Homily: Yes, Come!

Year B / Eastertide / Pentecost 

Readings: Acts 2.1-11 / Psalm 104. 1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34 (R/v cf 30) / Galatians 5:16-25/ Jn 15:25-27, 16:12-15 

Tin Tin is my sister’s maid. She’s from Myanmar. Whenever we have family dinner, she helps to cook and wash up, and to care for my nephews. She always welcomes my family and I with smiles and laughter whenever we visit. She is the helper my sister depends on: she’s always available; she’s just a call away.

Many of us here have maids too. Like Tin Tin, they do many things to help support us in our material life. We need helpers too in our spiritual life. Helpers like family and friends, fellow parishioners and religious and priests to help us grow as Christians.

Today we celebrate the feast of God’s helper in our life: the Holy Spirit. The Spirit did not just come randomly into the apostles’ lives. Jesus told them to pray for the Spirit to come. And the Spirit did come with a powerful, strong wind and with tongues of fire coming down upon their heads as we hear about the Pentecost in our first reading. It is a vivid, colourful, and dramatic scene. We can however lose sight of the goodness of the Spirit’s coming into the apostles’ lives if we focus too much on the sights and sounds of that first Pentecost.  

What effects of goodness does the Spirit bring about?

First, how the apostles began to speak in different tongues, and to do this by boldly proclaiming Jesus to all. Here is the Spirit at work in their lives. With the Spirit, we too can be brave and proclaim Jesus.

Second, how the many bystanders from different lands could hear them speaking in their own tongue about the things of God. Here is the work of the Spirit in their faith. With the Spirit, we too can understand the things of God and understand ourselves.

The Spirit is indeed powerful. It can transform us for the better.  This is the happy hope the second reading offers us in Paul’s exhortation to the early Christians and us to live by the Spirit, and not by the flesh. 

To live according to the flesh means that we let bad feelings, jealousy, laziness, impurity, anger and the like rule our lives. This leads us to do things in excess and in sin that inevitably hurt others and ourselves. Consider how drinking or smoking excessively, lusting to pleasure ourselves by abusing others, and acting selfishly to gratify ourselves are never good for us and others, let alone our souls. 

We are not meant to live in the flesh because we have been baptised to live in the Spirit.  We all struggle between living by the flesh and by the Spirit. “The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. We say this phrase now and again. We do because we struggle with the reality of being human and the hope of living as Christians. This hope brings us here because we want to live in the Spirit and be good Christians. 

To live in the Spirit is to live with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5.22-25). To live this way is to live in the language of love -- of God’s love, really. 

This language of love was Jesus’ language when he was on earth. In everything, love was his word and love was his way. Love informed how he taught and preached. Love enabled how he healed and cared. Love empowered how he ministered to all and uplifted the poor. 

Jesus calls us to use and practise this same language of love in our everyday lives. None of us has had a Pentecost experience like the apostles had. In fact, our day-to-day lives, on the whole, are much little less spectacular than that dramatic event. Yet the Holy Spirit is no less present to us now than it was to them, then.  Yes, there are no tongues of flame and no sound of a powerful wind but God’s Spirit is present here now, present in this place, and present especially within you. 

God’s Spirit is present in us because we are the temples of the Holy Spirit.  There is an inkling of this truth whenever we say that someone is “high spirited” or they are in “good spirits”. This Spirit dwells in us so that we know who God really is, what our truest intentions are, and why faith, hope and love are our Christian way. We know ourselves because the Spirit tells us so. 

Indeed, isn’t this why we call upon the Spirit to give us wisdom, to guide us daily, and to lift up our eyes to God? 

Don’t we see the Spirit’s answer in the simplest of actions like a mother’s gentleness in embracing her newborn or a stranger’s generosity when offering up his seat for a senior citizen on the MRT? And don’t we experience the Spirit’s answer in our daily ordinariness like when peace soothes us after a hectic work day, or when our patience and self-control surprises us in a trying, difficult moment? I am sure there other similar moments when the Spirit acted for your good and happiness.

Knowing that God’s Spirit is with us must surely move us to admit confidently that the Spirit is indeed the helper Jesus promised us. Yes, the Spirit helps to keep our lives in order, to empower us to do good, to stop us from going astray, to protect us from living in the flesh and sinning, and to uplift us in God’s love and for God’s life. In all of this, the Spirit advocates for us, our wellbeing and our happiness before God. It is wise for us to remember this counsel by St Irenaeus: “When we hear the Accuser, the Evil One, may we never forget we have an Advocate, the Spirit” (Against Heresies, Book 3).

The Spirit does all this good quietly and unobtrusively but surely and steadily in our lives for us to be well and happy. We can however easily miss this good and loving work of the Spirit because it happens so much in the unseen, the background, the unnoticeable moments of our lives. 

Today we are being invited to see, to experience, to know this but most of all to savour the goodness of the Spirit in our lives.

How can we do this? 

Tin Tin my sister’s maid has a limited grasp of English. She understands it but she struggles with speaking it. So, she points and signs a lot and repeats often to make sure she does the right work so that all of us are well and happy.   

Pointing and signing. Perhaps, this is how the Spirit speaks to us about the goodness of God’s love laboring in our lives. This is like that experience we have all had when we travel to a foreign country or place where people speaks differently, and we did not understand. Yet we did communicate by our pointing and signing, by our smiles and frowns, by our hand gestures.  And as we communicated in this way, we did understand. We could because in all of us there are basic human experiences we have and we want to share – needs, and desires, and hopes. This is why we can easily recognise in one another our shared struggles and hopes.  May be part of the Spirit’s action is to point us to see God's gracious labour in every moment of all our lives.

The Spirit works then for everyone’s well being and happiness. The Spirit brings unity and harmony amidst differences. It renews all things when there is brokenness and chaos. What the world needs now is more spirited people who want to make the world better. 

Let us be such people for all. Let us pray for the Spirit to fill our hearts and kindle in us the fire of God’s love. You and I need this fire to renew the world. The Spirit gave the apostles this fire to do this by proclaiming God’s mighty works, the mightiest of all is our salvation in Jesus.  

Let us call God’s helper, the Spirit to help us do this. And more than this, let us call for the Spirit to renew us so that we can set the world blaze again with God’s love. So, yes, “Come Holy Spirit, come!”

Inspired in parts by Fr James McTavish, FMVD

Preached at the Church of the Transfiguration

photo: www.liturgyletter.com