A homily for Pentecost, May 19, 2024
Mass During the Day: Acts 2:1-11, 1 Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13, Jn 15:26-27; 16:12-15
I suffer from writer’s block about as often as I suffer from allergies. Sometimes the attacks of either are stay-in-bed level; other times, I can power through. But like most of us, I do not relish either.
I have eye drops and antihistamine pills for my allergies, so their flare-ups qualify as annoyances and inconveniences.
But there’s no pill I can pop or lotion I can drop to cure writer’s block, especially when I’m dealing with a religious or spiritual or scriptural topic. And I consider that far more than an annoyance or an inconvenience. Especially as Sunday approaches.
Instead of pulling the covers over my head, however, I open myself to the grace and wise guidance of the Holy Spirit, who always shines a light toward an insight. Some insights I then pass along are profound; others, so-so. All of them started as perfect. My human limitations filtered them and pared them to whatever I type up or preach to unsuspecting ears.
An insight, inspired by the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of our one God.
Thank God for that.
Ever since the first Pentecost, when the presence of the Spirit energized and inspired the disciples in ways no one had ever encountered before, we have had the Spirit serving as the wind at our back whenever we’ve taken the time and the good sense to recognize this special gift of God, this active and activating love that fills our minds and souls as much as — or more than — our hearts.
And wind is an apt symbol, an apt metaphor for who the Holy Spirit is. Both the name “spirit” and the word “inspiration” are rooted in the notion of the breath of life. We breathe in air to survive; the medical profession calls that inspiration. We absorb ideas and knowledge and insights to live full lives; teachers and preachers and philosophers call that inspiration as well.
The disciples needed the mega-event of Pentecost for their aha moment. They needed the multi-lingual shake-up of the Holy Spirit descending on them in a profound way. Until then, as recorded throughout the Gospels, there were many little incidences when what Jesus was preaching wasn’t sinking in.
Some of them thar parables? Head-scratchers, until the Christ ‘splained who the sower was, what the seed was, what the various types of ground represented.
Did everyone in the first century who heard the Beatitudes on the mount or on the plain absorb them and comprehend them fully, or did some of those in the crowd react more like the characters in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”?
“Blessed are the cheesemakers”?
Even today, two millennia later, we hear news reports about people doubting or misunderstanding what Jesus said was blessed.
A leader of the Southern Baptist Church reported about ministers preaching about the Sermon on the Mount: “When the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ’ … the [church-goer’s] response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.'”
I think they’re ignoring the Holy Spirit.
I think they’re not breathing in the love and wisdom that God surrounds us with, surrounding us even more completely than our fragile Earth’s atmosphere.
We celebrate Pentecost every year to commemorate the mega-event experienced by the disciples, the mega-event Jesus promised all of his followers.
We celebrate Pentecost every year in the hope that we, too, can experience a spiritual mega-event in our lives.
Two thousand years ago, the Holy Spirit whacked those people upside the head, pointed them in the right direction, told them what they had to do to share the Good News, and promised them they would never be without wisdom, grace and inspiration.
The words of the Acts of the Apostles testify that God followed through.
In 2024, we probably won’t get whacked upside the head (although it’s possible). No, what’s different about our modern experience of the Holy Spirit is our active participation.
Like the air we breathe — that we inhale, intake, inspire — the Spirit is around us abundantly and constantly. We must recognize and acknowledge the Spirit in our lives, and actively draw deeply.
Like regular breathing, like sittin’ around and not really noticing breathing, this inspiration, this relationship with the Third Person of the Trinity can be essentially automatic.
And when we’re shackled by writer’s block, or anything that makes us lose our way for a moment or three, when we want to pull the covers over our heads, when we need the oomph that only true inspiration brings, we can figuratively breathe deeply, filling every cell of our bodies and souls with the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised, that the love of the Father and the Son provides.
Boundlessly.
Endlessly.
Powerfully.
As, I hope, the Spirit did for me just now.
