Archbishop of Sydney

God is with us. In faith we know God is near, but the Spirit is elusive, sometimes hard to recognise with our minds and feel in our hearts.

 

We all long to understand the signs of the times and, more importantly, to hear and understand as we “listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Rev. 3:22). This is hard work and public opinion is sometimes quite wrong, often contributing to a culture of death and disarray.

 

Australian society, as well as the Catholic Church, needs many young women and men with enlightened minds, led by the Spirit of Truth; witnesses possessing wisdom, knowledge and understanding, so they can regularly exercise right judgement.
(Jn. 15:26; 16:13; 1 Cor. 12:4-11)

 

The Spirit must not be reduced to the blind, impersonal forces which guide the universe and occasionally seem to fail e.g. in earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, because the Holy Spirit is personal, the Third Person of the Trinity, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, our leader and redeemer. Only a personal God can love us.

 

Yes, the Holy Spirit is mysterious, invisible and in some ways silent. Scripture speaks of the Spirit as ruah, breath or wind and we know the wind is blowing from seeing the effects; trees moving, leaves falling. Discerning what the Holy Spirit wants us to do requires courage, since it sometimes means going where we do not wish to go.

 

The wind can be gentle or strong, sometimes fierce and destructive, but as with the Old Testament prophet Elijah, God is generally not in the storm, earthquake or lightning, but in the gentle breeze, a “light murmuring sound” (1 Kings 19:9-13)

 

Elijah was a prophet about 2850 years ago, who lived in a time of drought, as we do. His struggles were much fiercer than ours. Ahab and Jezebel persecuted him viciously, as they strove to destroy faith in the one true God. The struggle for this faith, for the capacity to believe today in the reality of God is quieter, but still real. The forces of secularism and superstition are not spent. ...

 

Read full 'Pentecost Message' (PDF)