Bishop Anthony B. Taylor delivered this homily May 19.
On Christmas we celebrated the birth of Jesus. On Easter we celebrated our rebirth in Jesus, our share in his resurrection through the sacrament of baptism. And today, on Pentecost, we celebrate the birth of the Church, for which Jesus had prepared his disciples at the Last Supper, promising to send the Holy Spirit to empower them and lead them into all truth.
Now begins the proclamation of salvation to the whole world, represented by the people of 15 nationalities who heard the proclamation of the Good News that first Pentecost morning.
With this outpouring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which we receive sacramentally in confirmation, God begins the work of reuniting into a single family, a single catholic — that is, universal — Church, the human race which had been divided into warring nations unable to understand each other ever since the time of the Tower of Babel.
From this moment on, the Holy Spirit will become the dominant reality in the life of the Church. We see this in every page of the Acts of the Apostles, which is in a certain sense the “Gospel of the Holy Spirit.”
In Acts,
1. the Holy Spirit guides the Church — and indeed the leaders of the Church are described as people led by the Spirit, and
2. the Holy Spirit empowers Christians to rise and meet the challenges they face — and indeed we see how believers grow in the Spirit progressively as they exercise their God-given spiritual gifts in the Lord’s service. And the same can and should be true for us.
In the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit enabled Phillip to leave his comfort zone to proclaim the Good News to an Ethiopian eunuch. The Spirit used a vision to expand Peter’s vision so that he could recognize that pagans like Cornelius were included in God’s plan.
This same Spirit led the Church in Antioch to take the unprecedented step of sending Paul and Barnabas on at least three missions to the gentiles. And the Holy Spirit guided the proceedings of the Council of Jerusalem, which decided on what would be required of gentile converts to the faith and so on. The early Church was a Spirit-guided community.
How about you? Are you a Spirit-guided person? When is the last time you really listened to the movement of the Holy Spirit tugging at your heart, trying to lead you to go where the Lord wants you to go, and to do what the Lord wants you to do?
In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter attributes his courage and eloquence before the Sanhedrin to the working of the Holy Spirit, and throughout Acts almost everyone attributes their courage, zeal, persistence, eloquence and joy — not to mention the fruits of their efforts — to the working of the Holy Spirit.
How about you? If you find yourself lacking courage, zeal, persistence, eloquence and joy — and if you find that your efforts are not bearing the kind of fruit you had hoped for — it doesn’t have to be that way.
Your confirmation was your own personal Pentecost, the day when you received all the same gifts of the Holy Spirit that Jesus gave his followers on Pentecost 2,000 years ago. But for it to make a difference in your life and in the life of others, you have to make the effort to exercise these gifts, drawing on them consciously and constantly, using them in the Lord’s service, just like the disciples in today’s readings, the day the Church was born.
