Let the Holy Spirit Come

I give to you my peace. My peace I leave with you.

One of the greatest challenges of any group of human beings

when they get together to do any single task

is to get them to do the one important thing.

Because they they all tend to have their own ideas

about what they ought to do.

What makes a great coach a great coach

is the ability to get the team to focus on doing things

the way the coach needs them to done.

What makes a great boss is one that

can unify everybody around the same general direction

and get everybody doing their own thing

for that one common cause.

That sense of unity around a single vision

is what makes a great leader.

Today in all the readings, we get a lesson on unity

and what it means to have unity,

and indeed how we achieve it.

It is worth breaking it open

because it is really quite powerful.

In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles,

it says there was no little dissension among them.

Can you imagine how much there was

if he is saying there was no little dissension?

Obviously, there was a lot of dissension, right?

And here they were sending the apostles,

Paul and Barnabas out to resolve a dispute

that somebody had on whether an intention or not

has created dissent among them in the group

over what we call Asia Minor or today, Turkey, and further east.

But there is a unity in all of these readings today

that we need to hear, and it is what unifies the whole church

and has always unified the church.   

We have seen just an example of it

in these last few weeks with the election of Pope Leo

in the recent Conclave.

It is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

It is the Holy Spirit that unifies the early church.

It is the Holy Spirit that unifies our church today.

The challenge is that we often

do not want to listen to the Holy Spirit.

We want our own opinion,

and we want to what we want to do,

like all our different people

who want to go and do their own things.

What makes us as a church and institution different

is that we promise that we are going to listen to the Holy Spirit.

But this institution is more than just an institution.

This church we do, we live.

It is we, the body of Christ.

We, the people of God, is the church.

We are all called to listen to this Holy Spirit,

to unify us together in all that we do,

not just an election of a pope

but in every day living.

So it is really important for us to cycle through these readings

because they are really powerful readings today.

There was dissension in the early church,

and there are a couple of things really to note here

what Luke says in this Acts of the Apostles.

He says, “Now, there is a new center for the church.”

He said the center of the church is not a place,

but the Holy Spirit.

He says, we have listened as “the Holy Spirit and us.”

So the center of the church is

the Holy Spirit that flows through the apostles.

That is the new center of the church,

and that is the exact vision we hear in John's letter.

Now, I know book of Revelation

can sometimes be hard to understand,

but remember, in this time, if you were referring to the church,

you would have been referring to Jerusalem.

And Jerusalem was considered the center of the religious world.

There was no question about that in this era.

This was a hundred years after Christ died

when this book is written, a little over that.

Now, John comes along, and he sees a new center.

Just to understand, I know it is symbolic language,

but he says it is built with the 12 tribes of Israel.

The 12 tribes are the walls of the gate,

the four walls with three gates.

He tells them where they are.

The foundation is the head of all of these tribes of Israel.

That is the new center of the church.

In other words, the new church is us, the people of God.

And that foundation is what we call our leaders,

who are our bishops, and the cardinals, they elected the pope.

You can see the imagery and

we will be still doing it two thousand years later.

The one thing that unifies all this is what the gospel says

the Holy Spirit is our guiding and unifying source.

It is the advocate, the Holy Spirit.

That is the only way that an institution,

as human as ours is, could last two thousand years,

is that we promise in every era, in every year,

and in every week, and in our case,

every day is to listen to the Holy Spirit.

Why should we listen?

Because Jesus says,

“That is the peace I will give you.

If you listen, if you attend to the advocate,

he will explain it to you.”

He says, “He will explain everything I said to you.

He will explain it in your own heart,

and you will understand this is the peace I will give you.”

Now, what he will say is that peace,

and the next two weeks we will hear, that peace leads to joy.

But my friends, we have to learn to listen to the Holy Spirit.

My fear is that we do not listen to the Holy Spirit,

and we do not listen to even Jesus in our prayer.

I sometimes fear that we do not listen at all in prayer.

God, Father, Son, or the Holy Spirit.

This is my struggle.

I have constantly asked you all every Sunday

to try and get you to become men and women of prayer.

I cannot do that for you.

That is something you must do for yourself.

But my promise to you is that the Holy Spirit

that will be in your heart will give you peace

and will give you joy.

I promise you that.

But you must choose it for yourself.

And there is no other way to do this.

Yes, we come together around this table on Sunday,

but it is every day that we must choose to pause, and to pray,

and let that Holy Spirit flow into our hearts,

and listen to what Christ has to say through his Spirit.

It is powerful when it happens.

Look at what we just saw in Rome two weeks ago.

Two Hundres plus cardinals gathered from all over the world,

One hundred thirty three of the electors go into the conclave,

and with just a few short hours of deliberation,

they listen with clarity with over 90% of the vote

going immediately to one man, Cardinal Prevost.

There is no way any one person could do that.

It is always the movement of the Holy Spirit.

Here at St. Simon Parish this week,

we just finished something called

the “Spiritual Exercise in Everyday Living.”

And we had forty-four people who went through a training program,

learning how to pray and listen to the Spirit in their own life.

They committed to an hour of prayer a day

and an hour with a spiritual director every single week.

And after thirty two weeks, we finished the session on Thursday.

We could feel the Holy Spirit moving in the room on Thursday.

We could really feel the Lord’s presence.

It was not that it was not there before,

but there was just clarity that everybody had.

There was a deep peace and joy

that came from spending the time listening.

They had come to know the Lord personally,

and the Holy Spirit was among us.

My friends, that is my prayer for this every single Sunday,

is that the Holy Spirit is among us,

unifying us, not just in thought and in prayer, but in action.

But we have to commit.

We have to commit to spending time

listening to the Lord in our heart.

That only comes if we invite and

allow the Holy Spirit into our hearts

to guide us and to hold us in that journey.

Today, we celebrate at this table the gift that Christ

keeps on giving to us,

an invitation to listen to him,

an invitation to be him,

an invitation to walk in his steps.

He gives us his advocate to do that.

Listen to him.

Listen to him.

I give to you my peace. My peace I leave with you.