To All the World
Homily for Pentecost Sunday: May 24, 2026
I had someone ask once: was the miracle of Pentecost the Apostles’ miracle, or was it the people around them? Was it that the Apostles were miraculously able to preach in foreign tongues so all could understand? Or was it that the people around them could miraculously understand what was being proclaimed? And I’d have to say that in this, as in so much of our Catholic faith, the answer is not “either/or,” but “both/and.”
The miracle itself, of course, is neither the Apostles’ nor the people’s, but God’s.
The people were hungry for the Good News of God’s Word, and the Apostles gave them what they needed. The miracle was the Word itself and it only needed hearts that were open to it – open to sharing and open to receiving. And it is in this, the miracle of proclaiming the Good News, that we celebrate the birthday of the Church.
Because that is our Mission as the Church: to make disciples of all nations. That is the official mission statement for the Catholic Church – from Matthew, chapter 28 – to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
The baptizing part is mostly up to Father or me, or the Church’s other ordained ministers. But once we’ve baptized you, we’ve given you a share in that Mission of the Church. All of us, all Catholics, are called to that mission of proclaiming God’s Word to all the world.
Or at least, each of us to our own small corner of the world.
Because we all, one way or another, are in the world. A world fragmented by divisions and tribalism, as hungry for the Word of God as at that first Pentecost.
Our jobs, our hobbies and interests, and especially our ideologies and politics, all these things seem to have their own particular jargon, different ways of looking at, describing, and encountering the world. It can seem like even when we speak the same language we’re not really speaking the same language.
But we, gathered here, united in the common language of our faith as Catholics, we are called to be in that world but not of that world. We are sent out as ambassadors, as translators, into our varied and unique walks of life, to proclaim the Good News in ways that make sense to those differing sensibilities of the world.
Saint Paul reminds us that there are different spiritual gifts given to each of us; that like different parts of the body each of us has a different and unique function within this Body of Christ which is the Church.
Your life experiences, your interests, your passions, your station in life; these all make you uniquely suited to contribute to God’s work in your own particular way. Different gifts but the same Spirit; different workings but the same God; different ways of expressing the same Truth to the world. That is the miracle of Pentecost.
For many centuries our Church existed in a world in which Christianity was a kind of cultural default. You could generally safely assume that everyone in a given community was baptized and brought up in some sort of practice of the faith. Evangelization and missionary work were done overseas in foreign places. But that world began to change, through the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, Twentieth Centuries, so that by the 1960s the Church had to recognize that that world no longer existed. The Second Vatican Council was all about returning to that spirit of Pentecost – of re-learning how to be missionary disciples here at home, within our own communities.
In the Ecclesiology class a few years ago it was said that any ecumenical council takes about a hundred years to truly take effect. So with Vatican II we’re a little bit past the halfway point. Still figuring out how to reach out to a world that has lost faith and no longer sees the need for it. We are challenged to go out like those first apostles, inspired by the Holy Spirit to proclaim the Good News in our words and in our actions.
Jesus tells us, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
We gather here today to receive Christ, his body and blood, soul, and divinity, and at the end of Mass we are sent out into the world and invited to glorify the Lord by our life.