+BEING BORN OF THE SPIRIT Pentecost May 19th, 2024
When first thinking about giving this homily on Pentecost, what first came to mind were those words of Jesus to Nicodemus: “The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from of where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” I wondered if I should even dare to give a homily on this feast? The Holy Spirit has a way of coming among us that baffles all our efforts to grasp and understand. So pardon me, as I venture to offer a few reflections about the Holy Spirit’s coming into our lives.
The subtleness of the Spirit’s coming is expressed in our gospel. Jesus telling his disciples: “I have much more to tell you but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all truth.” Jesus goes on to say that the Spirit will speak what he hears and declare to them “the things that are coming.” As we have come to know about the Trinitarian life of God, the Holy Spirit is the love of God the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father. God is calling each and all of us to be sharers in God’s very own divine life, and love. It is then that we will know all truth.
In the Church’s liturgy, this solemnity comes fifty days after that of the celebration of the Resurrection. Perhaps the wisdom of all this is that we need time to absorb the great mystery we are remembering this morning. The coming and movement of the Holy Spirit is subtle beyond words and can never be confined to space and time. The coming of the Holy Spirit enables us to enter into God’s very own abiding love, to experience what it is to be “born again.”
The readings and then the Sequence we just sang, invite us into this mysterious and abiding presence in our lives. We pray that the Holy Spirit may shine within our hearts, fill our inmost beings, for where this Spirit is not, we are naught and can do nothing good in deed or thought. Our dependence on the Holy Spirit grounds us in a holy humility for without this wonderful gift we can do nothing good in deed or thought.
From the Acts of the Apostles, we heard of how on that first Pentecost, all were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues. A large crowd gathered from many nations and languages but each of them heard the disciples speaking in their own tongues. All the language barriers fell away, the gift of tongues burst them all. More than ever in our world we see the need to break down all those barriers caused by national conflicts, the different cultures, racism, wealth and power that are so divisive and devastating to the human family. More than ever, we are in need of the coming of the Holy Spirit.
And yet, the Holy Spirit is at work in each of us as we gather here this morning. The Spirit is inviting us to let Christ’s love flow through everything we think, do or say, not only as we gather in worship but into everything we will do with the rest of our lives. As a worshiping community, we will be as healthy as each of us allows herself or himself to be filled with those fruits of the Spirit we just heard of from St Paul, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” These fruits of an abiding love break down all the harmful barriers that afflict our lives.
Living with this kind of Love, is to let oneself be filled with the Holy Spirit. We can be sure that there is nothing more pleasing to God than to live with this kind of Love in our hearts. This is the Love that moved Jesus to give up his very own Body and Blood in sacrifice for the life of the world, making of us even now, sharers in his own eternal life.
Acts 2:1-11; Gal. 5:16-25; John 15:26-27; 16:12-15