Pentecost Sunday 2021
There is a perspective in theology that regards the event of Pentecost as the birth of the Church. On this day, the Spirit is poured out on the disciples. They are released from their disillusionments and their fears; they are enSpirited and emboldened to go out and to preach the good news that the life of Christ is more powerful than death, that the self-sacrifice of his love has overpowered the forces of selfishness and suspicion, that the future stretches out beyond us a constant invitation full of possibility. Our dead-ends have become new beginnings; our sunsets have been changed into dawns.
Yes, on this day the Spirit overwhelms our timidity, our doubt, our anxiety and sends us forth to become a living sign of the power of God manifest in lives of faith, hope and love. This is a remarkable acclamation. It is made even more so given that many around us are proclaiming not the birth of the Church but its death. Many are the occasions where we have to endure the public commentary about the decline of the Church. The question is constantly put forward, particularly by the media, about the future of the Church. How can the Church ever recover from the challenges that threaten to engulf it, people ask?
But the Church is not dead. It lives, and, what is more, it will keep on living. It will keep on being birthed in new ways, in new places and at new times. This is our bold and proud affirmation on this day of Pentecost. Yes, its form may not necessarily stay the same. It may look quite different in ten, twenty, fifty years’ time. However, I have no doubt at all that it will remain present. It will be present, alive and active, because we are not dealing here with a mere human institution that is dependent on the idiosyncrasies and failure of its members. We are dealing here with a community of people enlivened by the very Spirit of God, brought into being by their shared experience of the life of Jesus Christ which keeps irrupting in the hearts of people and calling them into lives of discipleship.
Whenever I have fears about the future of the Church I look around me here in the parish. Here I see extraordinary sanctity. Here I see people who in undramatic ways give of themselves with such love and generosity. Here I see people who in the quietness of their hearts keep entrusting themselves into the power of God’s life. Here I see every day people whose faith, hope and love caste light across the shadows that creep across the horizons of their lives. And in that light I say to myself, ‘Here is the Church, and it is not dying. It breathes and lives with such strength and vigour.” And yes, the message of Jesus Christ will keep calling forth people to see their lives and their struggles through the meaning and the hope that it offers. I see this here on a daily basis in our own community. I see it in the remote communities of Vietnam, of Myanmar, of Zambia where it has been my fortune to travel witnessing the same Spirit there too at work in the lives of people just as I witness it in place after place in our own country, even in the remotest of communities.
No the Church is not dying. It is living and constantly coming to birth. This is because before it is a noun, the Church is a verb. It is people coming together, using the words of Chauvet, re-reading the Scriptures with the memory of Jesus, repeating his gestures in memory of him, and living the fellowship with one another in his name. We cannot believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, without believing in the Church. The life of the Risen Christ is made present precisely in the community of those who find their future in his memory, the community which is the Body of the living Christ. And this Body will keep sparking because of the divine life that it bears, albeit in such earthen vessels.
Today we open our hearts to the Spirit of God poured out on us. It is the Spirit that renews and re-creates. It is the Spirit that keeps giving birth to the Church. In that Spirit we celebrate what God is doing in us, and what God will always do in us, through us, and for us. In the Spirit, it is never the time for despair. It is always the time to celebrate possibility.
