost, rightly orders the desire or movement in our same Church toward going together and therefore far, versus the desire or movement toward going alone and therefore fast. We hear of this right ordering in our readings today. The Holy Spirit first draws all this diversity of peoples together, so that they will be able to go far once they are sent out by the same Spirit, not in spite of but precisely because of their diversity. But the diversity of these earliest disciples of Jesus is a diversity whose unity is safeguarded by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the same is true of the Church today. The same Holy Spirit who once drew together the diverse peoples of the earliest Church draws us into this “one place together” so that we may honor and celebrate together our diversity held in unity by the Holy Spirit. We may not be “Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs.” But we are from East Irondequoit, West Irondequoit, elsewhere in greater Rochester, New York State, or beyond; rich, poor, and middle class; ideologically left, right, and center; people who prefer more pre-Vatican II liturgy or post-Vatican II liturgy, and so on, all called to this “one place together.” We might only want to be wary of letting in certain Canadians who study in France; they may be a little suspect…

Only once we have been drawn together by the Holy Spirit into the unity of “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” in this one celebration will we be able to set out, each in the particular ways in which we are called, to proclaim the Gospel, “glorifying [the one] God by our lives.” Only by learning by celebrating here and now our “going together,” our being “in one place together,” will we then be effective, if not sometimes surprisingly fast, if and when the Holy Spirit calls us to “go alone,” each putting our individual or unique gifts to the service of the same Gospel, remaining faithful to our unity as Church.

In John’s Gospel today, Jesus reinforces this point: To learn by celebrating our “going together” is necessary if and when the Holy Spirit, who keeps us together as one Church, calls us within this Church to “go alone”; to exercise our more particular or unique gifts at the service of the Gospel. In the same discourse as when Jesus promises his disciples the Holy Spirit, “another advocate to be with [us] always,” Jesus says to his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments… Whoever loves me will keep my word.” My sisters and brothers, love; keeping the commandments of Jesus, first among which is to love one another as Jesus has loved us; keeping Jesus’ word: These are not individual actions that we accomplish without any grounding in community; as one Church that gathers together to hear and celebrate God’s word in our Eucharist, together. To keep Jesus’ commandments, to love, presupposes our gathering “in one place together.” In fact, God himself is a communion, a “togetherness” of three distinct persons (more on this next Sunday, when we will celebrate more specifically the Most Holy Trinity).

Yet togetherness, unity, communion does not stifle diversity, individuality, uniqueness of spiritual and other gifts. In fact, our unity reinforces and honors our diversity, individuality, uniqueness of gifts. Our Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit not only puts in right order the complementary movements in the Church of going together and therefore farther so that we may be able to, if necessary, go alone and therefore maybe faster, but also our Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit purifies these two seemingly opposite movements, so that indeed they are complementary and will never stifle each other. As 1 Corinthians says to us today, we remain “one body though [with] many parts. We receive “different spiritual gifts” by “the same Spirit.” We perform “different forms of service” by the grace of our “one Lord” and God.

By “going together,” we gain the strength and unity we need for when we are called to “go alone.” As Church, we breathe with two lungs. Our unity and then our diversity are inspired by the same Spirit. Insofar we gather “in one place together” to celebrate this, we will both “go far” and “go fast,” because our Pentecost experience empowers us to do both.

Homily for Sunday, 24 May 2015‒ Pentecost

Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; Pentecost Sequence; John 20:19-23

Imagine for a moment that you are in your favorite place in the world. What is this place? Is it your favorite vacation destination, perhaps one of the world’s great cities; a remote place to enjoy nature; a beach in the tropics? Is your favorite place somewhere you enjoy spending a day off work? Is it a place to be still; to encounter God in prayer; perhaps in silence; perhaps at Mass? Are you with somebody or alone?

I feel blessed to have many favorite places all over the world. I have encountered God in prayer; in the Eucharist everywhere from here at St. Kateri to the parishes in which I grew up, St. Theresa’s and Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Edmonton; to Notre Dame and Saint-Sulpice in Paris, to the chaotic Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the calm of the shore of the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus once walked; to St. Patrick’s in busy New York City; to my highlights in Colombia in South America: At twelve thousand feet above sea level, Monserrate in Bogotá, for instance. This is one of the only churches of which I can think where the congregation remains standing during Mass, barely even able to turn, because of the number of people present!

Last week I enjoyed my parents’ visit here to Rochester; to St. Kateri. We visited places like the Corning Museum of Glass; wineries and breweries in the Finger Lakes, Sodus Point and El Rincón Mexicano, a favorite Mexican restaurant in Sodus to which Fr. Paul introduced me; Chimney Bluffs…  These are only a few of my favorite places near here to spend a day off; to eat; to learn; to enjoy nature. But it was particularly wonderful to be with people I love;  to be with Mom and Dad to enjoy some of my favorite places in New York State (and some places where I had never been before) during the week they were here.

Is there not something special about being together in one place with people you love; with family; with friends? This is the experience of Jesus’ disciples on Pentecost. We hear in our first reading from Acts that “they were all in one place together” when the Holy Spirit descended upon them. For Jesus’ first disciples, this is the necessary condition to receive God’s gift of the Holy Spirit. Their unity “in one place together,” in an upper room in Jerusalem, is the required setting for the birth of a community of faith, our Church. But why is this so? If God had so chosen, why could the Holy Spirit not have descended upon each of the disciples individually, alone, instead of descending upon them as a community?

The trouble here is that, unlike when we are enjoying quality time off; a vacation; perhaps peaceful time at prayer, Jesus’ disciples were not gathered in their favorite place in the world. Our Gospel reading today, from John, says that “the doors were locked” to the room “where the disciples were, for fear of” the leaders of “the Jews”; those who had put Jesus, their hoped-for Messiah, to a shameful death on a cross. But it is into this fear that the risen Christ enters and breathes the Holy Spirit upon the disciples as a community: “Peace be with you.” This Pentecost event would not have happened in the same way had the disciples have been scattered, facing their fears alone.

Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s disciples; the birth of the Church, is not a one-time event. We are reminded of this by today’s readings: The Acts of the Apostles and John’s Gospel speak of two distinct encounters with the Holy Spirit. In Acts the Holy Spirit appears to the disciples in “tongues as of fire”; as “a noise like a strong driving wind.” In John, the risen Christ breathes God’s Holy Spirit upon his disciples: “Peace be with you.”

And Pentecost continues to happen, here and now. The Holy Spirit continues to work; to be present among and within us. How is the Holy Spirit present, working among and within us? Might many of us here now be feeling anything but like you are in your favorite place in the world? For many of us there is no better place to be than here, on a beautiful Sunday morning, celebrating our Eucharist. And yet many more of us bring to this celebration our griefs and sorrows: Personal or loved ones’ illnesses; loss of loved ones; loss of employment or underemployment; struggles with our faith; marriage or family disunity. We bring to this celebration our distractions: Some of us barely awake; others with small children in tow with their own needs; still others finding it difficult to remain focused in prayer… And yet how blessed we are as a community of faith by one another’s presence: Joys, hopes, griefs, distractions and all! Still more of us may be bringing to this Eucharist very real fears: Our fear of death; what will happen after our death and how the people we love will cope; our fear of economic instability; our fears for those we love who have turned away from their faith; our fear for the state of our world, full of hope but with many instances of despair; violence; evil…

Our joys and hopes but also our griefs; our distractions; our fears are similar and every bit as real as those Jesus’ first disciples faced on the first Pentecost when they encountered the Holy Spirit. Some first encountered the Holy Spirit in the stillness of Jesus’ breath, “Peace be with you.” Others encountered the Holy Spirit amid their fear of death at the hands of those who had put Jesus to death. These first disciples encountered the Holy Spirit as they touched the risen Jesus’ wounds, an image of our own woundedness; our own sin; our own need for forgiveness and healing. And they encountered the Holy Spirit as fearsome, rushing wind and “tongues as of fire.”

Our encounters with the Holy Spirit are as varied perhaps as the encounters with the Holy Spirit of Jesus’ first disciples. The gifts we receive from God’s Holy Spirit are as varied as the encounters with the Spirit themselves: “Different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit,” St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians. But do we not have something else in common with these earliest disciples in how they encountered the Holy Spirit? We, like them, are “all in one place together.”

In this “one place together” our joys and hopes meet their source, our God whom we are united here to worship and to celebrate. Here our diverse “spiritual gifts” are refined; made ready through this celebration to be put to service of the one Body of Christ; one community of faith; one world; one human race. A “body with many parts,” we become, more and more, “one body, one spirit in Christ” in the words of our Eucharistic Prayer that we will hear and pray in a few moments.

In this “one place together” our griefs; our distractions; our fears are transformed by the Holy Spirit. Together we are invited to let our fears that could paralyze us without community; without God’s Holy Spirit be transformed into “fear” in the sense of awe and reverence in God’s presence. This “fear of the Lord”; awe and reverence in God’s presence is the first and greatest of the gifts of the Holy Spirit we all receive in baptism and confirmation.

In this “one place together” is our Pentecost. In this “one place together” we encounter God’s Holy Spirit who strengthens, gifts, unifies, and transforms us. In this “one place together,” my sisters and brothers, Church is born. In the whole world the best place for us to be; the place where God is; the place where we are prepared to serve God as Christian disciples in our world that hungers for God’s Spirit, is right here, in this “one place together.”

Homily for Friday, 15 May 2015– Friday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 18:9-18; Psalm 47:2-3, 4-5, 6-7; John 16:20-23

Have any of us noticed how, in these last few days of the Easter season, especially now between the Solemnity of the Lord’s Ascension and Pentecost (the Sunday after next), our daily readings have become dark; troubling?

Today the Acts of the Apostles speaks of Paul being brought once again to trial, this time before Gallio, the Roman “proconsul of Achaia” in Corinth. Is our Gospel reading today not especially ominous? Jesus speaks of his upcoming death, a painful experience for both him and for his disciples: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices.”

Would we not think that, during the Easter season, our readings would be somewhat more uplifting? Why must we hear amid such a joyful season of these events of deep pain and suffering: Apostles like Paul arrested, facing trial and eventual death for their faith; Jesus preparing his disciples for his own death?

Our readings, I think, remind us that we live in an “in-between” time; a time of transition. We live in a time that is an intermingling of joy and sorrow; of order and chaos; of new life and death. In our Church’s liturgical year, we are between Jesus’ Ascension into heaven, a joyful event but also a kind of death; joy mingled with sorrow because Jesus is no longer here on earth, and Pentecost, the Holy Spirit’s descent upon the Apostles and the birth of the Church. Each of us is between birth and death.

Our baptism marks both death and resurrection in Christ, again sorrow and joy mingled together. Jesus speaks of the experience of childbirth. Anyone who has brought a child into the world or witnessed a birth: Can you not relate to the intermingling of pain and joy of which Jesus speaks? The events of our world today are often troubling: natural and human-made disaster; disease; war; extremism… And yet we see signs of hope.

How many of us have experienced the loss of a loved one and yet remember forever with fondness and joy the goodness of your loved one? How many of us have experienced severe illness or that of a loved one, and yet amid illness perhaps experienced perseverance with joy by the sick person and those who care for her or him?

In these and many more ways, we experience an in-between time; joy intermingled with sorrow; life with death; wellness with illness; order with chaos. And in this in-between time, our readings today encourage us. “Do not be afraid,” Paul hears and we hear in Acts. “You will grieve, but your grief will become joy,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “so you… are now in anguish. But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.”

Take courage; “do not be afraid.” This is not to deny suffering; pain; sorrow; even death. These are part of the in-between time we are living. But they are temporary. Christ will reign victorious over all these realities. This is our hope; our reason, in this in-between time, to be here; to continue to persevere in faith; to live with joy. And “no one will take [our] joy away from” us.