I want to start today by going back to that first reading, from the Acts of the Apostles. Peter has been approached by a Roman centurion named Cornelius, whose whole family wants to be baptized and join the Christian community. It’s hard for us to imagine how completely impossible this must have seemed to these first Christians, all of whom still saw themselves as Jewish, all of whom assumed that the point of Jesus’s life was that he had been one of them, and that the community was meant for people like them. The reading says that they were astounded to see the Holy Spirit acting this way on a…
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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…
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In Jesus’s last few days before his passion and death, and again when he appeared to the disciples after his resurrection, he seemingly said one word more than any other: peace. “Peace I leave with you,” he says today, “my peace I give to you.” And to a group of tense and frightened disciples who were confused about what the next day was going to bring, they must have been welcome words. A sense of peace was what they wanted and needed. And yet, after these beautiful and reassuring words, the disciples didn’t get very much peace. Immediately after this passage, Jesus says, “Arise, let us leave this place,” and…
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You may have noticed a large and dramatic photograph in the New York Times last week during the Pope’s visit. It was not a story about the Pope, but about the more than one million Catholics in the U.S. who have left to join Pentecostal churches, and in the photo, there are three members of one such church in New York, along with their pastor. They have their arms raised dramatically in the air, eyes closed, intense feeling on their faces. One man is clutching at the shoulders of another, and seems like he is about ready to fall down to the floor in tears. A picture like that is…