Our Lady of Lourdes Church and School

Today marks our celebration of the great Feast of Pentecost. The Acts of the Apostles relates to us: “When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together and suddenly…” This moment of promises fulfilled in the coming of the Jesus-sent Spirit upon the believers is a moment we celebrate today as the beginning of the the Christian Church. The mandate we heard proclaimed in Mt. 28 last Sunday, to “Go, make disciples…” is given an urgency in this celebration. The promised presence of Jesus, abiding with us always “until the end of the age”, brings with it an urgency to fulfill and to be about the ongoing mission of Jesus Christ in the world. This is what Church is always intended to be about.

Church is really about our efforts, responding to God’s initiative, to continue the mission and ministry of Jesus in the world. The primary commandment or mission of the Church is to “make disciples”, and historically we do this by continuing the mission and ministry of Jesus. The very nature of the seven sacraments of our Church are affirmations of the ministry of Jesus as we understand it. In other words, our celebration of the different sacraments are our way of ensuring that key aspects of the mission of Jesus are carried forward from the first years of the Church’s existence into our own time. Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist are together the ritual celebration of a maturing in adult faith and a growing into fruitful discipleship in our lives. Reconciliation and the Anointing of the Sick are our ritual expressions of the healing ministry of Jesus as it is attested to in the gospels. That ministry has both spiritual and physical aspects and they are not always unrelated. The sacraments of Holy Orders and Matrimony are our ritual celebrations of the human vocation to service of others, which has at its heart the command of Jesus to follow him by taking up our own cross and placing service of others ahead of service of our selves.

In our time, it is easy for those who don’t understand to look at our sacraments and to disparage them. It is even easy for we who believe to misunderstand and to see them as something to “get” rather than as the committed disciples way of life and of living. It is all too easy for us to divorce our sacraments from a life of mature and maturing discipleship. But when we disconnect the ritual from the reality of which it speaks, we risk deadening ourselves to the work of God in the world, and in the worst cases, we might even become obstacles to the work of God in the world.

Pentecost is an affirmation of the power of the Holy Spirit of God entering into the life of humanity in a decisive and distinctive way. Church is an expression of the divine-human partnership that seeks to continue to build up the Reign of God in the world which was decisively begun in Jesus Christ. It is not a personal partnership into which God has entered. That is to say, it is not about me and God. Pentecost is yet another affirmation of the communal nature of how God works. The story might have narrated the power of the Spirit descending on individuals, but it doesn’t. It affirms the communal over the individual. It is in the power of the community’s experience that Peter gets to speak to the world. The Feast of Pentecost reaffirms the essential nature of the community in the ongoing work of God. For this reason, it is important for us to enter into a common understanding of what it means to be a people of faith, to be a community of believers committed to and dedicated to embracing God’s people as Jesus did, to ensuring that all who seek to become disciples of Jesus are equipped and empowered for that maturation of faith, and then nurtured and mentored in the becoming of all that disciples are called to be and to become in this place and in this time. It is important for us to appreciate and to commit ourselves to an accompaniment of believers, so that we can continue to journey together as a community of disciples through the developing stages of faith that are integral to the unfolding of life’s journey. Not only do we accompany, but as part of a community of faith, we can count on being accompanied by others also. When we are together, we encounter the presence of Jesus among us. When we are together, we open ourselves to the fulfillment of his promise of peace.