Not Always What We Want

Not always what we want

Pentecost Sunday is a day on which we are reminded that the Holy Spirit was promised and has been given. We celebrate the fulfillment of a promise by Jesus that the Advocate, the Paraclete, the one…

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Pentecost

Homily for June 4

Image source Homily for Pentecost Sunday ( Scriptures for today's Mass) (No audio today, platform is down) ...

A Concord Pastor Comments

Pentecost is meant to renew and refresh the Spirit within and among us. This day calls us to bow and to lean into the Spirit’s driving force that we might go with it and not be left broken, scattered in its path.

Pentecost calls us to endure the heat  of the inevitable friction generated when the Gospel grates  against the selfishness of our personal agendas.

No Coincidence in the Spirit

Those who recognize the action of the Spirit in the world tend to be a humble, optimistic, generous people.  Conversely, those who look at the world and feel that whatever happens is totally up to them have a tendency to be proud, pessimistic and stingy.  What kind of person do you want to be?  It depends on what you believe. Therefore, choose what you believe carefully.

The great feast of Pentecost that we celebrate today proclaims to us that God is real and God is active in our world.  Let us then today embrace this great truth.  Let us believe in the presence of God working and directing our lives.  Let that faith make us into humble, optimistic, generous people.  It all depends on what you believe. Christians do not believe in coincidence. We believe in the Spirit of God.

Outpouring of the Holy Spirit

PENTECOST SUNDAY

PENTECOST SUNDAY, YEAR A. 31st May 2020 Acts 2:1-11; 1 Corinthians 12:3-7,12-1; John 20:19-23.   The Pentecost is the celebration of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the thir

Sunday Homily

Through the Holy Spirit humanity is reconciled. Our uniqueness is brought together in rare form of unity. According to the first reading, the apostles began to speak foreign languages as the Spirit gave them the gift of speech, and the people that assembled were bewildered to hear them speak their individual language. The success of any soccer team is the ability of the coach to discover and blend into one the numerous skills of the players that make up the team.

The Power to Continue the Work

How is it that we are all here in church? How is it that billions celebrate Jesus Christ? Was there a huge miracle that caused so many to become Christians? Was there a sign in the sky that said, “Go to Church?” Of course not. We are here because the Holy Spirit worked through others. I am here because others, particularly in my case as in most your cases, my parents, took their Catholicism seriously. I am here, as you are, because others have led me to Christ.

God uses His People to spread his Gospel. He empowers them with His Spirit, inspiring them and others through them to choose Christ. God uses us to do the work of His Kingdom. He has empowered us with the Holy Spirit.

The mantle has fallen from the sky. We are called to pick it up, strike the Jordan River and witness the power of God. May we have the courage to continue the work of our Master.

Gifts of the Holy Spirit

The Holy Spirit is given to be with us in ways that are similar to our Lord’s presence of old.  However, as we see in the readings today, and in other readings throughout the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is doing more for us than what our Lord was doing in His days.  According to St. Paul, different gifts are given to us by the Holy Spirit.  Our Lord possessed these gifts Himself, but He did not communicate them to His Apostles until after He rose from the dead and gave them the Holy Spirit. 

We have been given many gifts by the Holy Spirit, but of course, the greatest gift we have been ng given is the Holy Spirit, along with the Father and the Son.  We often look at the gifts given by God and ignore the Giver of the gifts.  Even when we think of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we often think wrongly.  It is not a matter that I have been given a gift so I can do this or that with it.  No, it is the Holy Spirit Who is exercising these gifts within us and working through us.  It is not we who are doing this or that; it is the Holy Spirit Who is doing all the work, we are only cooperating with His work.

No ‘We’ or ‘They’

No 'we' or 'they'

Pentecost Year A “We…” “They …” We often use these words to refer to different groups of people. “We” usually refers to the group which I pe...

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Today’s feast reminds us that in this world there are no ‘we’ and ‘they.’ All of us are God’s children. All of us are recipients of the saving grace of Jesus. All of us are called to be that One family of God. There is no room for division and distinction in this one family of God. The poor will not be separated from the rich. The educated will not be separated from the uneducated. People of different languages and different cultures will not be separated and placed in different rooms.

This is the gift of the Holy Spirit. St. Paul reminds us in the second reading: “In the one Spirit we were all baptized, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens, and one Spirit was given to us all to drink.” “There is a variety of gifts but always the same Spirit; there are all sorts of service to be done, but always to the same Lord; working in all sorts of different ways in different people, it is the same God who is working in all of them.”

Clergy E-Notes

Pro-life reflections and intercessions related to the Sunday readings

Baptism of Fire! — Free Gift to the Church

Baptism of the Holy Spirit or Baptism of fire is NOT a Sacrament and NEVER another Baptism; talk less of the replacement of the Sacrament of Baptism. However The Holy Spirit is in the sacraments, He acts in each of the Sacraments. There remains then an intrinsic connection between the sacrament of Baptism and the Holy Spirit.

Healing of Memories

Bottom line: Let’s ask Jesus to pour the Holy Spirit as a healing river on our church and world: to heal memories and to wash away the stains of guilt – and lead us to eternal life.

MAY 31, 2020 — Today we bring to a conclusion the strangest Easter season – at least in my 49 years as a priest. After all we have been through, one thing we can agree on: we need the Holy Spirit. 

In this homily I’d like to talk about why we need the Holy Spirit. You can see that need dramatically in our current crisis. Faced with a pandemic you’d think we would pull together. Instead we pull apart. In spite of all our science and data, we’ve lost our ability to communicate.

RELATED HOMILIES:

2017:  Life in Christ Week 8: Source of Power
2014:  Practical Sign of Hope
2011:  It Was the Holy Ghost
2008:  Double Gift
2005:  The Greatest Unused Power
2002:  Healing of Memories
1999:  Each in His Native Language

Sister Emanuel in Medjugorje

One person who experienced the Holy Spirit coming to her in a profound way that totally changed her life was Sister Emmanuel in Medjugorje. She grew up in a good Catholic family but as a teenager while attending a boarding school in Paris she began mixing with girls who were using spirit boards and Ouija boards. They did it for hours every week. It was a fascination for them.

Pentecost

Today’s Entrance Antiphon sets the mood for the Mass. We are reminded that ‘the Spirit of the Lord fills the whole world’. In our response to the psalm we have just prayed: ‘Lord, send out your Spirit and renew the face of the earth’. We are daily given sickening reminders that the face of the earth can be very ugly. To the extent that our own personal lives are also disturbed, we can easily get the impression that everything is falling apart. Today’s feast refuses to allow us to stay with such a despondent view. It is so important that we keep reminding ourselves of this truth that we acclaim in every Mass: ‘heaven and earth are filled with your glory’. This is because, in the image of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Holy Spirit is bending over our world with warm breast and bright wings.

The Church of Many Voices

There are many gifts in the church, many ministries, many works, many members. That’s a problem. Who’s best? Who’s important? Who has the right way? Who corners the truth?

Some of us would love to have the special charism of solitary prayer. But not having it, we might think ourselves inferior. More distressing, we might envy contemplatives or even resort to the tactic of thinking that prayer isn’t so special after all. (Those people who run from the world, hide in their rooms, frequent chapels: wouldn’t it be better if they were like us, finding God in the rough and tumble, helping the poor, being busy?)…

Many of us, in our better moments, admire Christian social activists—people who hunger, thirst, and labor for justice. In our worse moments, however, we wish they wouldn’t bother us or remind us that the gospels challenge our way of life. (These people ought to get their own act together instead of trying to change the world. After all, we can’t hope for heaven on earth. All they do is send us on guilt trips.)

Reversing the Curse of Babel

What is the answer to the curse of Babel? It is the feast we celebrate today, Pentecost! On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles like fire (as we saw in our first reading). On Pentecost, all present were able to speak in hundreds of different languages, mirroring Babel, but with one important difference, they could understand each other.

My friends, left to our own devices, left to our own ego that wills to dominate conversations and family policies or social contract between friends, we will always eventually collapse into babbling, with relationships ruined under the rubble we have created for ourselves.

If we, however, allow the Holy Spirit to descend upon our relationships, seek first the Kingdom of God, allow Jesus to be the eyes upon which we view our relationships with our family, friends, co-workers, people of other religions and the world in which we live, all of the sudden we are speaking no longer the language of the ego, but the language of the Spirit, with vocabulary from the heart.

Pentecost Sunday with a Touch of Green

Pentecost Sunday with a touch of green

Here is a thought experiment: picture yourself as a parent looking upon your child.  (For those of you blessed with this role this should be easy.)  As you look upon your child imagine all the love…

The Alternate Path

Today we celebrate Pentecost Sunday – the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Church.  In our western Christian tradition we often associate the color red with the Holy Spirit (i.e. the “tongues of fire” that come upon those gathered for Pentecost).  Red is indeed a powerful color.  It is a color that flashes and holds ones attention.  In the Orthodox Christian tradition another color associated with the Holy Spirit is green.  If we reflect here for a moment this makes perfect sense.  In the creed we profess our belief in the Holy Spirit as “the Lord, the giver of life”.  Here, in East Tennessee, all we have to do is look around at the myriad shades of green to recognize it as indeed a color which signifies life.