Pentecost Sunday: 5-15-16
Peace be with You,
Friends, with the feast of Pentecost, we come to the end of the Easter Season, and there could not be a more perfect way to culminate this season in which we celebrate the new life Christ has won for! For, what we celebrate today is He Who brings life to the Church, the Holy Spirit.
We believe the Holy Spirit to be the Third Person of the Trinity, Who proceeds from the Father and Son. To describe how this takes place, Archbishop Fulton Sheen said that as the Father and Son gaze at one another for all eternity, they are so overwhelmed with love that they sigh, and this breath released from each is the Spirit of Love, the Holy Spirit. Notice, that by its very character, the Holy Spirit is a binding force. In the Trinity, it is the Love exchange by Father and Son, and within the Church, this same Spirit binds us all together in the One Body of Christ. Moreover, this binding force is so superabundant that those in whom It comes to dwell cannot contain it, not as an individual member, not as a family of millions. Rather, this Love, is so overpowering that in order to sustain It, It must be shared!
This is precisely what we see taking place in our reading from Acts this Sunday. When the apostles receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, they begin to proclaim “the mighty acts of God” in many diverse languages. Notice please, the Spirit here is undoing that which happened at Babel, when men attempted to reach Heaven by their own ingenuity and God confused their language, scattering them. Here, that which cannot be done by human will is accomplished by God Himself. For, through indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the apostles at once both shared in the life of God, and proclaimed ’the mighty acts of God’ that allow all people to come to share in this life: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ! Friends, this same Spirit that lived and breathed in the early Church is alive and well today! He lives in you and me and longs to share ’the mighty acts of God’ with all we meet! Let us allow the Spirit to live and move in us, so that all may come to share in the life of God, through this same Spirit.
Your servant in Christ,
Tony
Tony Crescio is the founder of FRESHImage Ministries. He holds an MTS from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD candidate in Christian Theology at Saint Louis University. His research focuses on the intersection between moral and sacramental theology. His dissertation is entitled, Presencing the Divine: Augustine, the Eucharist and the Ethics of Exemplarity.
Tony’s academic publications can be found here.