{"id":13952,"date":"2023-05-28T00:00:01","date_gmt":"2023-05-27T23:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/turski.blog\/?p=13952"},"modified":"2023-08-19T18:36:47","modified_gmt":"2023-08-19T18:36:47","slug":"pentecost-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/?p=13952","title":{"rendered":"Pentecost"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a mysterious force that keeps our world running. Without it, the world as we know it would rapidly cease to exist, literally. The force is so common and omnipresent that we only realise its existence when it\u2019s absent. Electricity – that\u2019s what I\u2019m talking about – seems to be a simple concept we all get, but actually, few understand. That\u2019s why sparkies are well-paid jobs. Amperage, voltage and wattage are just a few words in the vocabulary of the secret language of electricity. The force is quiet, invisible, yet powerful enough to be transformative (a niche pun). We don\u2019t see electricity as such, but we can see its effect in many ways. In my kitchen alone, it can freeze things, keep them chilled, warm them up, heat them, or cook or roast them. Electricity can chop, grind, slice or mix ingredients and at the same time play the radio. I can find recipes online via my tablet, wirelessly connected to my mains-powered Wi-Fi router. Electricity washes my clothes and then dries them out. The list is endless, and – who knows – one day in the distant future, an electric car might be added. One force can provide many outcomes, some of which are polar opposites. That makes electricity a fine metaphor for the Holy Spirit, the most mysterious divine person of the Holy Trinity.<\/span><\/p>\n

We can learn and say much about God the Father and His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. The Bible provides plenty of material to read, analyse, meditate upon and so on. But the Holy Spirit seems to evade the imagery and metaphors that make the Father and the Son almost tactile. The Holy Spirit remains mysteriously nebulous and elusive. And yet the New Testament is strongly unambiguous that without the Holy Spirit, there would be no Christian life, neither personal nor communal. However, I\u2019m not going to make theological deliberations on the nature of the Holy Spirit here and now; that might be something for next Sunday when we will celebrate the solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity (no promises!). I\u2019d instead follow the great St Paul, who was more interested in how the Holy Spirit manifested and what the Holy Spirit did.<\/span><\/p>\n

In today\u2019s first reading, we heard about the Holy Spirit coming down upon Jesus\u2019 disciples in a highly spectacular fashion. The sound and visual effects were so dramatic that a crowd gathered around the place to see what was happening, only to see a group of distinctly unassuming characters – <\/span>\u201cSurely, all these men […] are Galileans\u201d<\/span><\/i> – behaving strangely. The part of the story we heard today gave the impression that everyone in the crowd was in awe: <\/span>\u201cThey were amazed and astonished.\u201d<\/span><\/i> However, the story actually continued with a rather unflattering comment: <\/span>\u201cOthers sneered and said, \u2018They are filled with new wine.\u2019\u201d (Acts 2:13).<\/span><\/i> The latter opinion must have been so prevalent that Peter, speaking to the crowd, referred to it in his opening line: <\/span>\u201cThese are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o\u2019clock in the morning.\u201d (Acts 2:15)<\/span><\/i> In a way, the Holy Spirit had made the disciples look quite silly\u2026 And who says that God has no sense of humour? However, the spectacle of Pentecost was pretty much a one-off. The Acts of the Apostles, the New-Testamental book telling the story of the life of the early Church, seems to gradually tone down the manifestations of the Holy Spirit, moving from spectacular towards transformative. To use the metaphor of electricity, the book moved from the lightning bolt of Pentecost to more useful spiritual wiring and doing things in and through the believers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today\u2019s second reading refers to that. It\u2019s about what the Holy Spirit does, which might be far from spectacular. Let me tell you a wee story. Three weeks ago, on Sunday evening, I returned home and turned the telly on. I hadn\u2019t planned to watch the Coronation Concert at Windsor Castle, but as it was just starting, I gave it a chance and then watched it all. In my opinion, it was put together rather well. There was a jaw-dropping moment when a whale appeared in the night sky over the stage. For those who watched it, thanks to a cleverly set camera, it looked like the whale swam out of the huge screen above the stage into the sky. It was an astonishing effect produced by a swarm of drones. It was indeed a view to behold – if you were in the right place or saw it from one particular angle. But if you looked at the display from a different perspective, you wouldn\u2019t see a moving whale but a more or less disorderly bevvy of lights in the sky. Things would be even less spectacular if you were inside that swarm of drones. You\u2019d be deafened by the noisy whirl of their propellers and perplexed by the puzzling lights of different colours emitted by each drone. What if you were one of those machines? You hang up in the cold night sky, pushed in different directions by an invisible operator and beam lights that light absolutely nothing while your battery gets inexorably drained. What a miserable kind of existence\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a modern retelling of what St Paul wrote in today\u2019s second reading: <\/span>\u201cThere is a variety of gifts but always the same Spirit; there are all sorts of service to be done, but always to the same Lord; working in all sorts of different ways in different people, it is the same God who is working in all of them. The particular way in which the Spirit is given to each person is for a good purpose.\u201d<\/span><\/i> You and I have been given talents and skills. They are not the same, nor are they equally distributed. Each of us is equipped differently, similar to many electric appliances. Just like electricity, which is the same for each of them but generates different results, the same Holy Spirit nudges, encourages and motivates each of us in different, sometimes unique ways. Sometimes we wonder whether it makes sense because we don\u2019t see the whole picture. But all those seemingly insignificant acts of service play indispensable parts in God\u2019s plan, the one that we asked in the responsorial psalm to be accomplished: <\/span>\u201cSend forth your spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a mysterious force that keeps our world running. Without it, the world as we know it would rapidly cease to exist, literally. The force is so common and omnipresent that we only realise its existence when it\u2019s absent. Electricity – that\u2019s what I\u2019m talking about – seems to be a simple concept we all get, but actually, few understand. That\u2019s why sparkies are well-paid jobs. Amperage, voltage and wattage are just a few words in the vocabulary of the secret language of electricity. The force is quiet, invisible, yet powerful enough to be transformative (a niche pun). We don\u2019t see electricity as such, but we can see its effect in many ways. In my kitchen alone, it can freeze things, keep them chilled, warm them up, heat them, or cook or roast them. Electricity can chop, grind, slice or mix ingredients and at the same time play the radio. I can find recipes online via my tablet, wirelessly connected to my mains-powered Wi-Fi router. Electricity washes my clothes and then dries them out. The list is endless, and – who knows – one day in the distant future, an electric car might be added. One force can provide many outcomes, some of which are polar opposites. That makes electricity a fine metaphor for the Holy Spirit, the most mysterious divine person of the Holy Trinity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sermon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/post-header-red.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14063,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13952\/revisions\/14063"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tad.scot\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}