Pentecost - Year C

Today we celebrate the great feast of Pentecost, the Birthday of the Church.  The day when the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles as tongues of flame.  From there, the Apostles were empowered by the Holy Spirit to go out and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.  They walked outside and as people gathered, they began to teach about Jesus Christ.  Miraculously, even though all of those gathered were from dozens of different areas, they all heard the same message, the same Gospel.  They all encountered the same Jesus Christ.

The very real coming of the Holy Spirit shows us symbolically the two things that make the Catholic Church unique.  The people that come to mass, if we really have eyes to see, have almost nothing in common.  The famous author James Joyce once looked at the Church and said….Oh, the Catholic Church….."Here comes everybody."  It's true though, when I think of that story we hear in the Acts of the Apostles, they give that list….

We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites,

inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia,

Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,

Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene,

as well as travelers from Rome,

both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs

Then, I look at just the parishes I serve.  Right here we have old folks and young folks, many who might not come into contact with each other outside of mass.  Then, to think between our two parishes, we have everything from farmers, to school kids, to concrete workers, to Dentists, Engineers, social workers, and everything in between.  Then, on top of that, when I go up to the prison, I have guys who come from incredibly different backgrounds, and found themselves there through wildly different ways.  On retreat, we were eating dinner with our retreat director, and one of the other priests mentioned about their parish gun raffle.  Now for the retreat director from North Jersey, the concept of a Church gun raffle was almost beyond his imagination.   Yet, that too is the diversity of our Church.   Just this week, I saw a video of the people of Uganda celebrating the feast of the Ugandan Martyrs last Monday.  It was a sea of African folks, as far as the eye could see, with their own style of procession, music, art, and everything else.  It is such an amazingly different world…yet it is still…the Catholic Church.

The one thing that unites all of that is  Jesus Christ and the sacraments, the Eucharist, the confessional, baptism, confirmation, anointing of the sick.  If Jesus Christ is at the center of everything that we do…he is the thing that ties all of us together.  He's the reason we're here.  He is the center of everything.

I saw something this week, that I think really put all the pieces together in a really clear, it ties together with the ascension we celebrated last week.  Since the garden of Eden, man had turned away from God.   Then, God called the Jewish people, who he prepared for centuries to be the place where he would be born.  Jesus was born among the Jews and lived with them, teaching and gathering the apostles.  Then, after his death and resurrection, he appeared to the disciples, risen from the dead, destroying even death itself.   Then, rather than choosing to remain in the world, Jesus ascended to the father, where he could take his place in the great battle of Good over evil, he ascended so that he could have the appropriate vantage point to lead the world and the commanding general of the forces of Good.  From there, he sent the Holy Spirit, to guide us, each in our own missions

When Jesus was walking around, teaching his disciples, he was giving us an example to follow.  Now, he's looking down at us, guiding us every day, if we have the ears to listen.  That's the amazing part.  The Holy Spirit, the word spirit literally means wind or breath.  He's always present among us, helping, inspiring, strengthening us, giving breath to our words and actions.  It's an amazing image with we really think about it.  St. Paul tells us that we are now the Body of Christ.  Each of us has a mission, no matter if we're a hand, or a foot, or an eye, or a lung, or a stomach, or as St. Therese of the Child Jesus put it, if we're just the little toe on the body of Christ, we work together.  Each with our different gifts, each with our different workings and different forms of service.  God takes each of us, uniquely created, and calls us to use the gifts we've been given to serve him…directed by Jesus, from on high.   Then, the Holy spirit, that descended on the apostles today, is the breath, the spark of life that takes all those pieces and allows them to be connected as one.

If we really get that, if we see that every single one of us is called by God to continue his work.  He gives us the Holy Spirit, that spark of life itself to strengthen us, to bind us together.  Today, at Pentecost, we stand together with the whole Church throughout the world, throughout the ages, with billions upon billions of unique creations, each part of the body of Christ, directed by Christ the head from heaven, working under his guidance to call all humanity back to the Glory it was designed for, to live in Christ forever.   That is our faith.  Through the Eucharist, through confession, through the sacraments, we are made alive through the power of the spirit, to go forth and call back humanity to the one who created us…back to Jesus Christ.