My name is Don, and I’ve been a Catholic priest now for over 50 years. And during that time I keep going back to the same readings over and over again, only to discover that they contain something I never understood was there before. It gives me new enthusiasm and excitement for the message that keeps revealing itself. And I pray that the message that I’m sending you will be valuable. And if you find it so, please share these podcasts with your friends. Thank you.
Good morning. Today we celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. The opening prayer oh God, who by the mystery of today’s great feast, sanctify your whole church in every people and nation. Pour out, we pray, the gifts of the Holy Spirit across the face of the earth and with the divine grace that was at work when the gospel was first proclaimed, fill now once more the hearts of believers through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Acts of the apostles, second chapter, first through the 11th verse.
When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together. And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem. At this sound they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language.
They were astounded, and in amazement they asked, are not all these people who are speaking Galileans? Then how does each of us hear them in our native language? We are Parthians, Medes, Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya and Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs. Yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God, the Word of the Lord. Alleluia verse Lord, send out your spirit and renew the face of the earth. Bless the Lord.
O my soul. O Lord, my God, you are great indeed. How manifold are your works, O Lord, the earth is full of your creatures. Lord, send out your spirit and renew the face of the earth. May the glory of the Lord endure forever. May the Lord be glad in his works pleasing to him be my theme.
I will be glad in the Lord. Lord, send out your spirit and renew the face of the earth. If you take away their breath, they perish and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the earth. Lord, send out your spirit and renew the face of the earth. A reading from the New Testament.
From St. Paul’s letter to the Romans 8 through the 17th verse. Brothers and sisters, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh. On the contrary, you are in the Spirit. If only the Spirit of God dwells in you, whoever does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.
But if Christ is in him, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is alive because of righteousness. If the Spirit of the One who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you. Consequently, brothers and sisters, we are not debtors to the flesh to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.
For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but he received a spirit of adoption to whom we cry, Abba. Father, the Spirit himself bears witness with our Spirit, that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. If only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with Him. The Word of the Lord. On this feast of Pentecost, there is a tradition of reading the words of a famous hymn called Come, Holy Spirit, Veni, Sante Spiritus and hymns are prayers.
And so I want to read the words of this hymn, which is I’m asked to do as part of the Liturgy of the Word and just make it a prayer with me. Join me in these intentions, because it’s all about what I long for you to receive through this homily. And these are the words of this hymn. Come, Holy Spirit, come and from your celestial home shed a ray of light divine. Come, Father of the poor, Come, Source of all our store, Come within our bosom Shine, you of comforters, the best you, the soul’s most welcome guest. Sweet refreshment here below in our labour’s rest.
Most sweet grateful coolness in the heart, Solace in the midst of Woe. O most blest light divine, shine within these hearts of yours and fill our inmost being where you are not. We have naught, nothing good in deed or thought, nothing free from staint ill of heal our wounds, our strength renew on our dryness Pour your dew, wash the stains of guilt away. Bend the stubborn heart and will melt the frozen warm the chill guide the steps that go astray on the faithful who adore and confess you evermore in your sevenfold gift to sin. Give them virtue’s sure reward. Give them salvation, Lord.
Give them joys that never end. Amen. Hallelujah. The hallelujah. Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Hallelujah.
The gospel for this Pentecost Sunday is taken from St. John, 14th, chapter 15, 16th verse. In the 23rd through the 26th verse, Jesus said to his disciples, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you always. Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling within him. Those who do not love me do not keep my words.
Yet the word you hear is not mine, but that of the Father who sent me. I’ve told you this while I’m with you. The advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have told you. The Gospel of the Lord, Satan. Sam the name of this feast is Pentecost has reference to the number 50. But most importantly, it is a feast that is a part of the Jewish heritage, their Jewish tradition.
And it was a feast of harvest. So you can imagine when people live on the land, when they live just dependent on the soil and the rains. When harvest comes, and especially if it’s a rich, beautiful, fruitful harvest, there’s great parties, great rejoicing. And so I want you to realize that when this feast carries this name, it’s because it has something in it that’s very similar to that experience. We’ve lived in this world for a long time. People have been struggling from the very beginning of the story of Adam and Eve until now, to understand fully who God is and who.
Why we’re here and what we’re supposed to become. And these are questions that have been, in a way, seeded in each human being that comes into the world. And I remember so vividly there was an image in one of the readings from. I believe it’s Matthew. And he’s talking about the planting of seeds. And it’s a story of the farmer plants these wonderful, beautiful seeds like human beings, beautiful innocent people being planted on this earth.
And they’re there. And then an enemy comes along and throws weeds in there. And then there’s something negative and there is this cry from the workers. The farm workers go to the owner and say, someone’s done this terrible thing. There’s now something impure and not fruitful in this field. And the owner says, let it go, let it go.
Let them be together. That’s such a beautiful image for me of something that is probably one of the strongest, most important things for us to keep in mind is that the world, by intention of God, has impurity lies things that are not only not fruitful, but very destructive, poisonous even. Why would he allow all of that to be here unless it had some very important role to play? And that is the role of what life is about. A struggle, a struggle between flesh and spirit lies traumatic things that people do to each other versus this wonderful healing, transforming presence of a God who loves us in our imperfection. So I want to start with some of the images in that second reading.
And it’s Romans and it’s talking about there is this thing called the flesh and if you’re in it, you cannot please God. Now, I don’t know what you think of flesh, but sometimes people think, well, that’s, you know, you think of flesh, you think of maybe it’s about certainly something human. But a lot of people think it’s about their sexuality, that we have these dirty bodies that have these cravings and those are unattractive to God. And how could they be if God created them? And there’s all that negativity around the word flesh. But I want you to try to imagine this flesh is that time in our life when we’re caught in something that is destructive.
And I know it isn’t referred to quite as clearly as I want you to feel it, but it’s about the times we’re in depression and darkness and self hatred because of the fact that sin is in the world and we get tainted by it. We’re either the victim of it or we perpetrate it. And it creates this dichotomy in us. And we think that we’re both good and bad. And then when we concentrate on what’s bad, we go into this spiral of darkness and death. And if you’re in that, you cannot please God because you know what you’re doing.
It’s not because God is not there for you. It’s because when you’re in that darkness, you’d sometimes feel unworthy and you feel distance from God. And the last thing you think is, is that God is there right with you, longing to enter into your life and heal and transform and bring life to your mortal body. Now, isn’t it interesting that in this image of the flesh, it’s something in you, and it’s just as Paul says, just as Jesus is able to raise from the dead that part of you that feels dead, that isn’t alive, that is seemingly know such a burden to carry, Jesus can, if he can raise from the dead, he can raise that from the dead. And he does it. And the way he does it is the most amazing thing.
He promises to forgive and overlook your sin. And more importantly, he promises to send someone in you to take care of you. The advocate. The advocate. And that’s what this whole feast is about. Pentecost, the fruitfulness of the end of all the work that we’ve had during this whole thing with the Old Testament and into the New Testament.
It’s about this plant that has been growing this seed that has become the fullness of what we might call the church, which is believers believing in the life that God has given us and becoming instruments of life for the world. That’s what we’re celebrating in this feast and the fullness of that evolution of human consciousness. Now, as we had the Father in the Old Testament and the Father and the Son in the New Testament, meaning the Father reveals himself as who he really is, compassionate, loving, caring. And now we have the final phase of the presence of God in you is now an advocate. Two roles. To teach and to remind.
To teach and to remind. I love the fact that we need constantly to learn more about who we are and who God is. But I love the fact that even when we know it, we have to be reminded of what we know, because the flesh and the darkness and sin can pull us away from the truth easily without us realizing it. So we need the spirit of God in us, which is promised by particularly to those in their darkest place. He’s constantly saying, let me in, let me in, let me in. The misunderstanding of this reading about the flesh is that if you’re in the flesh, then God doesn’t love you and he has nothing to do with you.
No, he’s saying, when you’re in the flesh, you have lost something that is your inheritance. It’s in you. You’ve just lost awareness of it. And that’s God’s presence, particularly as the advocate. And what is the advocate doing? He is naming the sin for you.
He’s naming the trauma that may have happened to you because someone sinned against you. He’s naming it and he’s building his case against it. And he’s showing you with clarity, like a prosecutor presents the case against someone. He presents the case against this. This worldly disposition that we get caught in this sense that we’re not good enough, that we’re not worthy. And that’s what the world does to us.
That’s what sin does to us. It tries to rob us of our dignity and our worth. And there’s the advocate and saying, oh, no, no, no, I’m sorry, my client here, he is valuable. She is valuable. She has everything she needs that would make me long to be with her. She is my daughter.
He is my son, and whatever you’ve done to him, you’re going to be exposed. Nothing that evil hates more than being exposed for what it does. Because what it really does, it’s not so much the evil that might be performed, it’s the effect it has on us of robbing us of our dignity, our value. So now we get to what is it like that this. Now we have the advocate. The advocate.
Well, let’s go back to the first reading, because that’s the one that’s most important to talk about when we talk about Pentecost. Because the image is that there is this moment in the growing, the growth of the wisdom, of the fullness of what God reveals is not complete until Pentecost. This is when he finally gets gave the final full teaching. And it’s so exciting because if you listen to it carefully, it’s so mysterious that it robs you and me of the responsibility of having to figure out how to describe this thing called God’s presence in me, in you, his intimacy with us. How do you describe it? How do you explain it?
Well, here’s an example of what it does, what it sort of looks like in a sense. And if you can figure out how this happened, let me know, because it’s mysterious. Here’s a group of believers gathered originally in fear in a locked room, now filled with an excitement and an awareness of their calling and what they’re going to do. And they have a keen understanding that since most all of them denied Jesus, they’re all forgiven. We they know, and they’ve tasted and experienced the beauty of the forgiveness of God. And there they are, forgiven and loved.
And they’re gathered together, you know, just somehow. Let’s just say it was a group of people that got together and they were so excited about the stories they shared. They just rose to a fever pitch. How wonderful this all is. And then what happens? There’s all these observers.
These observers are from all over the world. And this spirit is so vital to what they’re understanding that they see it, they have a sense of it, they have a vision. And it’s a fire, and it’s a fire that comes down from the heavens. So it’s obviously the descending Spirit, the Holy Spirit descending into them. And it’s fire. What is fire?
Could have been living water. It could have been food. No, it’s fire. Fire has two properties. It enlightens it’s light. So this spirit coming into these human beings is an amazing enlightenment that they see things they could never see before.
They feel things they never felt before. They know things about God they never thought they would know. And then comes the other aspect, purification. Fire purifies. You want to find the gold, you burn. You heat the metal until the final.
The only thing that comes out is the gold. That’s an image of the power of the Holy Spirit as the advocate who comes and cleanses us of all illusions, all lies, and heals us of those things. So what I want you to feel with me is that this experience is not only their experience, but all these people are watching it. And they’re watching it and they’re listening to them speak. And it’s like I don’t understand exactly what they’re speaking in tongues. I don’t know whether they’re using the classic thing of tongues where you can’t really understand the words, or they’re speaking it in their own language.
But the mysterious thing is everyone from everywhere, from every different language, understands exactly what they’re experiencing and what they’re going through. It says there’s something about the Holy Spirit as resonance, a resonance of energy and life, light and hope and forgiveness flowing out of people. It’s so amazing that the heart of what religion is calling us to is not being bound to rules and laws and regulations, but being bound to a truth, a word that God speaks, and that is that he will dwell within us. And he comes to us in our broken sinfulness. Not. Why do we always find churches and religions demanding perfection before God comes?
Why do they stress so much God’s disappointment when we sin? He’s not disappointed. He may be sad, but he’s drawn to us, longing to fill us with the comfort that we prayed for in that sequence. Rest, refreshment, peace. That’s the mystery. And when you have that inside of you, when you have that indwelling presence, that fullness of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, watch out.
People will understand it, will feel it, even if they’re just standing next to you. I promise. Foreign the Closing Prayer Father, this feast is considered to be the birth of the church, the birth of your community of believers. I pray for our churches, all of them, all different denominations, so that they can continue to open their hearts to the fullness of this message. And they open hearts of people to not needing to change in order to be loved, but to know that in their need they are loved. In their darkness, they are held in great esteem by a God who wants nothing more than for them to be filled with life.
Bless our churches with forgiveness, understanding, compassion, empathy so they can know and feel the reality of who God is. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in this program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner. I’m excited for the opportunity to awaken your spiritual journey. If you enjoy this program, please subscribe and share it with a friend. This ministry also needs your support, so make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website.
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