Bishop Bradley was here last night to confirm thirty-three of our number, invoking the Holy Spirit to settle on them, to dwell in them, to transform them into the likeness of Jesus, the one, true and faithful Son of God. 

The work of the Spirit takes place in real persons: in Jim and Lupe and Sarah and Leslie and Joshua.  This is because each one of us is personally important to God—the way each of our children is important to us.  Only God loves each person perfectly.  Even we who love our children with all our heart cannot love with the purity and unselfishness of God.  But we ourselves are among those whom God loves so perfectly.  And God’s love recognizes our weakness and our limitation.  God understands, accepts, loves.

That the work of the Spirit takes place in individual persons is only half the story  The work of the Spirit does not stop with Dick or Sally, with Carmen or Juan or Mary Louise.  For the work of the Spirit is not only to transform me into the likeness of Jesus, but to transform us into the Body of Christ in the world.  This is a big step. 

The name “Body of Christ,” the way I use it just now, evokes the whole body of believers, the Church that we call “one, holy, catholic and apostolic.”  True enough.  But we are so small, our own vision tends to be so circumscribed, that we may feel lost in such a picture.  A little like looking at a picture of Earth taken from the moon.  We know it’s ours: we’re in there somewhere.  And we recognize it for its beauty.  But where am I? 

Part of the genius, the great comprehension of God—you have to smile when you pretend to know such things—part of God’s Wisdom, is that God draws us into this communion that we call the Body of Christ by various means that work and work naturally, according to the way we’re built.  So, in the present case, our experience of belonging to the Church happens in small groups: in our family, among friends, with the people we always sit with at Mass on Sunday. 

It is some of these people who brought us here; or cement our relationships with their love and loveable-ness.  The people with whom we serve in a variety of ways come to feel like we belong to them and they to us.  We get to have an identity with them.  We miss them if they go south for the winter or if they miss Mass on Sunday for whatever reason. 

The little thought we give them when we miss them, or the little memory of something they did or said last Sunday, or the recollection that they asked us to pray for someone important to them: that’s a nudge from God, a tiny work of the Holy Spirit that prompts us to care for them, to love them, to pray for them, to “reach out” to them.  If the whole Church is the Body of Christ, maybe you could say that these little “works of the Spirit” are like the tiny sparks that zip through our brain to connect our thought and our speech, our emotion with our smile, our love with the hands and feet that take us on errands of kindness. 

I do not deny that there are influences in our experience that work to divide us—that would corrupt, even begin to rot the Church.  Naturally, the scandal of predatory behavior by priests leaps to mind.  We have a variety of names for those influences: Satan; the devil; but also Pride, Envy, Lust, and so on.  We might identify also the prejudices that lurk in our minds and hearts, and even the apathy that keeps us from recognizing the hungry of Africa or the immigrant without documents as worthy of our care.  St. Paul calls existing-guided-by-this-influence, “living according to the flesh.”  It would destroy the communion among us, if we let it.

But we live intentionally, trying to accept and live in the Spirit which God poured out upon the followers of Jesus at Pentecost and on the 33 sisters and brothers who were confirmed last evening.  We try, and we pray, to reject the promptings of the “flesh;” and we decide, once and again and again, to allow ourselves to belong to one another, and to God, in respect and care and love.
 
This weekly gathering of us is also the work of the Holy Spirit.  The same Spirit that made the virgin womb of Mary fruitful is the Spirit that we invoke over the bread and wine to transform them into the Body and Blood of the risen Christ.  We also invoke that selfsame Spirit over the gathered faithful—over us—asking that we may be filled with Jesus’ Spirit and “become one body, one spirit in Christ.”

This is the work of God.  We are the handiwork of God.