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Pentecost
Soul Friends in Christ through the Holy Spirit
By Rev. Diane Lee
We live with a hope for a good and bright future amidst everyday challenges. Our future, however, is not a time distant from us. Paradoxically, the future started from somewhere in the past.
Many of us often take for granted parents’ love, grandparents’ hardwork, and great grandparents’ sacrifice, and the values and traditions that had been cultivated and nurtured by ancestors further back whose names even faded away from our memories. Don’t forget the prayers of godparents who have been our soul mates. Our future doesn’t exist without this family history.
Family history involves many roads – some velvety, some rough, and overall, it is a journey through ebbs and flows. And, devout Christians will get up every morning with an appreciation of this new given day and ask the Lord to fill them with His Holy Spirit, so that they can live a fulfilled life.
Some people may relate fulfillment with personal and professional happiness, with their purpose and satisfaction to reach their life goals – a well-paid job with a secured pension plan, an ability to enhance their own well-being. However, we might as well still feel empty with all our achievements, and we, whether Christian or not, will continue to face difficult situations that we are unprepared for.
Achieve all you can in order to enhance your life situations and try to make the world a better place to live with all your talents and available resources. But importantly, we must remind ourselves that true fulfillment can be found only in God in whose image we are born.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”
What is the inaudible language of the heart?
When we text or email, we sometimes use the emoji that has the shape of a heart, expressing love. Love is not rational, but it opens us to a new world that we didn’t know before. It helps us to come to understanding. Love is the internal, spiritual realm that we need to fall into. That’s why we say, we fall in love.
Today is the Day of Pentecost, which makes us think about our spiritual life. Pentecost is a celebration of the receiving of the Holy Spirit by the early church. John the Baptist prophesied of the first Pentecost when Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire (Mt 3:11). Jesus confirmed this prophecy with the promise of the Holy Spirit to the disciples (Jn 14:26).
Jesus told his disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the Father’s gift of the Holy Spirit, from whom they would receive power to be His witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:3-8). After Jesus’ ascension to heaven, they returned to Jerusalem and joined together in prayer in an upper room. On the Day of Pentecost, just as promised, the sound of a violent wind filled the house, and tongues of fire came to rest on each of them, and all were filled with the Holy Spirit.
This narrative is well known to seasoned churchgoers.
A violent wind . . . sounds scary? We know the power of natural winds with varying forms from a pleasant breeze to a destructive storm. Winds can also shape landforms; dust from large deserts can be moved great distances from Sahara to Amazon by winds. Winds can disperse seeds from various plants, enabling the survival and dispersal of those plant species, as well as flying insect populations. When the natural winds can do such things, imagine how much more the power of the Holy Spirit can do.
The gift of the Holy Spirit is God’s very life, breath and energy that changes the souls of those who believe in Him. The disciples were given the power of communication, which Peter, an ordinary fisherman, used to begin the ministry for which Jesus had prepared him.
The risen Lord supernaturally appeared to the fear-laden disciples, but their fear gave way to joy; their doubt became salvation; their despair over the loss of their Teacher turned into burning desire for God’s mission. After the coming of the Holy Spirit, the disciples did not stay in the room but burst out to tell the world the Good News. This was the beginning of the Church.
The celebration of Pentecost reminds us of this reality of the supernatural world that embrace us today through the unifying Spirit that was poured out upon the first-century church. It is a reminder that we are co-heirs with Christ, to suffer with Him that we may also be glorified with Him.
Life may not always go the way you have planned, but you will experience God in moments when you feel stuck like the disciples who stayed in the upper room. All you have to do is to say yes to Him to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit that is promised for you and your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to Himself (Act 2:39).
When your hearts are sensing the existence of a bond between you and something higher than you, things will begin to change. It is then when all separated ideas, different cultures, various individual interests will merge into one big world to live together, because we are all baptized by one Spirit into one body (1 Cor 12:13).
In Genesis, God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul (Gen 2:7). Likewise, the Spirit of God who transcends you dwells in you and is with you. With the Holy Spirit, you will be able to receive wisdom to discern right and wrong, strength to endure hardships, knowledge to understand things, humility before the Lord, the true purpose of your life.
When we pray, we pray to the Father with the Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Christ is holding you to send your prayer to God through the Holy Spirit that connects the Father and the Son.
The former Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Metropolitan Ignatius Hazim (1920-2012) said: "Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away, Christ remains in the past, the Gospel is a dead book, the Church is an organization, authority is only domination, mission is a propaganda, cult is an incantation, and Christian action a slave morality. But with the Holy Spirit the cosmos rises and groans in the birth pangs of the Kingdom, the Risen Christ is there, the Gospel is the power of life, the Church is the trinitarian community, authority is a liberating ministry, mission is a new Pentecost, liturgy is remembrance and anticipation, human action is glorified.”
This is such a profound statement.
God sent us the Holy Spirit through Christ. With the Holy Spirit upon us, our life becomes meaningful; every prayer to Him, with Him, and in Him, every service to Him is spiritual. When we walk with the Holy Spirit, the old order has collapsed; the old world where we lived is definitively over. And, we are renewed and healed. Christ is not out there but with in us. It is not as if we are praying here to God who is remote from us. Instead, we are praying within Him who dwells in the heart of the Church, the gathering of His people, and in the heart of every single believer.
Descartes claimed to have discovered a belief, saying: “I think, therefore I am.” But, we exist because God lives in us. Our human existence cannot be fully understood or rationalized without God’s revelation in life.
And now, on the Day of Pentecost, as the celebration of the rite of Holy Baptism is ready to be taken place, we will also renew our own baptismal covenant. With the gift of the Holy Spirit, all of us become soul friends who accompany one another on our eternal journey through this life and beyond.
God bless you!