Forgive me for wearing my party clothes. (dressed in red shirt and slacks)  It didn’t seem right to put a on a white cloth covering my red. And thank you, if you remembered to wear red. If you forgot, don’t worry about it. The gospel was about forgiveness anyway.

Our three biggest celebrations as a Christian church have been the same for almost three thousand years. Our high holy days are very clear. It is Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. It is interesting in the third century, one bishop, St. Augustine, North Africa, gave a signature for what Christians are like, what kind of people we are. And had he been around today, he would have gotten it wrong because the ads in the shopping malls and the decorations in the greeting cards and the media of mass marketing would never let him know what our three great feasts are; especially that the most important of them is Easter. He would remember us saying that we are Christmas people and our song is “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”; but what he said was, and it has been passed down for close to two thousand years now, we are Easter people and “Alleluia” is our song.

The big feast is Easter. But Pentecost is important too, although again, if you just went by the ads and by the decorations and greetings cards you would say, “Well, there is Mother’s Day and there is Halloween and there is Groundhog Day, but there is no Pentecost“. We have got to underline it for ourselves. Pentecost is the gift of the spirit of God, given to the church, given to the world and given to each of us. It is about gifts. But as I look around none of you are old enough to remember this, but once upon a time, we used to memorize out of the Baltimore Catechism the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit -the gift of wisdom, understanding, council, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. (Even if I had to look it up, I didn’t remember what the seven were, but I knew there were seven.)

What are the gifts we need today? What do you hope for? What gifts of the Spirit do you long for? What gifts of the Spirit do you need? What gifts of the Holy Spirit do you crave?   Well, I suggest you think about it today and make your own list. But my list is short, just four gifts, and they are different.

The first gift that I would pray for from the Holy Spirit is a gift of wonder, when we see life around us and say, “Wow!”  But whether we look through a microscope and see subatomic particles, or whether we look through a telescope and see the vast expanse of the universe, or whether we look with the naked eye at the life around us, we just say “Wow!” The gift of wonder makes us, first of all, a people who have grateful hearts. If we are people with grateful hearts, we give thanks. We are Eucharistic people; and secondly, the gift of wonder leads us to have a generous heart so we reach out and we know we can make a difference, like the Catholic Charities second collection that is coming up. We know we can make a difference. And the gift of wonder gives us a reverent heart to care for our old, to care for the life around us, and most of all the gift of wonder gives us delight. So I pray for the gift of wonder. (That’s my first one.)

The second gift - the gift of surprise. You know we are all unfinished. Our universe is an unfinished product. Our church is an unfinished product. That’s why it gets into so much trouble so often. And, each one of us individually is an unfinished product.  And what that means is, there is room for surprise. In fact, there is a need for surprise.

I can think of a little woman born in what in those days was called Yugoslavia. She traveled to Ireland and joined the convent. She was working in a quiet convent as a contemplative, and she finally left the convent and she went to work for the poor. Today, she is known as Mother Teresa, a surprise.

I can think of an overweight, elderly cardinal. He was elected pope and expected to be a caretaker because he only had a few years of his life left and in those few years he changed the church, opened the windows and brought the Vatican Council, as Pope John the 23rd.

I can think of a quiet priest in El Salvador, who no one thought much of. They thought he was studious, conservative and shy and he became the martyr,  Archbishop Oscar Romero. 

We need wonder; we need surprise.

Two more gifts that I would pray for:  We need a sense of humor. You know, someone has said that human beings are the only creatures on earth that laugh and cry because we are able to see the difference between what is and what ought to be. We look at the world and we either cry or we smile. I think we need a sense of humor. I think a sense of humor is just the other side of faith.  We use the same rule for both of them. We say to people, “Do you get it?” Or we can be talking about a joke, “Do you get it?“ or maybe about our faith, “Do you get it?”. 

Whether it is getting the joke, or getting the sense of the mysterious presence of God that is so much around us. We need both. We need a sense of humor; we have to smile.

And, the last one, is a little different. It’s the gift of “don’t sweat the small stuff.”   “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Our God is so great and grand that we need to be a people who think big and not small. To keep up with our God, we have to be a people who are large hearted and not cramped. We have to be a people who know the difference between what’s important and what isn’t important.

God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can and the wisdom to know the difference. There is my list of gifts (You have to have your own.)  and I pray for wonder, surprise, for humor, and not to “sweat the small stuff”.

Come Holy Spirit, change us. Come Holy Spirit, change our church. Come Holy Spirit, renew the face of the earth.  Amen.