6/5/2022 - Pentecost Sunday

 Holy Spirit and Renewal
Fifty days after the Passover, the People of Israel celebrated “Pentecost,” observing the giving of the law on Mount Sinai, when God wrote the law with his own finger on the tablets of stone. The feast was originally rooted in the celebration of the harvest. It was on that Pentecost Day that the apostles reaped the harvest of the Lord’s Passover of suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection, and received the Holy Spirit, who writes the law on our hearts. This same Holy Spirit who came mightily on Pentecost comes to us. The same Spirit is in us, by our baptism and confirmation – the same Spirit who transformed the apostles, who raises the dead, and who changes bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood. That same Spirit is in us, and this should give us tremendous confidence in following Christ.        The Holy Spirit, the “Lord and Giver of Life,” brings us back to our truest selves as he illumines us regarding the sanctity of life. The Spirit brings many gifts, and one of them is to enable us to see creation in its proper relationship to God – including the crowning of His creation, the gift of human life. When we do not have this light of the Holy Spirit, the law we have to follow seems like an imposition from the outside that limits our freedom. This is what people in the world sometimes feel about our attitude toward respect for life as sacred. When the Holy Spirit fills us, he gives us an inner attraction to all that is right and good, so that we do not feel pushed where we would rather not go, but rather pulled by the attractiveness of what is good and right.      Pope Benedict XVI described the Feast of Pentecost as the feast of “the Baptism of the Church.” It is the day the Church is “born again.” The Holy Spirit, who is the Lord and the Giver of Life ... has the power to sanctify, to remove divisions, to dissolve the confusion caused by sin. When we Catholics say that we have been “born again,” we refer to the transformation that God’s grace accomplished in us during baptism. Yes, if we have been baptized, we have been “born again.” And the Holy Spirit continues to work today in our Church and that work takes place most of all at every Mass. The Eucharist, wrote Pope Benedict XVI, “is a ‘perpetual Pentecost’ since every time we celebrate Mass, we receive the Holy Spirit who unites us more deeply with Christ and transforms us into Him.”         The Spirit of the Lord not only brings new birth to the Church, but also seeks to heal and renew the Church. And that is why we constantly need a new Pentecost. Whereas God brings harmony and peace to everything everywhere, sin causes chaos, conflict, and division to everything everywhere — in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our workplace, and in our church. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit began to reverse all this. But our fallen human nature is still with us, even in the post-Pentecost Church. And as church history unfolds, the Church is afflicted by ongoing divisions and schisms. Division and conflict are the result of sin, of pride, of lack of love, or disordered love separating us from God, the source of harmony and unity. We choose to follow our own human spirit or the spirit of the world, rather than listen and heed the promptings of the Spirit of God. That is why more than ever, we as individuals and we as a parish community, require a new Pentecost.      Perhaps, we doubt whether we or others in our parish are capable of change or capable of experiencing a new Pentecost. Doubt no longer. Today, we are all given a chance to be “born again.” As St. John Chrysostom once preached on Pentecost: "Today for us, earth is made heaven, not with stars descending to the earth, but with apostles ascending to heaven, because a copious grace of the Holy Spirit is poured out, and the orb of the earth has been turned into heaven, not changing nature, but fixing the will. The Holy Spirit found a publican and turned him into an evangelist; he found a persecutor, and rendered him an apostle; he found a thief, and he guided him into Paradise; He found a prostitute and made her chaste like a virgin; he found wise men and turned them into evangelists; he chased out evil and led in goodness; he ended slavery, and he introduced liberty; he pardoned debt and offered the grace of God.” If the Holy Spirit can do all this, then it is not impossible for Him to change you and me or renew our parish family.
Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O