Pentecost C (Acts 2:1-21; Rm 8:14-17; Ps 104:25-35, 37; Jn 14:8-17)

When do you experience the Holy Spirit working most visibly in your life? It can be when you get up in the morning and have another new day. Or it can be this very fact you came here this morning to worship God with other brothers and sisters in Christ. There can be many answers to this question. What would you consider the work of the Holy Spirit that is most significantly experienced and felt in your daily life? As you can see, I’m not asking for some miraculous experience that you had with the Holy Spirit such as speaking in tongues or a dramatic conversion story. 

St Paul in the second lesson says something quite interesting in regard to this work of the Holy Spirit. He seems to share his personal experience of the Holy Spirit with Christians in Rome. He first talks about a spirit of slavery and a spirit of adoption. The basic logic of his argument is that if you call God “Abba, Father,” this is the Holy Spirit bearing witness with our spirits that we are children of God. Now, I’m more interested in where this calling of God as Abba Father takes place. What would you say where this happens? In what context do you call God Abba Father? 

Prayer. This calling God as Father happens in our prayer life. Last Sunday, I preached on this topic of prayer because we listened to the prayer of Jesus not just for his disciples but also for all of us and everyone else who believe in him. When we enter into this time and place of prayer, we stand before God who is loving, kind, gentle, and compassionate to us. I’m very much aware that some Christians do not prefer Calling God Father for many legitimate reasons, but as I understand the Church tradition, this calling of God Abba Father matters for two reasons. One is that it’s the language of Jesus in his prayer life, especially the prayer that he taught us. (The Lord’s Prayer) The other reason is that calling God Father is not about portraying the masculine or patriarchal image of God (e.g. think of the prodigal father in Jesus’s parable) but really about how God relates himself to us and see us as God’s children. The point is that we are God’s children who God is so in love with. This intimate, loving, and caring relationship is the very context where we call God Father. 

So back to the first question, “When do you experience the Holy Spirit working most visibly in your life?” It’s when you pray. This is not to say that the Holy Spirit isn’t working at other times. Of course, she does. But it’s in prayer when the Holy Spirit is mostly visible in our lives. And today, we celebrate the Day of Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit. In our second lesson, we see the disciples gathered in one place to worship and pray. Every Christian gathering begins and ends with prayers. When two or three are gathered in Jesus’s name, Jesus is present, particularly in our communal prayers. We pray to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. This very act of prayer is how we participate in the divine life of God or in the trinitarian life of God. 

In your prayer life, before you say anything, before you bring to God what you really want, take a deep breath in and out. Feel this breath. And imagine that this very breath coming into your body and soul is the very Breath that the Father breathes forth through the Son. It is the breath of God sustaining your life. And the breath in you is also the Joy and Delight of God nurturing and loving you. In this simple awareness of your own breathing in and out, you become aware of the Holy Spirit, the life, the vitality, the joy of God. And with this awareness in prayer, we bring ourselves to the presence of God who has never been absent. Rather, we become more present to God’s loving and compassionate presence. As you breathe in, feel the love that God has poured out in you through the Holy Spirit (Rm 5:5). As you breathe out, feel the freedom that God has set before you through the Holy Spirit. 

From this rather personal experience of the Holy Spirit, we then move out to a larger setting where God is present to other brothers and sisters in Christ. The Breath of God in me is also in them. The gift of the Holy Spirit is given to all on this Day of Pentecost. Not just me. In our prayer life, we breathe together with others in Christ the same Breath of God. You might think you’re just praying on your own in your private prayer time, but that’s not true. You’re spiritually in communion with your fellow Christians, whether they’re alive here on earth or deceased now. And the Eucharist is the official sign of that communion visibly shown by which we are eternally bound to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. 

My friends, I once again talked about prayer. It seems this topic has nothing to do with Pentecost which we celebrate today. But there is. Often, the significance of this gift of the Holy Spirit on this 50th day after Easter Sunday is on our second lesson that  the disciples who were gathered on this very day started speaking in different languages when they were filled with the Holy Spirit. The point of this miraculous event of the Church, however, isn’t so much about them speaking in different languages but really about the very purpose and goal of that event. People who were once separated from each other due to language barriers or whatever barriers they had were now connected by the Holy Spirit. The person who speaks a different language than mine, meaning that person who has nothing to do with me is now connected to me by the Holy Spirit. Somehow, for some reason, I’m connected to that person. That person matters to me. And that person is also the precious child of our loving God. 

In this sense, the very act that we enter into prayer is a dangerous business. We not only encounter God who sees us as God’s children but we are also called to encounter others who God sees as God’s beloved too. Just like us, they are God’s children. In God, we are connected as Christ’s sisters and brothers. In prayer, we’re connected. In the Eucharist through baptism, we are publicly and visibly connected with one another as brothers and sisters. This very human connection which has become possible through the divine connection is what we celebrate. This may be one of the reasons why the Church has considered Pentecost as the birthday of the Church. 

For us Christians, we do not find the very meaning of life on alone. Neither do we just with God alone. We find and experience it with one another, with other sisters and brothers, through the Son in the Holy Spirit who is breathed forth from the Father. Let us pray to God that Saint Agnes Church becomes the place where this very meaning of life is found for those who have lost it. How do we do that? If we start discovering it ourselves here in Saint Agnes Church, God will send those who will find it themselves as well which will also flourish all of us in turn. 

Come, Holy Spirit upon our hearts. Let the Joy of the Father through the Son be in our hearts so that we become more loving and more open to one another as God’s children. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.