2025 Jun 15 SUN: THE HOLY TRINITY S
Prv 8: 22-31/ Ps 8: 4-5. 6-7. 8-9 (2a)/ Rom 5: 1-5/ Jn 16: 12-15

Last evening I spoke about current events and I'm not sure that everybody got the context. And the context is this. There were shootings in the Minneapolis area early yesterday morning. A state representative and her husband were killed. A state senator and his wife were badly injured but it is believed that they will survive. 

You know I've talked in the past about my sister Kathy. Kathy lives in Minneapolis and teaches at a Catholic school, three blocks from where George Floyd was killed.

So yesterday morning I texted her: "How are things where you live?" And she said "quiet" and I said "good." And she said, "My friends and I were going to protest but we have decided against it." And I just replied to her, "There will be time to protest and plenty to protest about." 

We have to lift up our voices.

I refer you to today's bulletin and it ran in last weekend's bulletin as well. And that notice amounts to a protest by the bishops of the United States, and their organization Catholic Relief Services. And it is protesting what I believe is legislation already passed. Cutting back feeding programs in many countries. And all I can say to that is that feeding the hungry is simple humanity.

We must lift up our voices. 

Regarding the Blessed Trinity: We have this beautiful thing from the book of Proverbs. Wisdom always existed with God and we may say that wisdom is the Holy Spirit because after all we list wisdom as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We have this description of wisdom as craftsman: One who is playing in the midst of creation. Finding delight in it.

We go on to Saint Paul and he says that the love of God has been poured out upon us in the Holy Spirit. We need to consider whether we are allowing ourselves to receive the Holy Spirit. Maybe we have armor on. Maybe we tell ourselves that we are self-sufficient and we have the right opinions and nothing can touch us. Well, if nothing can touch us, we suppose that God does not need to touch us. Romans talks about being justified by faith. There are too many of us, maybe all of us -- we have the idea that salvation is about getting God to notice us and be favorable to us. Well, God has always known us, has known us for eternity and there is no putting on an act with God. In our vulnerability, and this is a vulnerability that we all must be in touch with, in vulnerability we do allow a small space at least and our God will take advantage of that small space in order to touch us, to love us, so that we will be overwhelmed with what we may have been guarding against. We will trade in doing good things to get God's favor. We will trade that in for the love of God for us and we will do good things simply out of thanksgiving.

And finally, Jesus speaks with his disciples about the activity of both the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus, of course, is our point of easiest access. We find it so easy, even though we are filled with wonder that God would become human. But Jesus in his very humanity invites us to see how God loves us. And so we rejoice in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not a puzzle to be figured out, a mystery simply to be lived. We pray that being loved by the Holy Spirit we will find the way to true justice.

2025 Jun 8 SUN: PENTECOST S
Acts 2: 1-11/ Ps 104: 1. 24. 29-30. 31. 34/ 1 Cor 12: 3b-7. 12-13 or Rom 8: 8-17/ Sequence Veni Creator Spiritus/ Jn 20: 19-23 or Jn 14: 15-16. 23b-26

We come today to the conclusion, and you might say the crown, of the season of Easter: Pentecost -- what we also refer to as the Birthday of the Church.

And if you were following in Breaking Bread, you may have found it somewhat difficult because of a variety of options for our Scriptures. In fact, there are a variety of options both today on Pentecost itself and also yesterday on the Vigil of Pentecost. Because there are a great number of images of the Holy Spirit, and it's good for us to appreciate those images and discover which are most helpful to ourselves. 

On the banners we have the dove which is associated with the baptism of Jesus. We have other images as well. When the Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostles, it was with a driving wind and with tongues of flame. And in the Gospel today, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the Advocate. We can imagine ourselves being sued or otherwise finding ourselves in court. And we want someone to plead our case for us. So this image might be useful as well. 

And St. Paul today speaks of the Spirit as opposed to what he calls the flesh. Now human flesh is not a bad thing in itself. And we remember that the Son of God took on our human flesh out of love for us in order to raise us up, to lift us up. When Paul speaks of the flesh, he is referring to the tendency to think of the self alone. And we know that that sort of self-centered thinking is the cause of much distress in human life. Instead of thinking about the self, we are to understand ourselves as brought together in the Holy Spirit, who makes us here and now into the Body of Christ.

So we have heard many examples of how we might imagine the unimaginable Holy Spirit. And we take comfort in the fact that the mystery of the Holy Spirit -- like the mystery of the Trinity which we will celebrate next week -- this mystery is not a puzzle to be figured out. It is a gift which we are to live. We think of the gifts of the Holy Spirit poured out upon us in the sacrament of confirmation. And we think as well of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, the ways in which the Holy Spirit makes us new people. In fact, I sneaked St. Paul's list of the fruits of the Holy Spirit into the June birthday blessing today. So be sure to listen for those. And we know that there is a difference in our lives. We can find ourselves in a state of agitation or anxiety because a particular situation is affecting us in some way. And we feel powerless in many respects. But we can allow the Holy Spirit to grow within us and to bear fruit so that in similar situations we are not unnerved. We can have peace even when everyone else is in a state of agitation. So we know the working of the Holy Spirit in our own lives. And we are thankful for the difference as we accept God's peace and the understanding of His Word.

2025 Jun 1 SUN: ASCENSION OF THE LORD S (Seventh Sunday of Easter)
Acts 1: 1-11/ Ps 47: 2-3. 6-7. 8-9 (6)/ Heb 9: 24-28; 10: 19-23/ Lk 24: 46-53

As I mentioned last week, I am intending to concentrate through the 15th of June on God the Holy Spirit. 

And we have another help today in the passage from the letter to the Hebrews. He is asking us to imagine the heavenly sanctuary itself, which of course is beyond imagining. I know it exists. It is the proper place for the blessed Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are to picture God the Son returning to that heavenly sanctuary with His own blood offered in sacrifice for the salvation of all of us. And we are called to understand the difference between offering sacrifices over and over, as opposed to the one great sacrifice which is effective for all of us for all time.

And we understand that once the Son of God has returned to that heavenly sanctuary, He does send power from on high, and this is God the Holy Spirit. I mentioned last week that I think of the Holy Spirit in terms of what you and I experience as we get to know one another and seek to live together according to the love of God. We know that we can put two people together and they can feel very isolated from one another. They can also feel hostile to each other, but the Holy Spirit is in our midst and that Spirit allows us to become friends, to appreciate and love one another.

We understand that the Holy Spirit comes to form the body of Christ here and now in our earthly existence. Today we have also been given two accounts of Jesus' ascension, one from the end of Luke, the other from the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. And we understand that we are in fact to be the body of Christ here and now following the Apostles. And of course next week we celebrate that strange and beautiful event in which there's a mighty wind and tongues of flame and the ability to communicate across barriers.

This is what we seek to receive and to exercise. This is the gift won for us through the death and resurrection of Jesus in his breaking of the power of evil, in his giving us an invincible power, the power of love.

2025 May 25 SUN: SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
Acts 15: 1-2. 22-29/ Ps 67: 2-3. 5. 6. 8 (4)/ Rv 21: 10-14. 22-23/ Jn 14: 23-29 (In the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois, the Ascension of the Lord supersedes the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Therefore, the following second reading and gospel may be substituted today: Rv 22:12-14. 16-17. 20/ Jn 17: 20-26)

Given that today is the fifth anniversary of the murder of a man named George Floyd in Minneapolis, we do need to keep in mind all of the ways in which humanity must keep growing. And that includes growing out of cruelty, growing out of race-based conclusions about people. We come together and we hear of the love of the Son of God, and we know we still need to be transformed into His loving likeness.

What I intend to do for the next few weekends is consider the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit may well be the person of the Blessed Trinity which we have the hardest time knowing.

The Scriptures today will help us, but as I say, we will take several weekends through Trinity Sunday on the 15th of June to really focus on the Holy Spirit within God who is Trinity. And of course we all know that the Trinity itself is the mystery in the most strict sense, because it had to be revealed to us. It was not something that our intellects would reach. It had to be revealed to us, and we need to consider how it has been revealed. 

In this Gospel passage, Jesus is speaking as He does so many times of His relationship to the Father. We can consider the relationships we know of Father and Son, of mother and daughter, and we can name many, many more. And as much as we know the love which is shared in these relationships, we must understand that in the Blessed Trinity between the Father and the Son, it is all the more intense. And we have to keep that in mind as we consider the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So Jesus is introducing to the disciples the Holy Spirit whom He describes as the Advocate, the one who speaks on our behalf. And this is one of many images of the Holy Spirit. I believe that we can look at the other two Scriptures today to gain an appreciation of the Holy Spirit.

First of all, we have from the Acts of the Apostles the first great controversy which the early Church had to work through. That is the question of whether non-Jewish people who come to believe in Jesus are bound to various Jewish laws. The answer came back, no. It had to be worked out at a council in Jerusalem, and we have heard some of that account today. You can read it in full starting in the 15th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. And happily, those who met realized that this was not a time to cling to opinions and to dominate by saying that the opinions that one holds must be right and you must be wrong. It was a process of thinking and praying together, and they came forth with that result. And I like to think that the Holy Spirit is the thing that makes the difference when we think of relationships between two people. The difference between the awkwardness or hostility that we may see there. And the love that can and must develop. We see the Holy Spirit there.

And then in our passage from Revelation today, once again a beautiful image of the new Jerusalem descending from heaven. It says that there was no Temple in the city because God was everywhere within it, and there was light everywhere. And those images can likewise help us with appreciating the Holy Spirit. So we can think on these things and we will continue to stretch our imaginations and come to this deeper appreciation of the Holy Spirit, which is in fact the love shared between the Father and the Son. We know we need love to heal us. We welcome a love that has loved us from the beginning, which we then can apply for healing the world.