Feast of Pentecost

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

On this Great Feast of Pentecost we celebrate the descent of the Holy Spirit and the fulfillment of the dispensation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the world as well as the fulfillment of His promises.

As He said:

If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink. He that believeth in Me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. (This He spake concerning the Spirit, which they that believe in Him should receive: for the Holy Spirit was not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified.) (John 7:37-39)

Elsewhere our Savior qualified His promise with the words:

If ye love Me, keep My commandments. And I will entreat the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you unto the ages; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him: but ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. (John 14:15-17)

The gift of the Holy Spirit was indeed given in measure to the Apostles who heard the commandments of our Savior and kept them. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth sealed them in the doctrines that our Savior taught them and was with them before His Crucifixion, but the gift of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit was yet to come.

It is written in the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Saint Luke that after His resurrection our Savior appeared to the Apostles and, “Then opened He their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.” (Luke 24:45)

That is, through the Holy Spirit our Lord granted them knowledge not according to the normal order of things, for example, through speech or writing, but rather through divine vision, or theoria as it is called, and then He said, “Thus it is written, and thus ought Christ to have suffered, and rise from the dead the third day: And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And ye are witnesses of these things. And, behold, I send the promise of My Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high.” (Luke 24:46-49)

After the Holy Ascension of our Savior the Apostles and disciples remained in Jerusalem and spent ten days in prayerful anticipation of receiving these gifts, and as we heard in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles appointed for the feast:

“When the day of Pentecost was fully come, they we all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like unto fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” (Acts 2:1-4)

Thus on this day of Pentecost the gift of the Holy Spirit was poured out in fullness.

Yet, one might ask, why did our Savior arrange things in this way? Saint Gregory The Theologian, in his “Fifth Theological Oration,” explained that, “…He [the Holy Spirit] gradually came to dwell in the Disciples, measuring Himself out to them according to their capacity to receive Him, at the beginning of the Gospel, after the Passion, after the Ascension, making perfect their powers, being breathed upon them, and appearing in fiery tongues.”(Fifth Theological Oration, Chp 26)

In other words, the process of preparing oneself for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit takes time and effort and, of course, God. Saint Seraphim of Sarov once said that the spiritual life is not like a pear that one can swallow in a few bites. Our Savior taught the Apostles many things and guided them to experience many things by His providence before they received the capacity to receive the fullness of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit appeared in the form of tongues of fire and the Holy Apostles were granted the gift of tongues in order to preach to all nations. By the Holy Spirit, the Apostles baptized three thousand souls on that day. It was from this point forward that the Apostles united men and women to Christ through Baptism and the Eucharist, thus on this day the unique ministry of the New Testament Priesthood was established. This priestly ministry is the means Christ has provided for the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve to be united to Him and through this union to be sanctified.

The word of God in and of itself has power, but without the New Testament Priesthood, there is no union or sanctification in Christ. There are those who claim that they revere the Scriptures of the New Testament but they fall short because they do not revere the singular New Testament Priesthood. As Saint Paul proclaimed, “One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism.” Our singular Lord Jesus Christ established the singular Faith and granted us a singular Baptism through the New Testament Priesthood.

Alas, our era of confusion rejects these spiritual truths.

There is a very profound message for the men of today in the Kontakion of the feast of Pentecost: “Once, when He descended and confounded the tongues, the Most High divided the nations; and when He divided the tongues of fire, He called all men into unity; and with one accord we glorify the All-holy Spirit.”

This hymn refers to the division of the tongues of men at construction of the Tower of Babel as it is written in the Book of Genesis:

And all the earth was one tongue, and there was one language to all. And it came to pass as they moved from the east, they found a plain in the land of Senaar, and they dwelt there. And a man said to his neighbour: Come, let us make bricks and bake them with fire. And the brick was to them for stone, and their mortar was bitumen. And they said: Come, let us build to ourselves a city and tower, whose top shall be to Heaven, and let us make to ourselves a name, before we are scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men built. And the Lord said: Behold, there is one race, and one tongue of all, and they have begun to do this, and now nothing shall fail from them of all that they may have undertaken to do. Come, and having gone down, let us there confound their tongue, that they may not understand each the voice of his neighbor. And the Lord scattered them thence over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city and the tower. On this account its name was called Confusion [Babel], because there the Lord confounded the languages of all the earth, and thence the Lord scattered them upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1-9)

The sin in building this tower was not because they put brick upon brick, but because they, in their audacity thought to build a tower to Heaven, that is to reach heaven without God. This is the sin of modern men. Modern man naively seeks to find control over his environment, the meaning of life, his ultimate purpose and even paradise, without God. There is a Church of Modern man that claims to revere a god, but then proclaims that there is no objective truth or dogma that has been revealed by this god. Of course this pseudo church is the World Council of Churches. The WCC has established itself as a new pantheon, a house to gather together all of the false gods of antiquity and they desire to put Christ in this pantheon. This so-called church claims that it is searching for truth and it ignores the fact that Pentecost occurred and that the Spirit of Truth established Apostolic Tradition, the deposit of Truth. This World Council of Churches seeks to create an aggregate of all past heresies, that is, false teachings, into the great Pan-Heresy of Ecumenism.

In a very unique way, the Pan-Heresy of Ecumenism is a sin against the Holy Spirit and the Priesthood of the Church. Ecumenism proclaims that one can have union with Christ and sanctification separate from the truths given unto the Apostles and outside of the New Testament Priesthood. The sad fact is that through subtle words over a period of a few generations ecumenist bishops have caused their local churches to lose the New Testament Priesthood.

These are spiritually perilous times. Saint Paul exhorts us and teaches us how we can work to preserve the gift of the Holy Spirit in our own communities:

I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Eph 4:1-3)

We walk worthily of our vocation as Christians only when we exercise humility and self-sacrificing love. We can find peace in our lives only through the unity of the Holy Spirit. These things are not abstractions; they are a mystical reality that is experienced only through prayer and self-sacrifice. Saint Paul then adds the words that we need to fix in our minds as a remedy to the great spiritual error of our day:

There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. (Eph 4:4-6)

The Spirit is in you all. You have been baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Every day of our lives each of us should seek to increase our capacity to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Believe that even for the men and women of these last times our Lord Jesus Christ will not withhold His gifts, for He came to grant us union with Himself and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Remember His words:

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? (Luke 11:9-13)

Despite our sins, despite our shortcomings, despite past failings and all the problems we have in our lives we can always turn in repentance to our Savior and seek the grace of the Holy Spirit. In today’s vespers we will all pray for the descent of the Holy Spirit. Let us pray with faith, seeking the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Let us prepare by constraining ourselves to forgive each other from the heart, knowing that we are all debtors before the Lord. Let us ask for unity of faith with the Apostles and the unity of self-sacrificing love and peace amongst ourselves. May you and your families be filled with the gifts of the Holy Spirit in Christ Jesus. Amen.