Feast of Pentecost
Cycle C
May 15, 2016 12:00
Noon and 5:00 pm
Saint Margaret Parish
Readings:
Acts 2.1-11
I Corinthians 12.3b-7, 12-13
John 14. 15-16, 23b-26
“And with your spirit”
There
is an anecdote about a church where the microphone was not working well one
Sunday.
Obviously,
this was not Saint Margaret’s! That
never happens here!
This
particular morning, the microphone at the pulpit was crackling and cutting in
and out. The time came for the priest to
go over and read the gospel.
He
taps on it and moves it up and down and then says, “There’s something wrong with this mic!” And the people dutifully respond, “And with you spirit.”
Routine versus Awareness
Sometimes we are like the people at that Mass.
Sometimes we are on auto-pilot and just do things without
thinking about them very much. Today,
the feast of Pentecost, we celebrate the Holy Spirit – God within us.
That is who the Holy Spirit is – God within us,
often moving and guiding us in certain directions. So Pentecost is to help us to get off of
auto-pilot.
It helps us to tune into the presence of the Spirit
and what the Spirit is prompting us to do. The readings today show us two ways that the
Spirit may be moving us.
Communicating Well
The first is to communicate well.
The passage from the Acts of the Apostles tells us that
there are people from many different countries who speak many different
languages visiting Jerusalem. And yet
each of them, amazingly, hears the disciples speaking in their own native
language.
Each of them is able to understand what the disciples are
communicating. The lesson I see here is that
the Holy Spirit moves us to communicate well with each other.
This involves a number of things, but there is one thing that
must have been present in this Pentecost event.
Communicating well means that we say things in a way that the other
person can receive them.
So maybe I don’t just “Tell
it like it is.” Sometimes that expression
is used as a justification for just blurting out what I think or feel with no regard
for its effect on the other person.
Communicating well means that I try to express myself in a
way that is thoughtful and respectful of the other person. I try to say things in a way that doesn’t
just make me feel good for getting them off my chest.
Instead, I try to say things thoughtfully, in a way that others
can take in what I am saying. The Holy
Spirit is about communicating well.
Respecting Differences
And the
second thing I see here is that the Spirit moves us to respect differences.
Today
Saint Paul uses the image of the human body.
The body has different parts – eyes and ears and arms and legs and on it
goes.
Each
of these parts has its own unique and valuable role. Each of them is different, but together they
all form one body.
In a
similar way, the Spirit moves us to respect differences among ourselves. In our world today, we live and will be
living with many differences and with increasing diversity.
We can
see differences in religious belief, social customs, cultural tradition and
political viewpoint. But we do not have
to feel threatened or afraid of others because of differences.
Instead,
we can see these differences as potentially enriching. They can actually broaden our perspective and
make us fuller persons.
If we
approach differences in this way, we can remain one body in Christ. The Holy Spirit is about respecting
differences.
Conclusion
I want to conclude with this.
Sometimes we can feel restless
and unsettled about how we are relating with others. Maybe we keep trying to justify our behavior
or our attitudes but just cannot get settled.
This could well be a sign of the
Holy Spirit at work within us. As Jesus
says in today’s gospel, it could well be the Spirit trying to remind us of what
Jesus taught us.
It could
well be the Spirit moving us to communicate well and to respect differences. Pentecost tries to awaken us to these
promptings of the Spirit.
