Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily in anticipation of Pentecost Sunday

June 4, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.4.22_Pentecost_II_C_1.mp3

 

This is the text that guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us on Pentecost Sunday. As we celebrate the birthday of the Church and the anniversary of when the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles and Mary as tongues of fire, the Church this year has us consider the words of Jesus during the Last Supper when he promised, “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always,” adding, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.”

* The word Advocate, Parakletos in Greek, means a helper, consoler, champion, upholder, supporter, proponent, protector, someone who speaks on our behalf, lawyer or defense attorney, and was used in that context in Roman and Greek settings. In both languages it means literally someone called to stand beside us, to intercede for us. Jesus was our first Advocate and he says that God the Father sends us the Holy Spirit as “another Advocate” to be with us always, to help, console, uphold, support, protect and defend us.

* He will give us a specific form of assistance. Just as Jesus would tell Pontius Pilate the following day that he had come to “give witness to the truth,” so he told the apostles that the help the Holy Spirit would be the “Spirit of truth,” who would “guide you to all truth” (Jn 16:13), “teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (Jn 14:26). The Holy Spirit, like Jesus, would be our Advocate not by serving us like a mob attorney tries to defend his criminal mafiosi, but by helping us to know the truth, love the truth, live the truth, spread the truth and enter into communion with Jesus, who said, “I am the Truth.” He will help us to live in the real, real world, together with God, even in the midst of environments that will be filled with lies or following the infernal inspirations of the one Jesus calls the “liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44).

* How much we need the Holy Spirit’s help! How grateful we need to be for the gift of the Holy Spirit to tell the truth about God, about us, about others, about the world. We’re living at a time of assaults against the truth, not just opposition to revealed truths or the truths of the natural law, but a time of spin, of fake news, of believing and spreading lies. We see this attack against the truth not only in the disinformation campaigns of communist governments, but we also in the euphemisms that support the practice of abortion or in the attempt not only to allow those who are confused about their identity to think that they’re girls trapped in boys’ bodies and vice versa and to force everyone else to lie by pretending that they really are what they confusedly think they are.

* That’s why the great refrain of Pentecost, taken from Psalm 104, is, “Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth!” In the context of so much pain and violence flowing from hatred like we have seen recently in Uvalde, Buffalo and the Ukraine, so much despair, pain and suicides flowing from meaninglessness, so much confusion flowing from politically correct lies as well as the failure boldly to teach the truth, we need the Holy Spirit to come to renew us and through us the Church and the world.