Fr. Roger J. Landry
Espirito Santo Church, Fall River, MA
Nuptial Mass of Cody Knight and Kimberly Abgrab
May 22, 2021
Sir 26:1-4.13-16, Ps 34, Phil 4:4-9, Mt 5:1-12
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
“Rejoice in the Lord always,” St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Philippians, which Cody and Kimberly chose for today’s wedding Mass. “I shall say it again: rejoice!” We are filled with joy and abundant gratitude to God for getting you to this day — despite a pandemic, despite some serious health challenges — and for making it possible for us to be here with you as he prepares to join you in one flesh for the rest of your lives. Jesus came into the world so that his joy might be in us and our joy might be complete. And since God-with-us is with us until the end of time, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, in poverty and prosperity, it is indeed possible, in fact our duty and salvation, to rejoice in him at all times and always and everywhere give him thanks and praise.
Joy is a fruit of the action of the Holy Spirit in us (Gal 5:22). To rejoice always, we must cooperate with the work of the Holy Spirit. And it is impossible to miss the imprint of the Holy Spirit, Kimberly and Cody, on your marriage day. You are getting married in this beautiful Church dedicated to the Holy Spirit. You are being wed on the Vigil of Pentecost, celebrating that day on which the Holy Spirit came down upon Mary and the Apostles in the Upper Room, as depicted in the beautiful stained glass window in the choir loft. This sanctuary is full of the bandeiras (flags) and coronas (crowns) reflective of Portuguese piety toward the Divino Espirito Santo, the third Person of the Blessed Trinity. And the priest celebrating your wedding was here on April 12, 2010, as Kimberly’s Confirmation sponsor, Kimberly, as she was sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, as the Holy Spirit came down upon her as her helper and guide and as she were filled with his gifts of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, reverence, prudence, courage and fear of the Lord. This is the same Holy Spirit who likewise strengthened you in faith, Cody, on March 8, 2010 at St. Dominic Parish in Swansea.
We know what happened on Pentecost. The Holy Spirit worked a moral miracle in the lives of the apostles in the Upper Room. On Holy Thursday, despite their promises that they would never betray the Lord, the apostles left the Last Supper and all of them let the Lord down. 53 days later, after the Holy Spirit descended upon them as tongues of fire, they left that same Upper Room and courageously bore witness to Christ even to the point of death. That’s the difference that the Holy Spirit makes. He does the same thing in marriage. He takes the natural love of a man and woman for each other and strengthens it, raising marriage up to the dignity of a sacrament, a sign and means of intimate loving communion with God. Here the Holy Spirit who came down upon each of you in Confirmation wants to come down upon your marriage to fortify you to love each other not just with human love, but with the very love of God.
In the first reading from the Book of Sirach, we hear sung the praises of a good, worthy and virtuous wife, who brings joy to her husband and radiance to her home. That’s the type of wife and generous gift you want to be, Kimberly, for Cody. The Holy Spirit wants to help you become that type of wife and mother.
In the second reading, St. Paul instructs you, “Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.” It is the Holy Spirit that wants to help you to pray with this type of peaceful trust and gratitude. St. Paul tells us elsewhere, “We don’t know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with inexpressible sighs” (Rom 8:26). Count on his intercession. Likewise in that same reading, St. Paul tells you, “Think about these things”: “whatever is true, … honorable, … just,… pure, … lovely, … gracious, [and] … worthy of praise.” The Holy Spirit helps us always to keep our mind on the things of the Spirit, the things that are above. He wants to help you lift up your hearts, lift up your minds, to God in everything.
And in the Holy Gospel, you wanted us to focus on the Beatitudes and Jesus’ call for us to be poor in spirit, meek, hungry for holiness, merciful, clean of heart, peace-making, compassionate to the point of tears, and faithful to Jesus even when persecuted. That is a high order that few of us would ever be able to achieve by our own efforts. But the Holy Spirit makes it possible for us to live by those words, just like he’s made it possible for generations of Christian saints throughout the centuries.
The Holy Spirit wants to make this difference in your marriage. A little later in this Mass, we will have the beautiful “Nuptial Blessing” after the Our Father. The apex of that prayer is when we turn to God the Father through Jesus his Son and ask: “Look now with favor upon these your servants, joined together in Marriage, who ask to be strengthened by your blessing. Send down on them the grace of the Holy Spirit and pour your love into their hearts, that they may remain faithful in the Marriage covenant.”
The Holy Spirit wants to infuse your hearts with the fire of his divine love so that you may remain faithful to each other and to God always. That’s what makes Christian marriage different from all other marriages: this conscious cooperation with the work of the Holy Spirit in day-to-day married life.
The year before both of you were born, Pope St. John Paul II wrote a beautiful Letter to Families in which he basically said that the whole reality of Christian marriage and family can be summarized by that prayer in the Nuptial Blessing beseeching the “outpouring of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” He stated, “This ‘visitation’ of the Holy Spirit gives rise to the inner strength of families as well as to the power capable of uniting them in love and truth” (LF 4). He said that marital love can be “deepened and preserved” only by that Love “poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (LF 11, see Rom 5:5). The Holy Spirit fills us, in other words, with divine love and changes our hearts so that we can love each other as God has loved us first (see Amoris Laetitia 120). “Without such an ‘outpouring,’” he said, “it would be very difficult to understand … and carry out” the noble Christian vocation to marriage and family (11), since that is a vocation not just to human love but something far greater.
The Holy Spirit, he went on to say, also helps couples to grasp the beautiful connection between marriage and children. We know from the beginning of the Book of Genesis that in the beginning “God created man in his image and likeness: in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). The greatest example of the image of God is, therefore, the family, in which there is identity and communion modeled on the three-persons-in-one-God who is the Blessed Trinity. Just like God the Father and God the Son could love each other in such a way that their love, eternal, could “breathe forth” the Holy Spirit, so a husband and wife made in God’s image can literally “make love” and generate another person who is both a fruit of their love and a means by which that love can grow. St. John Paul II said, therefore, that a Christian husband and wife must always remain aware that each of their bodies is a “dwelling place of the Holy Spirit,” and it is in that sanctuary that children — themselves destined in baptism to become Temples of the Holy Spirit as well — are conceived and grow (LF 18). The grace of the Holy Spirit, the love of God poured into the hearts of a married couple, can bear this wondrous fruit.
These thoughts are deep, mysterious and beautiful, but it’s important to make them practical. The Holy Spirit whom we pray will come down upon you anew in a few minutes wants to enhance in you as a couple what he wishes to do in every believer.
First, since the Holy Spirit wants to help every one of us to pray, to recognize that we are beloved sons and daughters who turn to a Father who loves us more than all parents combined loved their children, he likewise wants to help you to learn how to pray as a couple and a family. As the Venerable Father Patrick Peyton, buried here in the Diocese of Fall River, famously used to say, “The family that prays together, stays together.” To remain faithful to your marital covenant, the Holy Spirit wants to help you to pray, each day of your married life. Respond to that help and turn to God each day. The early Church, as it awaited the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, huddled around Mary, who taught them how to receive and respond to the Holy Spirit’s gifts. I would encourage you to imitate the members of the early Church, by yourself drawing close to Mary through praying the family Rosary each day, which St. John Paul II called the prayer “of and for the family” (RVM 41).
Second, just as Holy Spirit wants to help everyone to learn how to “live according to the Holy Spirit,” putting to death the things in us that are worldly and helping us to raise up our minds, hearts and actions to God (Rom 8:5-11, Gal 5:16-25), so he wants to help every married couple learn to do so. We live today at a time in which so many give into a life opposed to the Spirit, a life that places its heart and treasure in pleasure, fame, power, money and material possessions. The Holy Spirit wants to help you to be different and to place your heart in the things that really matter, the things of God. The Christian life can be defined as cooperation with the Holy Spirit. Christian married life must be so, we could say, twice as much, with spouses helping each other to attune themselves even more to the Holy Spirit’s inspirations as he seeks to guide them day by day. To remain faithful to your marital covenant, the Holy Spirit wants to help you to “live in the Spirit” and “follow the Spirit” (Gal 5:26). Say yes to that work, as emphatically as you will pronounce your statements of intention and marital vows.
Third, just as the Holy Spirit came down on the first apostles as tongues of fire so that they could proclaim the Gospel with ardent love, so he wants to come down on both of you, to help you, as a couple, share the faith not just with the children and godchildren with whom God will bless you but with your parish, your friends, your co-workers and those you meet. In particular he wants you to help him evangelize other couples, who often are so much in need of guidance as to how to build their life on God. Pope Francis wrote in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel five years ago, “Through the Church, marriage and the family receive the grace of the Holy Spirit from Christ, in order to bear witness to the Gospel of God’s love” (AL 71). We’re living at a time in which that witness to the Gospel of God’s love is desperately needed and God the Holy Spirit wants to work with and through you to proclaim the truth about marriage in all its beauty. To help you remain faithful to your marital covenant, the Holy Spirit wants you not to keep to yourselves the love he is pouring into your hearts, but lavishly to share it, because in sharing it, your own love will grow.
Fourth, just as the Holy Spirit strengthened the apostles to remain faithful and fruitful under various challenges, sufferings and persecution, just as the Holy Spirit has emboldened the martyrs throughout the centuries, from young girls to old men and everyone else in between, so he wants to strengthen you by his outpouring to remain true no matter what crosses you may be asked to bear. Pope Francis wrote in The Joy of the Gospel that often couples and families experience “moments of pain and difficulty” and “dark hours,” what the vows point to when they describe “for worse, … for sicker, and … for poorer.” But in those moments, the Holy Father said, “With the grace of the Holy Spirit, [the spouses] grow in holiness through married life, also by sharing in the mystery of Christ’s cross, which transforms difficulties and sufferings into an offering of love” (AL 317). Crosses are allowed precisely to help couples grow in holiness through married life, to help them grow in unselfish love. The Holy Spirit has already helped you through some of those moments together over the course of these last couple of years. Know that today God the Father through God the Son is sending the God the Holy Spirit upon you anew to help you convert whatever crosses you may be asked to carry into means grow in communion with Christ and in loving communion with each other.
Lastly, just as the Holy Spirit wants to help each one of us unite our whole life to Jesus, so he wants to help every Christian married couple live a truly Eucharistic life. The same Holy Spirit who overshadows a young man and a young woman before the altar to make them one flesh is the one who overshadows the altar to transform, through the person of the priest, bread and wine into Jesus’ Body and Blood and all of us into “one Body, one Spirit in Christ” (Eucharistic Prayer III). The Holy Spirit wants to make your love truly Eucharistic so that, as you receive here Christ’s sacred Body and Blood, you may be able to say to each other, “This is my Body,” “This is my Blood,” “This is my heart, my sweat, my callouses, my joys, my tears, all I am and have,” “given out of love for you.” Pope Benedict told young Catholics from across the world in 2008 that the Eucharist is the “Perpetual Pentecost,” in which the Holy Spirit is poured down upon us, to strengthen us in love for God and for each other. We pray that, for you, the Eucharist, this Perpetual Pentecost, will also be a constant renewal of the vows you will profess to each other and to God and a continuous experience of the nuptial blessing the Church today for you implores.
At the every end of Mass today, on the Vigil of Pentecost, in the Church of Espirito Santo, in a sanctuary filled with reminders of devotion to the Holy Spirit, we will pray, immediately before the final blessing, “May the Holy Spirit of God always pour forth his love into your hearts!” That love is what will make you like the woman praised by Sirach in the Scriptures. That love is what will help you to live the Beatitudes. That love is what will help you to rejoice always, as we pray that the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead will, through the Sacrament you receive and minister to each other today, bring you one day, hand-in-hand, to the eternal wedding banquet to which the Eucharist on earth is a foretaste and to which all of the work of the Holy Spirit is directed. And that love poured forth into your hearts will be a blessing through which God will bless us all.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Book of Sirach
Happy the husband of a good wife, twice-lengthened are his days; A worthy wife brings joy to her husband, peaceful and full is his life. A good wife is a generous gift bestowed upon him who fears the LORD; Be he rich or poor, his heart is content, and a smile is ever on his face. A gracious wife delights her husband, her thoughtfulness puts flesh on his bones; A gift from the LORD is her governed speech, and her firm virtue is of surpassing worth. Choicest of blessings is a modest wife, priceless her chaste person. Like the sun rising in the LORD’s heavens, the beauty of a virtuous wife is the radiance of her home. The Word of the Lord
Responsorial Psalm (34) — Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord
I will bless the LORD at all times; praise shall be always in my mouth.
My soul will glory in the LORD that the poor may hear and be glad.
Magnify the LORD with me; let us exalt his name together.
I sought the LORD, who answered me, delivered me from all my fears.
Look to God that you may be radiant with joy and your faces may not blush for shame.
In my misfortune I called, the LORD heard and saved me from all distress.
The angel of the LORD, who encamps with them, delivers all who fear God.
Learn to savor how good the LORD is; happy are those who take refuge in him.
A reading from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Philippians
Brothers and Sisters: Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all. The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me. Then the God of peace will be with you. The Word of the Lord
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew
When he saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him. He began to teach them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you. The Gospel of the Lord
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