Today’s celebration of Pentecost is somewhat treated like Christmas or Easter, with different readings depending on which Mass you chose to attend. You can flip through the Breaking Bread book to see all the different readings designed to help us enter into the day.
Rightly so, this is a big celebration, because it marks the day when the Catholic Church was truly born, Her birthday so to speak, and then the disciples were sent out on Mission, led by, guided by, this outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.
In our first reading from Joel at the Vigil, we hear a prophecy where God says, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh” and “and I will work wonders in the Heavens and on the Earth.” In our Gospel, Jesus makes a similar prophecy saying, “‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.’ He said this in reference to the Spirit that those who came to believe in him were to receive.”
Then in our readings from Sunday, we hear of these prophecies coming true, finally coming to fulfillment, first, in the Gospel when Jesus appears to the disciples in the upper room right after the Resurrection, and “he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”
And then 50 days later, on Pentecost, we hear from Acts, “When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together. And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were. Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.”
When we read these prophecies and fulfillments, it is easy to think, “well, that just happened then, way back then, but we are past that.” But what I have learned over the past couple of years, as any of the regular Nativity parishioners would know, is that these awesome wonders are still happening now.
I haven’t talked about it for a while since I felt like I overloaded you on the Holy Spirit back in January leading up to our Spirit-filled Parish Mission, but in the meantime, I have been praying with people privately, reading books, going to healing trainings and missions all around, just trying to learn everything I can.
One of the training sessions that I went to was from the John Paul II Healing Center in Florida which is run by Dr. Bob Schuchts, but his brother Bart Schuchts was leading this training about two months ago today. And he said a couple of really interesting things that really stuck with me, that I have been thinking and praying a lot about.
First is that we are entering into a new springtime in the Church, led by the Holy Spirit. It’s not the “charismatic movement,” it isn’t anything weird, it is really just the Holy Spirit being poured out on the believers, on all of us disciples, in a really powerful way, in a way that people are going to come running back to the Church.
People have been leaving the Church for so long, many scandals, many reasons, but now is the time, when they will see these awesome wonders worked again, and people will come back to their faith in Jesus.
Second is that Bart Schuchts laid out a vision for what this looks like. He said this needs to happen in the Church, where we pray with each other, like we see people struggling, physically, emotionally, in the pew in front of us or beside us or anywhere, and we walk up to them and talk to them and ask to pray for them.
Not that we say we will pray for them and intend to do it later, but that we ask if we can lay our hands on their head or their shoulders or whatever part of their body hurts or even above them and just pray for them, right then and there!
I love that vision, and I would love to see it come true, but I also see it as so foreign to our current Saturday/Sunday experience. And furthermore, I think that is a difficult thing to ask many people to do, simply because we don’t have the experience with that type of prayer.
Plus, we are Catholics… we need rote prayers. I’m joking, we don’t, but what we need is to learn how to pray. And I believe the best way to learn is with our family or our friends outside of church, and then bring it inside.
So, I have produced a handout to help you with this, and it is in the bulletin. There are more in the back too. It is on heavy paper so you can hold it up and pray with it in one hand, and it won’t flop over like normal paper. It has three prayers, the third focuses on anxiety because that is so common these days, but it is highly customizable for your own purposes.
The Holy Spirit is given to all of us believers in Jesus for some benefit. I believe one of the biggest benefits is just to show God's presence in our world.
On the first Christian Pentecost, the biggest wonder was everyone who had just received the Holy Spirit could speak in human tongues, so that all of the visitors from foreign nations who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish feast of Pentecost could understand these disciples in their own language.
This was a huge proof that this was of God, that it was supernatural, because there was no way these simple Jewish fisherman could have known all these different languages. And these people believed that Jesus was the Messiah, that He was God after hearing the Gospel proclaimed in their own language.
But this is not as important today, especially here in Dubuque. The Holy Spirit enabling us to speak crazy languages isn’t that helpful to know that God is present in our midst. But what is helpful? Healing. We need healing.
I was over at the Radio Station Friday with Lisa Bennett in the 92.9 KatFM studio and she has these little interesting statistics that she reads each morning, and one of them that she plans to read on Monday, so spoiler alert, it said “If you’re average, you have only 13 pain-free days per year.”
We need healing in so many ways. We know it is true with our close family and friends. So why don’t we take the time to do it, to pray with them? Well, most likely it’s because we A) don’t know how and B) don’t think it will work.
As to A) we don’t know how. It is simple, we don’t need these rote prayers, but they help. I have borrowed and modified these from psychologists, priests and priest exorcists. The words matter, they are formulas, and they are effective, but in truth, it is God that does the healing, not us, God just works through our hands.
And that goes to B) we’re afraid it won’t work. If it doesn’t work, will I be disappointed, will they be disappointed, does God not love us? These are all fair questions, but God does love us, and even if we are not healed physically instantly, it doesn’t mean we didn’t feel a moment of peace, or some emotional healing, or some healing is occurring slowly.
God does the healing. If someone is healed, praise Jesus, don’t take the credit yourself. If someone doesn’t get healed, still praise Jesus, don’t take the credit yourself. It isn’t a failure on your part, either way, it’s all up to Him.
Back to A) We could pray something as simple as “Be healed in the name of Jesus” and someone could be healed. Fr. Dave Hemann from Sioux City tells a story like that where someone was healed through his hands and that’s all he said.
But I wanted to share this movement of the Holy Spirit with you because I’ve seen this work in my own family. My dad’s knees were hurting, so me and my sister prayed over him one day. My niece Katherine even joined in the prayer. She is two years old but she saw us put our hands on Papa’s leg and she wanted to as well, and we all prayed for a few minutes and his knees have been good ever since.
My sister Sara prays over her son Conrad every time he has an asthma attack, and it goes away. Her kids now ask her regularly to pray over them because they’ve seen it work so much.
I’ve heard it happen in other people’s families, we have some family friends in Marshalltown, Carrie Seaberger is the mom of the family, she’s about my age, and one day my dad went over to her house to pick up his grandkids, my nieces and nephews. She was limping, she had just rolled her ankle. It was swollen and starting to turn black and blue.
My Dad called all of the kids together and they all prayed over her, and when they got done, the pain had gone away, the swelling went down and the color was going back to normal.
“Okay Father, thanks, but your dad is a Deacon and you are a priest and your family is just special we can’t do this kind of stuff.” No, that is not what the bible says! At the end of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents [with their hands], and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Jesus said it! “[Believers] will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.” We just have to believe and lay our hands, say the prayers and let Jesus do the work. That’s why the Holy Spirit is sent to us.
Just to show that I’ve heard it happen with people that aren’t priests or deacons and that I am not related to even… There is a family here in town that the parents came to the Parish Healing Mission back in February and the mom went home and prayed over their daughter while she was sleeping.
She doesn’t even know what prayers they used, it doesn't matter except that she prayed in the name of Jesus Christ, but they went to see their doctor in Iowa City Children’s Hospital for her regular heart check-up. Ever since she was born she had a heart condition, a bad valve or something that could give way and she could die, at any moment.
The doctor is looking at her heart, and he isn’t saying anything for a long time and he finally goes, “her heart valve looks like it is healed.” So the mom said, “well, how often does that happen?” And the doctor said, “Ma’am, in my thirty years of looking at hearts every single day, I’ve never seen it happen. Never.”
And the mom said, “Well I know why! God healed her!” And the doctor said, “Well that’s as good of an explanation as I have.” Praise be to Jesus Christ. I was talking to her dad last night and he said “this type of tissue just doesn’t heal itself, it isn’t like our skin or our liver” and then I found out that he is a doctor himself!
So what have you got to lose? Ten, fifteen minutes tops? Can you afford to give that much time up in your day, on the chance, the well founded promise made by Jesus, and still seen today that people can be healed by believers who are filled with the Holy Spirit?
So ask again for the Holy Spirit, ask today and ask often. One of the things that really caught me when preparing for this homily was that Jesus gave the disciples the Holy Spirit on Easter, and then again on Pentecost in a more powerful way, so we should ask again and again as well.