Dear beloved sisters and brothers in Christ,

The day after my ordination thirty years ago I celebrated my first Mass as a priest. It was a Pentecost Sunday on May 30, 1993 at St. Mary Magdalen Church in Altamonte Springs. Naturally, it was during a Florida thunderstorm.

After saying the words of consecration, “This is my body which will be given up for you,” I lifted up the host. At that moment, thunder shook the church. The lights in the church fluttered. In case we missed the moment, it happened again. “Do this in memory of me,” I had barely said, and the raised chalice cued lightning and booming thunder that shook the building.

At the first Pentecost, “There came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were” (Acts 2:2). On another occasion, Peter and John, ordered by the authorities not to speak in the name of Jesus, prayed with the other believers. “As they prayed, the place where they were gathered shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:31).

The Spirit that filled the apostles with boldness is the same Spirit we have received at Baptism. The Spirit that shook the very building where they gathered fills our buildings when we gather.

“Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?” asked Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. “The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.” 

To our meek church ears, the word “power” might sound impolite if not unchristian. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. saw it differently. “Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change.” 

With so much boldness that it led to his assassination, he shaped the civil rights movement to act with power and with love. “Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

In my thirty years as a priest, my opinion is that we church people more often err towards love without power than power without love. We settle for sentimental devotional music rather than powerful life-giving singing. We worry about offending a few complainers more than about pleasing the almighty God. 

Pope Francis has spoken with boldness that shakes the building. For example, his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si faults humanity for “slapping around” the natural world. He has warned, “God always forgives, man sometimes forgives, but nature never forgives.” In another example of boldness, his catechesis on marriage and the family praises the family. “The masterpiece of society is the family: man and woman who love one another! This is the masterpiece!” The family is founded on marriage. “Marriage,” he said, “is between a man and a woman.”

The French philosopher Voltaire, living in an age when the powerful abused authority and privilege while the poor starved and suffered, is credited with first saying, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Having received the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the church has the great responsibility to proclaim the good news that Christ is risen! The Holy Spirit has come with power! His power raises the dead, forgives sins, and changes bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ so that we sinners become his temple.

The world is desperate for such powerful love. Let us pray and serve boldly, in word and deed, until the whole world shakes.

Blessed Pentecost,

Father David