Category: Pentecost

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Truth and Consequences

Pentecost (A):  I Corinthians 12: 3-7, 12-13

 

Many years ago, there was a popular game show called Truth or Consequences.  A contestant in this show would be asked a difficult trivia question, which the contestant would usually get wrong.  Getting the question wrong had consequences! The contestant would then have to participate in a potentially embarrassing stunt.

One unintended effect of this show’s title was to affirm that truth has consequences.  If something is true, certain conclusions necessarily follow.  For example, if we claim that Jesus of Nazareth is true God as well as true man, and that His Passion, Death and Resurrection are, together, the defining moment of human history, that claim has consequences.  Our lives cannot be like the lives  of those who do not claim this.  Our perception of reality, our ways of thinking and acting, must be fundamentally transformed by this claim.  If not, then we do not really believe that our faith in Jesus Christ is true.  It may be only a slogan.  It may be only political spin.  But it is not truth unless it has real, visible, perceptible consequences for us. Continue reading “Truth and Consequences”

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Open To The Holy Spirit

Pentecost (C)

 

Pentecost.  The outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the infant Church. The proclamation of the Gospel to devout Jews gathered for the first major Jewish feast after Passover. Some people scoff and sneer at the proclamation. Others, cut to the heart, ask what they must do, and come to believe and are baptized.

Pentecost is presented to us as not only a beginning, but also as a summary of what the Apostles would do – and the responses they would get – throughout the Acts of the Apostles. Pentecost is also a template for us. It reveals to us the foundations of our own vocations, whatever they may be, and shows us how we are to live out our vocations in union with the Lord and His Church.  It shows us what the Holy Spirit does for us, the responses we are likely to get in living out our vocations, and also how the Spirit helps our faithfulness to Him bear great fruit. Continue reading “Open To The Holy Spirit”

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One In The Spirit

Pentecost (A): 1 Corinthians 12: 3b-7; 12-13

“No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’, except by the Holy Spirit.” – 1 Corinthians 12:3

Many Catholics in this country came from ethnic groups that have been here for generations. Some began to arrive in the great waves of immigration that began in the 1830’s – the Irish, the Germans, the French Canadians, the Italians. Others were descendants of Spanish and Portuguese settlers that had arrived in the Americas long before the English and French began to settle here.

All of these, however, had one thing in common – they were not “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. They had the wrong accents, the wrong customs, and the wrong religion. They usually arrived poor, if not destitute, and were seen by many Americans as bringers of disease and crime, and as a threat to American democracy. (Funny how some things do not change – and sad to see how the descendants of people so treated now treat new immigrants in the same way.) In a word, these Catholic immigrants had no status in American society.  Continue reading “One In The Spirit”