Pentecost
Acts 2:1-11 | 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13 | John 20:19-23

Almighty, everliving God, who willed the Pascal mystery to be encompassed as a sign in 50 days, granted from out of the scattered nations the confusion of many tongues may be gathered by heavenly grace into one great confession of your name.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

As a Catholic, I was obviously very much formed by the liturgy, by mass on Sunday, and as a priest, I’ve celebrated mass after mass after mass every day.  I’ll be saying this thing that is a celebration of what has happened to the human race because of this figure Jesus, and one of the things that I love about the liturgy in the renewal is that we brought back at the very beginning of the liturgy a more public form of the request from the congregation to God to forgive us of our sins.  It’s interesting.  We start every liturgy with simply a request.  “Please Father, forgive me.  Have mercy on me.”  The reason that seems so important is because of the effect of sin.  Sin is the enemy.  Sin is the thing that Jesus came to conquer, to take away its power.  He taught us this mysterious thing about giving in to evil, giving in to sin, and that seems so strange when you think about it.  But it has an incredible element of wisdom, and it’s this: sin is what separates people.  If there’s anything that’s clear about the message of Jesus, it’s we are all called to be one body, one spirit, one reflection, a multitude of different kinds of reflection, but we’re all called to be in some way a reflection of this incredible loving figure that is God the Father made manifest to us through a God/man, Jesus, who implies so clearly in his ministry what he’s doing is empowering us to be who he was, who he is.  And what it is that God always wants of his people is that we become one in union, communion.  Oneness, that’s the core.  Nothing creates more difficulty and problems for the evolution of a human being from the time they’re young till the time they’re old as the relationships they have with people, and if there’s a healthy flow of life between parent and child, between friends, partners, there’s life. 

So the first thing I want to start with is this image that God has come into the world to effect a change, and the change is to draw people more and more consciously into one unit, one communion of intention.  And the intention is always there for the good of the other.  We’re called to be one body manifesting the gifts of the Spirit in different ways.  So we look at our first reading, and the first line that strikes me so much is it says that everyone — well, the opening prayer says everyone is gathered together in one great confession of who God is.  And this oneness is expressed by this experience of the disciples when they were gathered together.  They had 50 days since the time that Jesus died, and once Jesus died, as you know, the disciples were terrified, frightened.  They were in a locked room.  They were filled with confusion and doubt, and I’d say the 11 that were left ran the gamut from John, who understood everything, to doubting Thomas.  If there’s anything clear about the work that Jesus did before the Spirit entered into the world in this new way that he enabled through his death to bring to us, you see that the work before that wasn’t that effective, or at least it was very frightening to the disciples when it took the turn it did when Jesus died.  And so you have this sense that there was this lack of cohesion and union, and so what happened in 50 days is you had these men that were so diverse in their response to Jesus all one.  And they’re in this room, and suddenly there’s this overwhelming presence of divinity, which is in the form of one of the ways in which God, through Jesus and through the Old Testament, has provided us an image of how this God works in our life, and it’s like breath.  It’s like wind.  It’s like this mysterious thing.  You don’t know where it comes from.  You don’t know where it goes, but you know it can effect great changes from a gentle breeze to a hurricane or tornado. 

So they’re in this room.  It’s filled with this wind, and all of a sudden, there’s these tongues of fire.  And fire is the most interesting element throughout scripture, but it’s a combination of light, which enlightens, wisdom, and a fire that purifies, burns out everything that isn’t really what it’s intended to be.  So just imagine what’s happening is, in this union they feel with each other, the presence of God, that presence awakens in them this awareness.  Two things: you’re being purified, transformed, and you’re being enlightened to be a source of wisdom and light for other people.  And what was happening when this Spirit came is that they wanted — and this is the dynamic that God has created in our hearts.  When we’re given a truth and we’re given life, the instinct, the purest instinct of human nature is to share it with other people, to receive it in gratitude and in thanksgiving and then say, “God, this has given me so much.  I want to give it to other people.  I do.  I want to give it to them.”  And so you see all these other people from around them.  They’re from all over.  They’re in Jerusalem.  They’re from every country in a sense, and they’re watching this thing happen.  And what they’re hearing is a manifestation of the feeling that each of these men had, knowing that they were being touched by a transforming Spirit, an enlightening Spirit, and that gave them the ability to share the wisdom and the life that they had.  And they started talking about it in their own language, and all these other people heard it.  Now, why would that be the image that we’re asked to ponder about this new thing called the church?  It’s about individuals being infused with life and light and having this not just power but this inner desire to share it with other people, to give it to them, and the interesting thing is it isn’t being communicated in the normal way.  In other words, if I’m English-speaking and I’ve got a group of Germans and French people and all these other people and they don’t understand at all my language and I start talking about this thing that I know is in me that I want to be in them and it’s life-giving, they get it.  So how’s that working?  It’s not through words?  It’s through this mysterious thing called presence.  This presence that’s in them is so vital and alive that, when one has it and intends to give it to another person, they receive it.  It says a lot about the organ that we know that’s in the middle of our chest where God says he dwells.  We know that that organ has the capacity — the heart we’re talking about — has the capacity to resonate and share whatever its disposition is, its feeling with another person without using words.  It’s called an electromagnetic field.  It goes out eight, ten feet.  So we have within us this capacity to communicate something without words, and that’s the mystery that I think we’re asked to ponder, this Spirit being given to human beings.  When they have it and they feel it and they know what it creates within them and they have a desire to share it, it flows between us.  And words, yes, can help, but it’s not the words that work.  It’s something else, and I want to talk about that something else.  It’s the presence of God and your human presence, and they’re together in terms of their intention of wanting to give life, and it flows.  It works.  It goes out. 

So let’s look at, then, the image of the gospel.  The gospel is that moment when Jesus came to the disciples after his death.  It’s interesting.  The gospel is the beginning of Jesus working with the disciples, and his post-resurrection disposition, power, presence in the opening reading was the effectiveness of it.  But let’s go back to that moment when Jesus appeared to his disciples for the first time, and they’re locked in a place, and they’re full of fear and confusion and doubt.  And he’s just there, and he just says, “Peace be with you.  Peace be with you.”  And he said, “I want you.  I want so much for you to be the person that I’ve called you to be, and I want you to have this great gift that I want to give you.  It’s an amazing gift.  It’s the gift that you can do something for your brothers and sisters that gives life, but one of the things that’s so important that you have to do in order to do this is both receive the Spirit I’ve given you, but then understand this Spirit has a gift for you.  And the gift is your ability to forgive, to forgive sin.”  Now, what would the disciples feel overwhelmingly when they first saw Jesus after they had doubted and ran away and denied him and all of that?  They would have been feeling that he would have been angry and demanding maybe retaliation or whatever.  No, he was just filled with love.  That love took the form of forgiveness.  So if you can understand with me that this moment, when Jesus is first appearing to his disciples, he sets them on a journey of being an agent in the world that unifies the world, reconnects the world by forgiving all the sins that we’ve done to each other and to God.  It’s amazing how unifying this element of forgiveness is, and without it, there remains division.  I think it’s so interesting that, when Jesus says these words to his disciples — he said, “If you forgive someone, they’re forgiven.  If you don’t forgive them, their sin remains.”  And what is the impact of sin?  Separation.  So think of it.  When you hold a grudge, when you refuse to accept someone for who they are, when you judge people, when you find yourself only comfortable with a certain set of people and the rest you have some kind of resistance to, all that resistance to union and communion  and oneness is somehow connected to this thing called sin.  

Sin is a hard thing to describe.  It’s easy to describe, but if you say, “Well, it’s breaking a rule, breaking a law.  God said, ‘Do this,’ and I didn’t do it, so I sinned.  So now I need his forgiveness.”  No, it’s more that you as a human being have something deep inside of you that, when left unchecked, creates this distance between people, and it’s weird, because we do it for the strangest reason.  We don’t know them.  We don’t understand them.  We feel offended by them.  We feel threatened by them.  We think they’re better than we are.  We think we’re better than they are.  All of that, if you imagine all of that is somehow connected to this thing called sin, in order to be the Spirit of God in the world, if we don’t have this thing flowing out of our heart that I want to call compassion and empathy, if we don’t feel something for others and don’t know that what others are needing more than anything else from us, if they’ve offended us, what we need from them, if we’ve offended them, what is the call to be in union with one another, if we don’t understand that that has, at the core, this requirement that we be filled with this virtue of forgiveness — and a virtue is not something that you are told to do and you have to figure out how to do it.  A virtue is the power to have this gift of forgiveness as just an integral part of who you are.  It always begins — I find this so fascinating.  It always begins with self.  You’ve got to know how to forgive yourself.  You’ve got to know how to have patience and love and compassion and empathy for your selfishness, your stupidity, your shallowness, whatever.  

All I’m trying to say is, if I can say one thing to you on this Feast of Pentecost about the power that’s been poured into you by the God who wants you to be like him, it’s the power to forgive, the power to not hold something against someone and the desire that everyone become one and all the gifts that each one has become gifts to the other.  And that flow of gift to another is blocked so often by a negative experience that we call being hurt or being somehow damaged by someone else.  The thing that I’m saying is God said, “I’ve given you a power to be one, and the oneness is essential because of the communication that you need to have.  And let the Spirit flow from one to the other, because I’m in everyone, and I know that I’ve chosen to work through human beings.  I want to reach others through your friends, and so if you have any block with them, it’s not going to work very well.”  So please understand.  There’s one primary gift. The primary gift is to be like Jesus, who is the essence of understanding, compassion and forgiveness.

Father, before we listen to your word, when we worship you, before we receive you in Eucharist, we are told by you that we are forgiven.  There has to be some key way in which we are able to receive and give things to one another without the block, the damaging role that sin often has in our life.  So bless us with the greater awareness of this importance of focusing on the heart of your ministry.  The love, the acceptance, the empowerment that you give to each of us through your presence in one another is so precious that we should do nothing that blocks it, nothing that gets in its way.  And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.