PENTECOST SUNDAY
Acts 2:1-11
1 Corinthians 12:3-7, 12-13
John 20:19-23
Art and literature are filled with stories of a quest: Odysseus trying to get home, Dante on the way to paradise, Frodo and the ring, Luke Skywalker looking for his father. The theme of a quest is not limited to the realm of fiction but part of human history: Columbus sailed the ocean blue looking for a new world, Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Mt. Everest, Neil Armstrong rode an Atlas V rocket to the moon. There is something in our make-up as human beings which causes us to reach out for something more, something else. What is on the other side of the mountain? This is so because we are, in fact, made for more. We are made for God. The human propensity to go on a quest, to seek something more is an echo of the foundational longing in human life which only God can satisfy. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. There are times when our quest for God becomes explicit. We visit a Shrine, go on a pilgrimage, make a retreat, offer a novena, undertake a vigil, all in the desire to find something that we are missing, to experience the presence of God. Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O God, said St. Augustine.
Today’s Feast of Pentecost suggests that maybe we are, as the old song puts it, looking for love in all the wrong places. On this day we remember that from the first moment of the Church’s existence what shapes, forms, inspires, motivates, empowers us as followers of Jesus is the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit. The key word there is “presence.” We don’t need to go looking for the Holy Spirit, we don’t need to seek the Holy Spirit, we don’t need to acquire the Holy Spirit. All we need do is discover that the Holy Spirit has been given to us and lives in our hearts. Deep within each one of us lies the sacred space we have been looking for. On Pentecost we find that God is not content to remain seated on the divine throne above it all in heaven. Jesus has not left us but left with us his abiding Spirit. God so desires to draw us into the folds of divinity that we are gifted with the Holy Spirit as the foundation of our humanity. To quote St. Augustine again: God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Every move we make, every step we take is only possible because the Holy Spirit animates our spirit with the spark of divinity.
All of which reveals how very precious we all are. You, child of God, are of infinite, of eternal worth since the infinite and eternal Spirit has been planted into your being. How we work to make something of ourselves, how we strive to be all that we can be, how we look for some recognition or achievement, how we want to prove ourselves worthy. How unnecessary that all is since we can’t have any more worth, any more value, any greater accomplishment then being who God made us to be – Spirit living in the World. Nothing that we do for good or for ill changes who we are – created to bear the Holy Spirit of God. Nothing that anyone says about us or even thinks about us has more power that the word of God spoken to us while showering down the Holy Spirit: you are my beloved child. I am well pleased with you.
That being so, we must grow in the awareness that every single person that we meet is also of infinite, of eternal value. Look around you and find that you are surrounded by vessels of the Holy Spirit. Thomas Merton, twentieth century Trappist monk, wrote that gobsmacked him one day: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun… If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time.”
Maybe that is why the Risen Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit onto his followers. What is more basic than breath? Breathing is almost the definition of being alive. According to the book of Genesis it was when God breathed into the newly fashioned mud that Adam, a thing of dust, became a living being. Jesus breathed the Spirit upon his followers and he breathes upon us so that we too will come alive to what the Spirit of God is doing in us and with us. There was an article in Smithsonian Magazine several years ago which made this observation about the atmosphere of the earth. The molecules in the air are so long-lasting and so well mixed by the wind that in every breath you are taking in a molecule of oxygen that Jesus breathed. On this Pentecost Sunday let us breathe in the Spirit of Jesus and ask the Holy Spirit to transform our minds and hearts so that here in Chicago, on the corner of 29th and Wabash, close to Lake Michigan we will take up Merton’s challenge and shine like the sun.
