Pentecost Sunday, June 5, 2022 – Acts 2:1-11; 1 Corinthians 12:3B-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23

So, who do you pray to? I’ll bet a lot of us, when we kneel down to pray, say, “Dear God,” sort of generically. “Dear God,” by whom we usually mean God the Father, but not necessarily. Lots of people pray to Jesus. “Dear Jesus this,” “Dear Jesus that.” “Lord Jesus this,” “Lord Jesus that.” But I’ll bet very few people here in the congregation have ever prayed directly to God the Holy Spirit. I have one friend who is deeply devoted to the third person of the Blessed Trinity. She’s the only Catholic I’ve met in 52 years who prays regularly to the Holy Spirit. I wonder why that is. But, in theological circles, the joke is that the Holy Spirit is the forgotten God.

There’s a big history to coming to understanding that the Holy Spirit is one of the three persons in God. Last night we read a prophesy from the Book of Job, and there’s a big reference to some sort of spirit, but the Jewish people could not possibly have imagined that there was more than one person in God because the foundation of their faith was “Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is Lord alone.” And so, praying to some other God by some other name would have been abhorrent to them. And yet, in the books of Wisdom – there are four or five of them – this mysterious figure appears. A woman, no less, in a patriarchal society, who was called Lady Wisdom. And she has all the same attributes and gives all the same gifts that we now say the Holy Spirit provides. But it wasn’t until Jesus began to speak about His Father and about His relation to the Father and about the Holy Spirit that our minds and hearts were open to the idea of three persons in one God.

It’s a mystery and we’ll never be able to penetrate that mystery. But what the church discovered, in its first centuries, is that, looking at all the things that Jesus had said separately, and all the things that Paul had written separately, the only way to make sense of them all together was that what Jesus was saying was that there was another person of God.

But we don’t really see the Holy Spirit as a person very often, do we? Because of the way we were trained. Remember when you prepared for your Confirmation. What did the teacher spend most of the time on? The gifts of the Holy Spirit and the fruits of the Holy Spirit. You probably could name some of them now, but maybe not all of them. But they seemed like things - attributes or virtues or good habits – that God would bestow on us when we received our Confirmation. And so we didn’t think about them as coming from a person, relating to us as a person, just like we were taught that God the Father relates to us as a person, that Jesus relates to us as a person.

But here’s another way of understanding some of those old fruits and gifts. We say that, in the sacrament of Marriage, we’re given the actual graces of the sacrament. What does that mean? It means that, when that inevitable first fight occurs, where you’re shouting at each other and filled with rage, some little voice in the back of your mind says, “Don’t say the next thing. Shut your mouth and back off.” That little voice that came out of nowhere at the moment it was most needed, that’s the Holy Spirit.

Or, in the place where you work, one day you’re asked to do something that you know is illegal or at least immoral. And you’re asked to go along in order to get along. And some little voice says, in the back of your head, “Don’t go down this road.” “Yeah, but I might lose my job.” “Don’t go down this road.” That little voice that comes out of nowhere, that’s the Holy Spirit.

Or when you suddenly have a big chunk of free time that you didn’t expect to have. You plop yourself down on the couch with your electronic device and some little voice in the back of your head says, “Why don’t you pull out that hobby you’ve been meaning to get to for a while?” Or “Why don’t you call one of your friends or one of your relatives that you haven’t talked to in a while?” “Why don’t you go out in the garden and putz around for a while with the flowers?” “Why don’t you go out and take a walk?” That little voice that says you can use your time more valuably than you were about to do. That little voice is the Holy Spirit speaking with you.

The scripture that we have last night and today go off in two directions. One direction you can see very clearly in St. Paul’s reading this morning. He talks about the gifts of the Holy Spirit that are given for the community. That’s very Catholic. It’s among us, and nobody else. Then the first reading, all of a sudden, has the apostles, all of them Jews, speaking in languages that nobody ever taught them. They’re the languages of the known world at the time that Luke was writing.

And the gospel says something very interesting as well. It says that, after the second time Jesus said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, I send you,” then He breathed on them. What a strange thing to do. Very unsanitary. Very undignified. We would never say hello to somebody and then go, “Hhhhhuuuuh (Heavy exhale).”

Why does St. John write that? Because he wants us to remember something that happened in the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the bible. There was a lump of clay that God had molded, according to the creation myths, and then God breathed into the nostrils of this dead lump of clay and it became a living being. The rest of the story is about how human beings wandered away from the God who loved them. In this upper room, Jesus gives this Holy Spirit to recreate the entire human race. Not just Catholics, not just Christians, not just believers, but everybody. Which means that the Holy Spirit is active in the world all the time.

Whenever human beings use their minds and their hearts simultaneously to do something good, to create something new, that’s the action of the Holy Spirit in the world. Whether its technology, or science, or medicine, or art, or music, or sculpture, or architecture. No matter what it is, all that has to happen is for people of reasonable good will to open their minds and their hearts simultaneously. That’s a trinitarian thing. Your mind, your heart, new product. We see that all over the world, all over creation. Poor St. Patrick tried to explain to the Irish people what the Trinity was by holding up a shamrock and showing that three separate leaves grew out of one stem. A simple explanation, sort of naïve. But he was correct in essence, because everything that reflects God, mad in the image and likeness of God, is threefold. 

The wind and the moisture combine with the temperature and create what we call weather. A seed drops into the ground, the ground filled with nutrients, and out of it comes a new plant. Someone, something, in the animal species creates a new member of its species. And, when it comes to us people, we do it with a reservoir of love all the time. And so a new creature, loved and capable of loving, comes from there. All of that is Trinitarian. All that has to happen for things to be created is for people of reasonable goodwill to unite their hearts and their minds together to make something new.

There’s an old prayer, “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your spirit and we shall be created and you will renew the face of the earth.”