The First Outpouring of the Holy Spirit: for Forgiveness

 

(Pentecost 2023 (A): This homily was given on May 28, 2023 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1,24,29-30,31,34; 1 Corinthians 12:3-13; John 20:19-23.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Pentecost 2023]

I’m sure that many of you remember the great comedian, Red Skelton.  He performed back in the days when most comics didn’t feel the need to use 4-letter words in their comedy routines.

 

Ah, the good old days.

 

I read an interesting story about Red a few years ago.  It seems that, one day back in 1951, he was on a plane that was headed to Europe, where he was scheduled to perform in a show.  But on the way, as the plane was flying over the Swiss Alps, three of its engines failed and the plane began to go down.  The situation looked rather bleak (to put it mildly!), and many of the passengers quite naturally began to pray.  As for Red Skelton, he responded to the situation by doing what he did best: he went into a comedy routine—to try to distract the passengers from the impending disaster.  He was like the orchestra on the Titanic that played music as the ship slowly sank into the North Atlantic.

 

Well, thankfully, at the last moment, the pilot spotted a large field between two of the mountains there in the Alps, and he was able to land the plane safely in that field.

 

When the ordeal was finally over, Red stood up and—in typical Red Skelton style—said, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you may return to all the evil habits you gave up twenty minutes ago.”

 

Which brings us to this morning’s gospel reading from John, chapter 20.  Today, as I mentioned at the beginning of Mass, we celebrate the feast of Pentecost, which was the event we heard about in our first reading from Acts, chapter 2.  This was the moment when the promise Jesus had made to his Apostles at the Last Supper was completely fulfilled.  This was the moment of the first Confirmation, when the Holy Spirit descended on these men and gave them power—new power: the power to live the truth of the Gospel, and speak the truth of the Gospel, and defend the truth of the Gospel.  This was the moment when they received gifts—the spiritual gifts they would need to carry out the mission Jesus had given them to convert the world: first and foremost, the gifts of faith, hope and charity; but also the seven gifts mentioned in Isaiah 11 (wisdom, understanding, knowledge, etc.); as well as the charismatic gifts like tongues, prophecy and healing.

 

The Spirit empowered them through this spectacular event, and they were transformed.  Suddenly they were no longer afraid of their own shadows.  Suddenly they were not intimidated by the godless culture they were living in.  Instead, they made the decision to use the gifts the Spirit gave to them that day, and change their culture in a positive way from within—which is exactly what we’re supposed to do in our culture today with the anointing we receive at our Confirmation. 

 

But it’s not magic!  Notice, I said that the Apostles made the decision to use the gifts of the Spirit to work for positive change.  The fact is, you can receive the gifts of the Spirit at Confirmation (as many of our young people do today) and do absolutely nothing positive with those graces.  In that case, you most certainly will be intimidated by the culture we’re currently living in, and eventually overpowered by it.  This, unfortunately, happens more often than not these days.  If you need some proof, just get hold of some statistics on how many confirmed Catholic young people support things like abortion and transgenderism and so-called gay marriage.

 

At this point, I’ll bet it’s way over 50%.

 

But as important as it is to receive—and use—the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our lives, there is something even more basic that the Spirit brings to us, which is why Jesus didn’t wait until Pentecost to begin pouring out the Spirit on his first priests.  As we heard in today’s gospel, Jesus first sent the Spirit to his Apostles way back on Easter Sunday (a full fifty days before Pentecost).

 

Why?

 

So that they could forgive sins in his name!

 

The Spirit was given first so that sins could be forgiven—which should make perfect sense to us because, if a person is steeped in sin, any spiritual gifts he may have won’t matter. 

 

They won’t matter at all.

 

Forgiveness is primary—and necessary.  This is something, by the way, that Red Skelton definitely understood.  It’s why he said what he said on that plane back in 1951.  Red knew that when the passengers on that aircraft thought they were about to die, most of them were not especially interested in how much wisdom and knowledge they possessed, or whether they could pray in tongues or not.  What they were most concerned with at that decisive (and scary) moment was where they stood before God!  And it was that concern which led them to want to give up what Red called their “evil habits”—that is to say, the sins they had committed but had not yet repented of.

 

Red knew.

 

“[Jesus] breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.  Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.’”

 

This is where priests get the power to forgive sins in the sacrament of Reconciliation.

 

And so, if you want to determine how active the Holy Spirit is in your life at any given time, the first question you should ask yourself is not, “What spiritual gifts do I have?”  No, no, no.  The very first question you should ask yourself is, “How repentant am I—how repentant am I for my sins—and how often do I express my repentance humbly and sincerely and honestly by bringing those sins to Jesus in the confessional?

 

It’s my simple prayer today that in the future the Holy Spirit will be very, very active both in your life and in mine.

 

Love and Obedience

"St. Augustine" by Caravaggio

(Sixth Sunday of Easter (A): This homily was given on May 14, 2023, at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond Suriani.  Read Acts 8:5-17; Psalm 66:1-20; 1 Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21.)

[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Sixth Sunday of Easter 2023]

My homily today is entitled, “Love and Obedience.”

In the minds of many people these days, those are two ideas that definitely don’t go together, spiritually speaking.  And this is true even for many Christians!  They say they love God (and I presume most are sincere in making that assertion), but they also believe that obedience to his commandments is optional (here I include the Ten Commandments, as well as the other commandments that Jesus gives us in Scripture and through his Church—like the commandment to love your enemies).

But Jesus never said these laws were optional!  Quite oppositely, our Lord made a direct connection between love and obedience on many occasions.  He did it twice in today’s gospel.  He began by saying, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  Then later on he added, “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me.”

This is a fitting gospel, incidentally, for Mother’s Day.  When I was young I remember that when I asked my mom what she wanted for her birthday or Christmas or Mother’s Day, she’d almost always give me the same answer.  She’d say, “I don’t want anything material.  Just be nice to your sister.  Just obey me when I ask you to do things.  That’s all I want.  That’s what will make me happy.  That will show me that you love me.”

To which I would typically respond, “Aw ma, come on.  Be serious.”

But she was being serious!

In the Christian life, obedience is supposed to flow from love; it’s supposed to be rooted in love: the love of a Person (a divine Person) whose name is Jesus Christ.

To the extent that that’s the case—to the extent that our obedience is rooted in love, it will actually be easy; to the extent that our obedience rooted in obligation or something else, it will be difficult.

Bishop Sheen had a great way of illustrating this.  He said, “There isn’t a driver [among us] who hasn’t broken the law against speeding.  [But] did you ever lean over your steering wheel and say an act of contrition [afterward]?  Nobody is really sorry for breaking a law, unless he gets caught.”

Sheen was right.  Keeping a commandment for the sake of keeping a commandment doesn’t provide much motivation for doing what’s right, whereas keeping a commandment out of love for another person does provide that incentive.

Love for God will motivate us to obey him; and it will lead us to repent when we don’t obey him—because we will be conscious of having hurt someone we love. 

Let me change Bishop Sheen’s example just a bit to illustrate this point.  Imagine that you broke the speed limit law one day, drove recklessly and nearly got into a serious accident—with your two little children in the back seat of the car.

In that case, would you say an act of contrition afterward for travelling so fast?

You should!  In fact, I would say that you should probably bring that sin to confession.

In any event, you’d be far more likely to realize you broke a law and to repent in a situation like that, simply because what you did directly affected two people whom you dearly love.

So, if you’re having difficulty obeying one or more of God’s commandments, ask the Lord to fill your heart with love for him.  I do that all the time, in the midst of my own sins—because I know if I love God more I will obey him more (and sin less!).

Here we can all take a lesson from Augustine and his experience back in the 4^th century.  Most of us know the basic outline of his story. …

For his first three decades on earth Augustine lived a lifestyle that would have made Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, proud.  That is to say, for his first three decades on earth Augustine lived the life of a hedonist.  His constant prayer was, “Lord, make me chaste—but not now!”  Yes, he believed in God, but for him, God was “out there.”  For him the Lord was an abstraction to be discussed in a philosophical debate—and God’s commandments were simply a bunch of arbitrary rules that threatened the lifestyle he had chosen to embrace.  Well, finally, thanks in large part to his mother Monica’s faithful prayers, Augustine had an experience of God’s love through the Sacred Scriptures. 

It happened one day when he was in the city of Milan with a friend, trying to make sense of his messed-up life. As is the case for most hedonists, Augustine’s years of debauchery had left him empty and confused and on the verge of despair.   Well, at one point he heard a child off in the distance singing a song that he had never heard before.  One of the lines in the song really struck him: “Pick it up and read it.  Pick it up and read it.”  He thought that maybe God was trying to speak to him at that moment, and so he found a copy of the Bible and picked it up, making the decision to read the very first passage his eyes fell upon.  That turned out to be the text from Romans 13 where St. Paul says, “Not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual excess and lust, not in quarreling and jealousy.  Rather, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.”

At that moment, God reached out to Augustine with his love and mercy—and Augustine knew it!  That proved to be the turning point in his life.

Many years later, reflecting back on his three decades of sin and his subsequent conversion, Augustine wrote this prayer to God—the God he had clearly fallen in love with:

Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

It is not a coincidence, my brothers and sisters, that Augustine changed his life in a radically positive way.

He was touched by the love of God; he began to love God in return—and in response to the love he experienced from God, he was also motivated to obey.  And he obeyed so well, that he eventually became a saint.

It’s my prayer today that we will all follow that very same pattern in our lives.