Wonderful as this feast is, there could be a problem with
Pentecost – not unlike with our other great feasts – Christmas, for
instance, or Easter. The problem is that we may look at them more as
historical happenings than here-and-now happenings. They are both.
God is timeless, after all, and the divine action, the divine energy
unleashed in the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Sending of the
Spirit isn’t locked in the past: it’s ongoing, ever new. The Word of God
took flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary at a moment in time,
true, but the Word is still taking flesh in our time, in our flesh. And
Christ who triumphed over the power of death on Easter triumphs over
death even now. And the Holy Spirit who burst forth upon the apostles in
wind and fire on Pentecost is still fanning those flames, lighting those
fires in our time. Pentecost may be history but Pentecost is also here
and now!
But maybe I don’t
need to spend a lot of time convincing you that Pentecost is happening
right now because the Cathedral certainly looks like Pentecost, doesn’t
it! I mean, if you were to paint a picture of Pentecost, wouldn’t it
look like this? Pentecost is now! God’s Spirit is moving among us at
this moment – prodding us, waking us up, stirring us, sending us! The
Veni, Sancte Spiritus, that lovely Medieval Sequence which we just
heard, makes it clear that Pentecost is now. Listen again:
Come, Holy Spirit, Come! And from your
celestial home
Shed a ray of light divine. 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.
For a few moments, let me draw on those images to help
bring Pentecost from the past into the present.
“Heal our wounds, our strength renew.” Our wounds are
many. Too many to count, really. Who of us isn’t wounded, fragile,
sinful, weak? And our world is wounded, too. Think of the wounds of
famine, terrorism, and war, the wounds of casual disregard for human
life and human dignity, the wounds of sexism and racism, and the wounds
that we mindlessly and selfishly inflict on God’s magnificent creation.
Wounded we are. Healing we need. And healing is the Spirit’s gift, the
gift only the Spirit can give.
The Pentecost sequence continues: “On our dryness pour your
dew.” Do you experience dryness is your life? I know I do. In one way
or another we all long for the refreshing dew of the Holy Spirit. The
63rd Psalm says this in remarkably beautiful poetry: “O God, you are my
God, for you I long. My body pines for you, my soul thirsts for you like
a dry, weary land without water...For your love is better than
life.” Beautiful, but do we believe it? Believe that God’s love is
better than life? In our better moments we do; in our lesser ones we
settle for lesser loves and drink from wells that only make us
thirstier. Pentecost reminds us that only God’s love, a gift of the Holy
Spirit, completely satisfies. “On our dryness pour your dew.”
The Sequence goes on: “Bend the stubborn heart and will,
melt the frozen, warm the chill.” Stubborn hearts, frozen hearts - we
know what those are. How often do we cling to our cold, harsh judgments
about people? How often do we freeze people out of our lives, lock them
out of our hearts: people who think differently from us, people who have
hurt us, people we can’t bring ourselves to forgive? The Holy Spirit of
Pentecost wants to bend our rigid hearts, to break open our locked-up
hearts, to fire up our frozen hearts. “Melt the frozen, warm the chill!”
The Pentecost Sequence concludes with a plea:
On the faithful who adore and confess you,
evermore
In your sevenfold gift descend.
On the day we were confirmed the bishop extended his hands
over us and prayed a solemn prayer, naming each of those seven gifts,
and asking God to breathe them into us: “…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.”
My friends, each of those seven gifts is ours but
sometimes they are asleep within us. Pentecost can fan them into fire.
It can! Look at what happened to those frightened disciples in the
Pentecost story when they found their voice and took to the streets! Do
you think that God’s Spirit is any less at work now than then? We should
never sell the Spirit short!
Look around you. If you haven’t yet caught fire, look at
those who have! This community is alive with God’s Spirit. Witness our
prayer together. Witness this prayer! St. Paul told us in the first
reading that “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy
Spirit.” This liturgy and every liturgy we celebrate is our way of
saying that Jesus is Lord, our way of telling the world that Jesus is
Lord. We can always say it better and we can always mean it more, but we
would not be saying it at all were it not for God’s Spirit.
The same goes for everything we do in this place: every
child we teach, every stranger we welcome, every friend we feed, every
searcher we encounter. Everything we do here is a way of saying that
Jesus is Lord and is therefore the work of the Holy Spirit. Make no
mistake, then, my friends: the Spirit lives in this place; the Spirit
lives in each of us. Pentecost is not past. Pentecost is present!
“Come Holy Spirit! Fill the hearts of your faithful and
kindle in them the fire of your love.” Send forth your Spirit and we
will be created, and in the fire of that Spirit we will renew the face
of the earth!”
Father Michael G. Ryan
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