SOLEMNITY OF PENTECOST A

[cappie]

The giving of the Spirit to the new people of God crowns the mighty acts of the Father in salvation history.

The Jewish feast of Pentecost called all devout Jews to Jerusalem to celebrate their birth as God’s chosen people in the covenant Law given to Moses at Sinai. In today’s First Reading, the mysteries prefigured in that feast are fulfilled in the pouring out of the Spirit on Mary and the Apostles

“ When Pentecost day came round, they had all met in one room.”  Now, you might miss that opening line as if it were some insignificant detail. But then you remember that Luke, the who wrote Acts, was probably a physician, and doctors don’t tend to give insignificant details. This event was for all of the disciples. No one could be missing.

They all get the same gift — the Holy Spirit — but at the same time, they don’t all get the same gifts.  Immediately, they would begin to speak in different languages, differentiating them from the very beginning.

There’s a reason we talk about the Holy Spirit in terms of fire and wind. Fire and wind are not things that we can easily control. Fire and wind are also not things whose form, intensity, or effects always look the same.

It won’t take long before Paul will start writing of the fruits of the spirit and the different gifts of the Spirit. In 1 Corinthians, a letter Paul wrote to the community who couldn’t stop bickering, he wrote, “Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.”

He’ll write to the church in Rome about how it’s the Spirit who makes the church work. The Holy Spirit makes this whole church thing work. Our differences as humans make the world work.

We often talk about how we are deeply divided as a people. We sometimes seem to occupy completely different realities than our neighbours and we gravitate towards opinions that are already the same as ours.

But we’ve all changed our minds on something before, even when it was difficult to do so. We all have things we used to believe strongly that we don’t believe anymore. Often, it is because we met someone — somebody who was affected directly by whatever thing we had an opinion about.  

We are different, and we are divided. We all generally agree that we don’t like the state of things. But if anything’s going to change, in the church or outside of it, as much as we may hate it, we need each other. We need someone who believes differently and has a completely different experience than we do.

 Maybe things might get better if we started meeting with a common identity to ask and answer questions, we can all wrestle with. And finally, after we talk for a while about those things, we can ask: What can we do together?

There are many places this can happen, but it’s been happening for centuries in places of worship. Religion has  been a destructive force in the world, but it also has a way of helping. It asks us who we are and why we’re here and where we’re going, and it doesn’t work if we’re all the same.

  Christmas and Easter proclaim the Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection, but it is Pentecost with its gift of the Holy Spirit that reveals to us the purpose and meaning of those great mysteries. It is the presence of the Holy Spirit living in our hearts that makes the power of the Cross a reality in our lives. It is the indwelling of the Comforter that makes us part of the Risen Christ’s Body and allows us to know that we are found in him, the Word make flesh.

The feast of Pentecost is, of course, the commemoration of events in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit was first poured out on the disciples after Christ’s Ascension. However, it might also stand at a personal level as a commemoration of that moment when the same Spirit was bestowed on us making us God’s sons and daughters at our baptism. It is a wonderful feast to give thanks for that baptismal and Confirmation gift and to ask God to replenish and strengthen the presence of his Spirit within each one of us .

[BarbTherese]

Thank you