Hopping Aboard, Pentecost Sunday (C), May 23, 2010

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Anthony of Padua Church, New Bedford, MA
Pentecost Sunday 2010
May 23, 2010
Acts 2:1-11; 1 Cor 12:3-7,12-13; Rom 8:8-17; Jn 20:19-23; Jn 14:15-16,23-26

The following text guided today’s homily:

• Beginning of the Church:
  • When St. John the Baptist began his ministry at the Jordan river, he announced, “I have baptized you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is more powerful than I. … He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire” (Mt 3:11)
  • As Jesus was preparing to ascend into heaven, he told the disciples to remain in Jerusalem, saying, “In a short time you will be baptized in the Holy Spirit. … You will have the power of the Holy Spirit, who will descend upon you.”
  • Today, on Pentecost, we celebrate that baptism with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
  • Jesus’ whole mission was aimed at giving us the Holy Spirit that brings us new life.
  • Pentecost is the beginning of the Church because it is precisely the baptism of the Church by the Holy Spirit and with fire. All our own individual baptisms are put into the context of what began today in the Church by the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
  • Pope Benedict spoke of this interconnection between our baptism and the Church’s baptism two years ago on this feast, when he said, “In this baptism of the Holy Spirit the personal and communal dimensions — the ‘I’ of the disciple and the ‘we’ of the Church — are inseparable. The Spirit consecrates the person and at the same time makes him a living member of the mystical body of Christ, a participant in the mission to witness to his love.”
  • So today as we celebrate with joy the spiritual birthday or baptism of the Church by the Holy Spirit, we are called to open ourselves to the way the Holy Spirit wishes to consecrate us anew to live as a member of Christ’s mystical body and a participant, not a spectator, in the mission to witness his love. Our mission is precisely to help all people enter into this baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit and always live with the fire of love for God and others that was begun this day.
• That is the meaning of salvation, to live in accordance with the Holy Spirit. Jesus came from heaven to earth in order to send the Holy Spirit to be our helper and guide throughout all of life. He told us during the Last Supper that it was good for Him to go, because otherwise he would not send us the Holy Spirit, which would be the completion of his work. So great is the gift of the Holy Spirit that Jesus says we should prefer it even to his presence.
• St. John Vianney once remarked that if we truly allow the Holy Spirit to come alive in us, our salvation and the salvation of others will be relatively straightforward and easy. He used an image that I’ve always found powerful and unforgettable: “The Holy Spirit is like a man with a carriage with a good horse who is ready to drive us to Paris.  We have only to say yes and climb inside!”
  • That’s what the Christian life is meant to be. The Holy Spirit invites us to hop aboard his carriage. That means:
    • First, we have to trust him.
    • Second, we need to cease trying to control the direction of our lives and give him the “keys” and the “wheel.”
    • Third, we need to get into the carriage
    • Fourth, we need to stay in the carriage
    • Fifth, we need to hold on for the ride, even if he takes us into dark valleys, over canyons, and into places where we’d prefer not to go.
    • Sixth, we need readily to move over, with joy not jealousy, when the Holy Spirit invites others aboard.
    • Lastly, we need to cooperate with him to encourage those we know to get on board as well, because otherwise, we won’t end up in Paris.
  • There are many Christians, however, who even though they hopped onto the carriage of the Holy Spirit at baptism, have gotten off. Some have disembarked because they preferred a sin to God. Others just basically fell off because of inattentiveness and have never got back on. Some of these people who have fallen off, by God’s mercy, may still be trying to live a Christian life and heading in the right direction, but they’re trying to walk, step by step, to Paris, but as St. John Vianney points out, there’s a much better way.
• I read a story a short time ago of an Italian family that emigrated to the United States. They were poor and after selling their home and all their possessions, the parents had just basically enough money to buy three tickets for themselves and their ten-year-old son on a ship coming to the New York. They didn’t have any money to buy food at any of the restaurants aboard, so before they left, they just took as much bread and cheese as they could to sustain them on the journey. At the beginning of the trip, all was fine, but as the trip went on, the bread got stale and the cheese became moldy. They continued to eat it until one morning, a couple of days before they were scheduled to arrive at Ellis Island, the ten-year old started to cry. He just couldn’t take it any more. He refused to eat any more. Out of sacrificial love, the parents gave him the pennies that they still had so that he could go to one of the restaurants on board and buy some healthy food. After about an hour, the boy came back, still crying. The parents were crushed. They had given him all they had left and it wasn’t enough to help their son stop weeping. They said to him, “We have spent all the money we had to buy you a good meal. Why are you still crying?” The boy replied, “I’m crying because I just found out that one meal a day was included in the price of the tickets we bought, and for the entire trip, instead of having these great meals, we’ve just been eating bad bread and cheese!”
• Many of us go through our journey of life like that family made their transatlantic voyage, being insufficiently nourished by unsatisfactory food. We go through the Christian life with “bread and cheese,” without joy, without enthusiasm, when, spiritually, we have always been eligible for something far greater.
  • During the Vigil of Pentecost, there’s an Old Testament reading that seems out of place. It’s from the Book of Exodus and describes how God called Moses to the top of Mt. Sinai. The only initial point of contact seems to be that God came down upon Mt. Sinai like a pillar of fire, in a way that seems to evoke how the Holy Spirit came down upon the disciples as tongues of fire.
  • But the real purpose of the reading is to describe two different types of law. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, which was a law written in stone, that some of the Jews were faithful to, and many weren’t, but regardless, they looked at their end of the covenant as keeping the letter of God’s commands, as fulfilling their religious duties, as being obedient.
  • The link to Pentecost is that on this great day of the Church, God changed two things. First, he supplanted the law written on stone with the “new law,” who is the Holy Spirit himself within us. This new law doesn’t contradict the old law but brings it to fulfillment. The old law was looked at as following the commandments of God whereas now we’re called to follow the God of the commandments. That’s the first thing. The second was our motivation. For the Jews, the principal way they related to the law was through fidelity and obedience. There’s nothing wrong with those, but there’s something more that God wants, which the Holy Spirit seeks to make possible. It’s that we relate to God and this new law not out of duty but out of love. The Holy Spirit has been sent into our hearts precisely so that we may live a love life with God, not one of duty.
  • This is absolutely key for us to hear, because many Catholics live their Catholic faith as a thing of duty, not love. They’ll keep the commandments, they’ll come to Mass, they’ll get their prayers in, they’ll go to confession the minimal once a year, but all as merely religious obligations to which they’re faithful, rather than as encounters with a God they really love. The Holy Spirit wants to change that. He wants us to relate to God out of love, not out of duty.
  • We’ve all seen the difference between someone who is in love and someone who isn’t. We’ve seen it in couples who have been married for a while. Some couples will remain faithful to each other, they will try to help each other, they certainly don’t hate each other, but, as the song goes, they’ve “lost that loving feeling.” We all know that love is more than a feeling, but such couples have lost their zeal, they’ve lost their enthusiasm, they’ve lost what they once had when they were dating, the joy they had the day they were married, when they were newlyweds, when they got their first home, when they received word they were expecting their first child. We can contrast such couples with those who have been married for a while who are still obviously in love with each other, who treat each other with affection, who burn with a desire to make the other happy in little ways. The first group is living on “stale bread and moldy cheese,” relating to each other out of fidelity and duty. The second are living as the Holy Spirit wishes.
  • That analogy is relevant to the way we practice the faith, pray the Mass, live our lives. Are we just “faithful” or are we “in love”? God wants us to be in love. I say this because — for causes I still haven’t been able to figure out because I haven’t been around that long — so many people in this parish seem to live their faith out of duty rather than with fire. They don’t show much enthusiasm for Mass. They don’t sing. They don’t enthusiastically say the responses. Even when they come for Holy Communion, they seem sometimes to be going through the spiritual motions rather than look as if they first know they’re receiving the Creator of the world in their hands and second that they love him and have been longing to come into Communion with him. They seem to be anything but “happy” that they’ve been called to the Supper of the Lamb of God. The Christian who loves God should be more enthusiastic about coming to be with God at Mass than the biggest Celtics fanatic was last night at the TD Banknorth Garden cheering the Celtics to a blowout victory over the Orlando Magic. How is it that human beings can with great zeal and sacrifice go to a sports event, cheer at the top of their lungs, sing “Sweet Caroline,” slap high fives with strangers, but people come to Mass and mumble responses, don’t sing at all, and sit far enough away from others that they even can’t wish the sign of peace? The Holy Spirit’s gift of reverence is meant to help us to treat God as he deserves, and God deserves our best — and all our heart.
  • Today, for people who are not yet on fire with love for God, the Holy Spirit wants to work a miracle, a miracle greater than what God did with Elijah, when he consumed with fire a holocaust that had been drenched in water. We prayed in the sequence before Mass that God the Holy Spirit would “bend the stubborn heart and will,” and “melt the frozen, warm the chill.” He wants to light us all on fire, but we’ve got to give him permission. To live according to the Holy Spirit is incompatible with living the faith in a frozen, chilly, unenthusiastic, going-through-the-motions kind of way. If we’re not on fire with love for God and others, today is the day that the Holy Spirit wants to change that, forever.
• I’d like to highlight three other aspects to this life according to the Holy Spirit to which every Christian is called, three ways he seeks to nourish us with real spiritual food, three ways he seeks to guide us as he drives us not toward Paris but toward him.
  • Life according to the Holy Spirit is a life of grace, where we focus first and primarily on what God wants to do in us.
    • We don’t even know how to pray as we ought, St. Paul tells us. We need to turn to the Holy Spirit and give him permission to help us in all the areas of our life, beginning with prayer. It’s the Holy Spirit who helps us to cry out “Abba! Father!” in prayer, who reminds us of what Jesus taught us, who leads us into all truth. The first step of life according to the Holy Spirit is to be conscious of him and to allow ourselves to be guided.
  • Life according to the Holy Spirit is a life that requires that our desires for sin and our opting for sin be killed.
    • St. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, that to live according to the Spirit means precisely not to live according to the flesh. There’s a strict separation that he describes both in terms of our desires and our choices. “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.  For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, indeed it cannot; and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” If we’re living according to the Holy Spirit, we’ll be desiring what the Holy Spirit wants, not what our sinful desires seek. He’s clear that when we set our minds on the things of the flesh, it kills us spiritually, and we’re hostile to God. Most of us who sin might not think that in choosing to sin — like not coming to Mass on Sunday, or telling a lie to a colleague — we’re not hating God, but, regardless of our subjective intention, that’s what our action is actually doing. We’re saying, “This is what I want to do now, Lord, and I want you dead to me at this moment, so that I can do my will rather than your will.”
    • What does this life according to the flesh look like that must be killed for us to live a truly Christian life according to the Spirit? St. Paul describes it in his letter to the Galatians, where he says that the works of the flesh are:  fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.” He’s saying clearly that we cannot live according to the Holy Spirit if we are full of lust, if we seek or have sex outside of marriage, if we idolize celebrities and sports stars, if we see curandeuses, tarot card readers or participate in the occult, if we harbor jealousy or anger, if we’re selfish, if we like getting drunk or high. And because we need to live by the Holy Spirit to be saved, St. Paul makes absolutely clear what life according to the flesh brings: “I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”
    • The Holy Spirit seeks to help us to put to death life according to the flesh, but we need to allow him to do so. To get into his chariot means to make a choice to leave our filth behind. There’s no both-and here, only an either-or. It’s either life according to God or life according to our own desires and what so many in the world value.
    • We can clearly see that, sadly, most of the people in the world, and many of the people who call themselves Catholic, are not in the Holy Spirit’s chariot, but in fact prefer to be in a stretch limousine full of booze, sexy celebrities, pimps, astrologers, and a whole bunch of people who want to tell the driver where to go. We’ve got to choose the Holy Spirit’s carriage or the stretch limo. And if we really love others, we need to help them choose, enthusiastically, the Holy Spirit’s carriage, too. That brings me to the third point.
  • Life according to the Holy Spirit is a life that seeks to give witness to Jesus Christ and help others come into communion with him and with his body, the Church.
    • The Holy Spirit came down upon the first Christians as tongues of fire — tongues because they were to speak, fire because they were to speak with the passion of burning love. And they responded. Jesus had promised that the Holy Spirit he would send would teach them all things, lead them to all truth, remind them of everything he had taught them, and prove the world wrong about sin, holiness and judgment. Then, moved by the Holy Spirit, and giving witness together with him, they began to fulfill this mission. That mission has been entrusted to us. We have each been given, as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” He has given us particular gifts to carry out the mission of the Church. But we need to pray to identify them and then begin to use them for the purpose for which God gave them to us.
    • We are called to be witnesses of Christ. This does not mean just that we can testify that he’s alive, that he loves us, that he’s saved us, and wants us to share an eternal communion with him. It means that we ourselves testify to him by our own lives, that when others see us, they witness, to some degree, Jesus. At the end of our life, and now, people are supposed to be able to say about us much more than “Bill was a good person.” “I liked Sally.” They’re supposed to be able to say, “Bill reminded me of Jesus Christ.” “Sally was a Christian who really brought honor to the name.” That’s quite a task, frightening at first. But it’s made possible by life according to the Spirit, the Holy Spirit helps us to become like Jesus in boldly preaching the truth, in boldly living a life of sacrificial love.
• The way we are renewed in life according to the Spirit, in what was begun on the day of the Church’s baptism and our baptism, is here at Mass. The Church is like a station where the Holy Spirit pulls in his carriage each day to allow all the passengers to get not bread and cheese, but the Lamb of God and the blood of eternal salvation. It’s where he stops to invite others to climb aboard. It’s the starting point from which he seeks to drive us through the world to give witness to Jesus in courageous word and loving deed.
• Today as we prepare for the Holy Spirit who filled the apostles on Pentecost to come down and overshadow the altar miraculously to turn not just bread and wine into Jesus’ body and blood but men and women, boys and girls into his mystical body, let us, who have been baptized by the Holy Spirit and fire, ask the Holy Spirit to live with Him and with fire. We pray together: Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and enkindle in us the real fire of your love!

The readings for today’s Mass were: