Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Entrance to MSF

If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,

the one who raised Christ from the dead
will give life to your mortal bodies also,
through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Imagine a travelling businessman from Cincinnati who finds an evening with nothing to do in New York City, and the Reds are playing the Mets. So he hurries up to the stadium and buys a ticket, only to discover he is the only Reds fan in an enormous crowd of rabid Mets fans. He’s got the spirit, but it’s not the home team spirit. When they cheer, he groans; when they boo, he laughs. A fan (short for fanatic?) with team spirit pays attention to the sport and his team. He is excited by their success and depressed by their failure. 

Christians find themselves in that traveler's situation often. When the world around us is demanding war, we work for peace; when our neighbors envy the wealthy and despise the poor, we befriend the poor and shun the wealthy. Very often we march to the tune of a distant drummer, and we’re the only ones who hear him.

The Holy Spirit is a flocking spirit, like that of sheep and birds. It draws us together as it moves in our hearts. Just as Reds fans in a foreign city might watch for the baseball caps and t-shirts that signify other Reds fans, Christians watch for one another. We gather every Sunday; we never want to miss a Sunday and, in fact, we never have. Every since that Sunday after the Passover when Jesus rose from the dead, we have never failed to gather and worship God in his name. If one person misses Mass for some reason, for illness or travel, she feels the loss in her spirit.

While many people fail and die for lack of spirit, the Christian spirit still animates us into our final years. Our bodies might fail but our spirit does not.

The other half

When the day comes that we finally surrender our bodily spirit to the earth from which it came, the Holy Spirit will gather us from our graves and lead us to God. That’s the critical difference between team spirit, company spirit, family spirit, national spirit and the Holy Spirit. Every other spirit belongs to earth, but the Holy Spirit of Jesus, of the Church belongs to God.