Acts 2:1-11

Romans 8:8-17

John 14:15-16,23-26

Do you know why  Christians celebrate Eucharist on Sundays? Didn’t God rest on the last day of the week. Sunday is actually deemed to be the first day of the week, not the last; Sunday is the day that God began creation we are told in the Genesis story. The Spirit of God moved on the waters on the first day! For the Jews Spirit  is a feminine gender word which also means breath or wind. Like God, Jews rested on the seventh day, Saturday, and early Christians, too,  used to go to synagogues on Saturdays. With the advent of Pentecost, however, which is 50 days after Easter, itself a Sunday, the church has traditionally also celebrated not only its birth day, but the weekly Lord’s Day on a Sunday. We celebrate Eucharist on Sunday, then as a reminder of the first creation and of the second creation. The Holy Spirit that stirred the waters of creation returned to us on Pentecost making a new creation, her church, and making us new creatures because of the Resurrection. This is really what we are all about today.   And every Sunday! So, happy birthday!

Although today is the reminder of starting something new, it is also an ending.  Today we end the Easter season.  The Easter candle which has been burning since Easter to remind us of the light that has come into the world, will be set aside and used only of there is a baptism. Next week we continue what is called “Ordinary Time’ which simply means that the joyous feasts have ended, and we go back to the Gospel of Luke and continue to read the story of Jesus, focusing primarily on his teachings and parables.

So what is Pentecost all about?  One of the major things it is about is, of course, the Holy Spirit.  We often pray that the Holy Spirit enlighten the hearts of the faithful. I like that image because I think that any light that can be shed in our lives is a good thing! I have here a camping light here that can be used to shed light in the darkness and help us to see.  But it can’t work by itself.  It has to have batteries.  Perhaps think of the Holy Spirit as the battery behind us that gives us the ‘energy’, often called ‘grace’ that powers us, allowing us to see.

The Apostles and followers of Jesus were locked up in a room, frightened and confused, but awaiting something that had been promised them. When the Holy Spirit came, it came as tongues of fire – light and energy – which caused all of them to see in the the light and be the light in so many ways.  They began to speak in such a way that people could understand them in any language. The frightened followers all were energized and were given gifts to be able to go out and preach the  message of Christ.  Peter, in particular, preaches a moving homily using the Jewish prophet Joel to explain what had happened to them: the Spirit was causing them to dream dreams, see visions and prophesy. The church was alive and energized!

So Pentecost then is the celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit energizing the church and sending its members forth to live and preach the good news of Jesus, the Christ. And like the energizer bunny, it goes on and on. Our readings and hymns today abound with attempts to explain what the Spirit is and what the Spirit means. God sends the Spirit in Jesus’ name.  We are told that the Spirit can teach us all things and remind us of all that Jesus taught us.  For this reason we need to have faith in the Spirit and leave ourselves open to its work.

The Holy Spirit is God, the third person of the Trinity. It is God’s own presence that comes in to us and mentors us and makes Jesus alive in us. Confirmation is the sacrament we most closely associate with the coming of the Spirit.  In adults baptism and confirmation are often given in the same day because confirmation is a deepening of the gifts we already receive at Baptism.  In younger people we most often separate the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation because the child received Baptism before the age of reason, and was baptized by the will of the parents.  Confirmation becomes an initiation rite, then, where the child confirms the baptismal choice and the depth of the gifts received at Baptism is strengthened by the presence of the Holy Spirit in the child. It is also a commissioning rite – one in which we are sent out to the world to preach repentance and the forgiveness of sin. So each Pentecost we are reminded of our mission to do this.

St. Paul often talks about gifts of the Spirit – the greatest one being caritas or love. But the Church also identifies other gifts that come from the Spirit, gifts that presumably were given to the apostles and disciples in the upper room at Pentecost and are given to each of us – gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. We see many of these gifts acted out in the Pentecost story.

Wisdom involves seeing the light – seeing things as God sees them and not as humans do. Christ often told us that God’s ways are not our ways. The Holy Spirit can help us distinguish what is God’s way, and help us make right judgments in our lives.

Understanding also involves seeing the light – it is the light bulb that goes on when we recognize the truth in something. It is the “Eureka” moment. The Apostles had such a moment at Pentecost when all the things Jesus had taught them, his Passion and Death, his Resurrection, his Ascension – all came together and made sense for the Apostles, so they had the ability to see and teach others. They understood what it was all about.

Counsel is the mentoring aspect of the Spirit. It is the compass that can guide us when we lose our way.  It is the the map that we need when we don’t know which way to go. It is the friendly advice that pushes us in the right direction when we reach that path in the road that goes in two directions.

Fortitude is the gift that helps us by giving us the strength to make difficult moral decisions. Think of fortitude as a shot of moral adrenalin that overcomes the fear that we may have to choose a difficult but correct path. With fortitude the early Christians could go out and preach the Good News even in the face of persecution.

Knowledge is the gift of the Spirit that helps us to understand what is difficult to understand. It gives us the obligation to try to understand our religion, to understand the Scriptures.  As thinking beings, the Spirit can help us to make sense of the spiritual realm which is often not as accessible as worldly knowledge.  I have often said to you that as Christians we have been told not to think – just to accept.  This gift of the Spirit says just the opposite.  Use your minds to ponder the mysteries of God, and the Spirit will help you. Never be afraid to use your minds. Our Catholic theology is a direct result of great Christian thinkers of the past and present.

Piety is the gift of recognizing our gifts. It is our recognition of the wonderful things that God has done for us and the feeling of thankfulness that comes with it. It is the joy that the Apostles felt at Pentecost, the gratitude that allowed them to praise God and spread his Good News.

Lastly, we are given the misunderstood gift of “fear of the Lord.” This is probably a poor translation because the Church does not believe that God, our loving parent, should be feared.  A better translation might be “respect of the Lord.” When we respect a person we often want to be like that person and makes us not want to hurt or dishonor that person.  It gives us impetus for not sinning because we don’t want to hurt God. It is respect for his Creation, the environment, and for his Word.

Thus, in the Pentecost story today we can see many of the aspects of the theology that have developed over the centuries. What is most important for us to remember, I think, is that the Spirit is God’s gift to us, the Spirit is with us, the Spirit can help us grow, guide us, help us to become a better persons, help us make right decisions, give us strength when we are down or bad things happen to us, and so much more. So it is time today to celebrate those gifts, that loving God has given us, and to become more aware of the power that we have through the Spirit. In everything you do, the Spirit is with you. Listen to her!

Today we come to the high point of our Easter celebration, the Feast of Pentecost. Pentecost, meaning "fifty days" after the Passover -- was the feast day in which the Jewish people celebrated the Giving of the Law on Mount Sinai. On Mt Sinai the different tribes of Israel entered into covenant with God and with one another and so became the people of God. God gave them the Ten Commandments as a guide to show them how to be a people, because being people of God means relating to God and to one another in a way that God Himself has mapped out, not in the way that we think is right. Proverbs 14:12 says "There is a way that seems right to a people, but in the end it leads to death." The beginning of wisdom, the beginning of true religion, therefore, is when we realize that as humans we are limited and shortsighted, and so we ask God to show us how to be the people of God that He has created us to be.

Whenever human beings forget how limited we are and try to take the initiative in our dealings with God, what inevitably follows is disaster. An example is the story of the Tower of Babel that we are told in Gen 11 where human beings decided to build a tower that would reach to heaven. In this way they would have access to God whenever they wanted, in this way they could manipulate God. But in the process of building the human bridge to heaven God came and confused their languages. They began to speak different languages, there was no more communication, no more understanding among them, and they could no longer work together. The result was the proliferation of languages and human misunderstanding.

Does the story of Babel remind you of the story we read today from the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples of Jesus speaking in other languages? Actually the two stories are related. But Pentecost is not a repeat of Babel, Pentecost is a reversal of Babel, and this for three reasons:

1. At Babel human beings decided to build a tower to God by their own effort; at Pentecost it is now God who decides to build a bridge to humans by sending the Holy Spirit. Babel was a human initiative, a human effort, Pentecost is a divine initiative, a divine activity through the Holy Spirit.

Imagine this: Jesus ascends to heaven and mandates the disciples to spread the Good News from Jerusalem to all Judea, to Samaria and to the ends of the earth. But the task is too much for them. How could these twelve, uneducated, rural fishermen from Galilee go out and address the learned world of Greek philosophers and Roman poets. Moreover even their fellow Jews are hostile to them. So what do they do? They go in and pray, and wait and pray, and wait -- for God's initiative. And as soon as God gives the sign of the Holy Spirit, there they go, all out on the streets boldly and fearlessly proclaiming the Good News.

What God asks of us as believers always seems impossible. And it is indeed impossible if we rely on our own initiatives and will power alone. But if, like the disciples, we realize that godliness is above us, and so commit ourselves to waiting daily on God in prayer, God will not be found wanting. At the opportune time God will send the flame of the Holy Spirit to invigorate us, and change us from lukewarm to zealous, fervent, enthusiastic believers.

2. Babel was a requiem of misunderstanding, Pentecost is a chorus of mutual understanding. The miracle of Pentecost is very different from the miracle of Babel. At Babel, the people came together with one language, understanding themselves. After God's intervention they dispersed no longer understanding each other. At Pentecost, on the other hand, people of different ethnic backgrounds (Persians, Asians, Romans, Egyptians, Libyans, Arabs, etc) came together unable to communicate, but after the miracle of Pentecost, they said, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that we hear them, each of us in our own language?" (Acts 2:7-8).

In order words, as Peter, for example, spoke everyone from all the different language groups gathered there would hear Peter speaking in their own language. The miracle of Pentecost was a miracle of mutual understanding, a restoration of that precious gift that humanity lost at Babel. Now, someone might ask, is there such a language that one could speak and everybody would understand in their own mother tongue? The answer is yes. Ant the name of that language is LOVE. Love is the language that all women and men understand irrespective of ethnic background. Everybody understands when you smile. Love is the language of the children of God, the only language we shall speak in heaven.

3. Finally, Pentecost differs from Babel in its result. Babel resulted in the disintegration of the human family into different races and nationalities. Pentecost, on the other hand, brings all peoples together and reunifies them under one universal family. This universal family embracing all races and nationalities is called church. "Catholic" means "universal". On Pentecost we celebrate the birthday of the Church. Today is, therefore, an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to be active and faithful members of this family of God we call Church.

Fulton J. Sheen once said about the church that even though we are God's chosen people, we often behave more like God's frozen people. God's frozen people indeed: frozen in our prayer life, frozen in the way we relate with one another, frozen in the way we celebrate our faith. We don't seem to be happy to be in God's house; we are always in a hurry to get it over and done with as soon as possible. Today is a great day to ask the Holy Spirit to rekindle in us the spirit of new life and enthusiasm, the fire of God's love.