Catholics, I think, have what you might call an ambivalent relationship with the Holy Spirit. We might know the definition, if we were paying attention in PREP class years ago, but at a personal level, it’s not part of our day to day vocabulary. And when we hear people start talking about being “moved by the Spirit,” we get nervous, because we worry this is all going to get very emotional and exotic. But on a day like today, we can’t avoid it. because we hear in the Scriptures that “receiving the Holy Spirit” was completely central to what Jesus promised to the disciples, the “advocate” who would be present with them always, and it was also what everyone was clamoring for in that reading from the Acts of Apostles. They wanted the Holy Spirit, and they received it.
We don’t know what to make of this kind of language. On the one hand, we assume that someone who says they’ve received the Spirit might act irrationally or even fanatically, and it’s kind of like turning into another person, at least temporarily. On the other hand, we know that even though all our sacraments are all about the action of the Spirit, we know that many people who receive that Spirit at baptism and confirmation may not look or act all that much different the day after than the day before. So we’re caught between two extremes, thinking on the one hand that the Spirit is too exotic and over the top for us, and on the other, thinking that the Spirit’s work is so quiet that we have a hard time seeing it at all.
So what does “receiving the Spirit” mean? And there’s a related question, is it something you want? We have some clues today from the scriptures, and we find out quickly that both these pictures we have of the Spirit, wildly emotional on the one hand, almost invisible on the other, aren’t what the Spirit is up to at all.
First, today’s gospel. Jesus tells his disciples that he will not leave them, because this Holy Spirit will be there, and they should be led and taught by it in the same way they were by him. That means that this Spirit is powerful, but also frankly something we humans can find a way to ignore if we want to. After all, that’s the way it was with Jesus himself: Sometimes the people he was with understood where Jesus was trying to send them; at other times they seemed frozen, or too caught up in their own ideas and lives to hear what Jesus was hoping for from them even when he was right there. It’s the same with the Spirit — it is a power that we don’t always understand, or decide to listen to, but if we think we don’t understand what the Spirit is, we should remember that it is not an exotic mystery: it is the presence of Jesus alive and well and with us still. Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit is not some faceless, anonymous power that comes and goes in strange and overpowering moments. The Spirit is the presence of Jesus, here not just to teach us and change us if we want it to, and to love us and protect us. We don’t have any reason to think of it as exotic. It is meant for everyday Christians to be the wind that helps them forward.
And if you want to see a great example of how that Spirit works, we see it today in that first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Because we heard about Philip, who was the one who went to preach the good news to Samaria. He is one of my favorite people in the New Testament, but you have to think back to last Sunday’s readings to see why. Last week we heard that he was appointed one of the seven assistants to the 12 apostles. These seven were supposed to take care of all the administrative work so that the apostles could get promoted out of that and spend more time preaching. But now, right after being assigned that role of assistant, here Philip seems to have left that job already and is preaching himself, way off in the countryside in a part of the world, Samaria, that a Jew would never go to voluntarily, Samaria, filled with people everyone distrusted as unclean heretics. What happened to him?
Maybe you have seen people like this, people who decided they saw something that needed to be done, not work that immediately made a lot of sense, or even work they felt particularly well trained to do. Somehow in people like Philip, a desire to do something for God and for other people just overwhelms all their defense mechanisms and breaks down a barrier in this world.
The early church grew because people saw things like this happening and wondered what inspires this kind of life. That was evidence of the Spirit when Jews like Philip went to Samaria and acted like nothing was strange about talking with people there like they were human, it was also evidence of the Spirit when people sold their possessions and pooled everything together, or when ordinary men and women started talking about the risen Christ and the joy it gave them. People saw that and said, only God could do a thing like that, this isn’t the way people usually are.
The Spirit working like that just continues the work of Jesus. All along when he was alive, Jesus was telling people to live in a new kind of kingdom, where everyone sustained one another and acted with generosity and took down barriers that divided people. They all thought he meant later, but he meant now. The Spirit today does what he did, the Spirit points to now and says, it’s time to take a step. The Spirit says you can do it because have a defender who will be in your corner. Just start on the day-by-day work of picking up the lowly where they are spreading the word that the kingdom of God can be alive and even well on this earth. You won’t be let down. Jesus is with you.
We all know people in this world are looking for something. That kingdom and the way it works is what we can offer that the world needs. We all have some next way to contribute to building that kingdom that the Spirit is trying to draw us towards, sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly in small ways over time.
And yet we all have a lot of ways we talk ourselves out of feeling that it’s us the Spirit wants to shape and change and nudge forward. The Spirit is powerful, but it does not possess us if we don’t want it. The real question about the Spirit that always needs answering is, do I want that Spirit near me, working on me, changing me? If the answer is yes, the signs of it in your life won’t be a secret for very long.