Pentecost Sunday
4-5 June 2022, St. Lambert
Acts
2:1-11
1
Cor 12:3b-7, 12-13
Jn 14:15-16, 23b-26
Come, Holy Spirit!
“No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit
… As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body,
though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one spirit we were all
baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we
were all given to drink of one Spirit.”
Even before I started to prepare my homily for Pentecost, for
some reason (call it inspiration?) the Genesis reading about the Tower of Babel
was roaming around in my head. The thought which accompanied this little
distraction was about how in Sacred Scripture Old and New Testament, that is to
say in God’s inspired word, confused speech, speech with no commonly held point
of reference, was and is considered a curse: Babel (the word says it all).
When
in 2001 I moved from Bonn, Germany (at the heart of the very culturally
Catholic Rhine Valley) to Berlin (bottom land, marsh land, sort of Protestant,
but mostly just secularized and without any particular geographic points of reference)
I learned that one of the things Berliners were quite proud of was referring to
themselves as “multiculti”, multicultural. As many of these same people
in that big city were often prejudiced against foreigners, that
multiculturalism usually boiled down to a rejection of what were for their
parents commonly held pre-WWII German values, usually Christian values about
matters of faith and home life. With this multiculti business, it was as
if they were celebrating the chaos in the Book of Genesis which came as a
result of the confusion of speech which put an end to the project of building a
tower to heaven (Babel!). They were effectively not embracing foreigners and
diversity of culture so much as they were rejecting hearth and home as they
relate to traditional Christian values and customs. In other words, many of the
rather outspoken people living in Germany’s capital city when I was there 20
years ago were being doubly foolish. Not only did they refuse to place
themselves under God or to espouse the traditional values of their ancestors,
but they basically refused any kind of common social project for the present or
for the future. They were being multiculti, or so they said!
My
simple message to you is that “multiculti” (you can supply the word
“woke-ism” if you like) is not the miracle of Pentecost. The tongues of fire
and the multiple languages with which the Apostles taught on that day were far
better, because they effectively communicated. They did not divide but actually
taught people, offering singleness of purpose. God is not about division and
confusion but rather about unity, experienced as favor and grace. If we are
going to build up our world, this world, then we will do so on Christ and no
one else. We will do so by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost was and is
the showering of His gifts upon the faithful. We know who is faithful and truly
favored by God by the fruits of their lives, the fruits of the indwelling of
the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our hearts, in our Church.
“Come,
Thou Holy Spirit, come!”
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will
ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always.”
I don’t mean to pick on the Berliners, but back then they
were for me a perfectly illustrated example of unfounded pride which had lost
its way. Life is about virtue, and it is God-centered, or it is not truly life at
all. Before we moved to the old/new capital of reunified Germany, my boss had
sent me ahead to Berlin to interview candidates for the position of chauffeur
for the Nunciature. The idea was to recruit a man from Berlin to come to Bonn
to work for the last couple months before our move, so that then back in Berlin
he would be at home with his family. After interviewing 11 candidates, I
settled on the guy who seemed the cleverest and most engaging. Reporting back
with my recommendation to my boss, with my top three picks, he reacted by
telling me I was mistaken to favor as number one a guy without church
affiliation rather than to pick the less flashy but much more solid Catholic
man, my number two among those I interviewed. As it turned out, he was right.
Flashy quit almost immediately (no real strength of character). He did not even
make it through the couple months left in Bonn before the move. The Catholic
guy, in the meantime, had been hired by the Cardinal of Berlin and served
faithfully and well for many years. He was steady and his life was marked, yes,
by virtue.
Life in the Holy Spirit is virtuous living. Virtue is a
habitual and firm disposition to do good. The Catechism of the Catholic Church
tells us that the human virtues are stable dispositions of the intellect and
the will that govern our acts, order our passions, and guide our conduct in accordance with reason and
faith. There are moral virtues and there are theological virtues. The moral
virtues grow through education, deliberate acts, and perseverance in struggle.
They can be grouped around the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice,
fortitude, and temperance. Divine grace purifies and elevates them. The
theological virtues dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy
Trinity. They have God for their origin, their motive, and their object— God
known by faith, God hoped in and loved for his own sake. There are three
theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. They inform all the moral
virtues and give life to them.
Many of the more charismatically inclined members of the
Church seem to be drawn by the flashy. They seem to ignore basic Catholic
teaching about what the true gifts, the higher qualities in life are. The moral
life of Christians is sustained by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. These are
permanent dispositions which make man docile in following the promptings of the
Holy Spirit. Already from the Old Testament Prophet Isaiah we class these gifts
as numbering seven. The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom,
understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. They
complete and perfect the virtues of those who receive them.
Several of the communities of nuns I have worked with over
the years had the custom of preparing holy cards with the name of each of the
seven gifts of the Holy Spirit on them and then each one drawing a card out on
Pentecost at breakfast. The card you drew was the gift you were to work on and
pray for, for yourself, during the Pentecost Octave especially.
There
are also the fruits of the Spirit. They are perfections that the Holy Spirit
forms in us as the first fruits of eternal glory. The tradition of the Church
lists twelve of them: “charity, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty,
self-control, chastity.”
[cf. Church, U.S.
Catholic. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Second Edition (pp. 502-504). The
Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.]
On this Sunday or during the Pentecost Octave, look in the
mirror at your own life to see what kind of perfections the Holy Spirit is working
in you. “Charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity,
gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity”, not much of what
you would call “flashy” there and not particularly marked by multi-anything
either. There is steadiness, however, something wholesome that you can build on
for your own sake and for the sake of the life of the world.
Praised be Jesus Christ!
Come,
Holy Spirit!
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