Show Notes
The Holy Spirit provides us with different gifts. Fr. Rob relates this reality to electric cars.
Gospel: Jn 15:26-27; 16:12-15
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and your spirit. A reading from the holy gospel according to John.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Glory to you, Lord.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Jesus said to his disciples, when the advocate comes, whom I will send from the Father the spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me, and you also testify because you have been with me from the beginning.
I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.
But when he comes, the spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth.
He will not speak on his own, but he will speak what he hears and will declare to you the things that are coming.
He will glorify me because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
Everything that the Father has is mine.
For this reason I told you that he will take from what is mine and give it to you.
The gospel of the Lord.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: I had initially planned on preaching on Paul's letter to the Galatians, but since he took away absolutely everything that could be perceived as fun, I thought I'd leave that one alone.
But I want to talk to you just a little bit about analogies, because I've always believed that analogies can give us a deeper understanding of things that we don't fully understand or can begin to give us a little bit of a concept of things that are bigger than we can understand.
So we oftentimes use analogies to give us a glimpse into how God interacts with us and how God is revealed to us. But the problem is always that any analogy, by very definition, is always extremely lacking, because God is bigger than our vocabularies or even our human minds can begin to understand.
So today I want to give you an analogy, but a little different. The analogy is what you are like and how you've been created, and then at the end, a slight analogy about God and how God and humanity interface, how we connect.
The analogy I have comes from a long standing family history. My family for several generations have typically worked in the automotive industry, so I've always had a big interest in cars and all that technology.
And even a casual reading of the future seems to be pointing that we will be doing things differently, be it hydrogen fuel cells or electric vehicles. Whether you like it or not, that seems to be the reality, and I don't want to debate that. But I'm going to compare you to one of those, I want to compare you in my analogy to an electric vehicle, and here's why.
If you look at one, even casually, what you notice is it is amazing technology.
And that technology has been exponentially growing in recent years. When they first came out, if you could get 25 to 30 miles out of an electric car, it was incredible. And now 300 miles, even 400, is not out of the question.
And if you've ever ridden in one or driven one, what you quickly find out is the ability of those things to accelerate is phenomenal. And in fact, I saw a video of a Rivian truck racing a Porsche 911, and it blew the doors off of it because there's so much torque in those electric motors.
But the reason these things could happen in today's world is because we've developed the micro technology of computers and chips to run all of the sensors and everything else that an electric car needs to fully function, including all that battery technology.
That's why I'm comparing you to an electric car, because each one of you, in your own way, is amazing.
The abilities that you have, the gifts that you share in the way that you function, the way that you live, all of those things are extremely powerful and amazing, and that's a very good thing.
But here's where you're like an electric vehicle as well.
An electric car, if it runs out of charge, is basically a bit of artwork or a brick.
It can't do anything.
It needs that charge of electricity entering into it to allow it to do all those other things.
That's how you are. But the charge of electricity that you need, that we need is the presence of the Holy Spirit in us.
And as long as we allow the Holy Spirit to be a part of us and dwell in us and energize us, there is virtually nothing that we can't do.
But without the Holy spirit, a part of our lives, there's virtually nothing we can do.
This day, as we celebrate that presence of the Spirit and that gift of the Spirit, try to see that presence in that way. We don't always have visual experiences of the spirit, but they're internal. They're in our batteries. They charge us. The Spirit charges us up and allows us to be the best we can be.
