The Sixth Sunday of Easter [A]
Acts 8:5-8,14-17  +  1 Peter 3:15-18  +  John 14:15-21
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
May 10, 2026

“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate.”

Today’s Gospel passage is set at the Last Supper.  Although the disciples of Jesus do not fully know at this point what’s ahead, Jesus knows completely.  Jesus was fully God all the days that He lived on this earth.  He had divine knowledge, which includes divine fore-knowledge.  So what He said at the Last Supper was part of a plan.

“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate.”  In speaking these words, Jesus is looking beyond His death, beyond His resurrection, and beyond His ascension to Heaven.  Jesus is looking to the day of Pentecost, which will occur ten days after His ascension.  The Holy Spirit who will come at Pentecost wants to strengthen us in a specific way, for a specific reason.

However, by contrast, it’s also important to remember what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit on another occasion.  On the evening of Jesus’ resurrection, He spoke about the Holy Spirit coming for another reason, and in another way.  Jesus said to the Apostles, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”[1]  In those words, Jesus pointed out one of the specific roles—one of the “jobs”, if you will—that the Holy Spirit carries out.  The Holy Spirit works in the Sacrament of Confession to forgive, heal, and strengthen.  But that’s not the Holy Spirit’s only role in our lives. 

To use an analogy from ordinary life:  when you go to your physician to be healed of sickness or disease, your aim is full health, so you can live your life again.  Something similar is at work in the spiritual life.  When we go to Confession to be healed of spiritual sickness, our aim is full health, so we can live a healthy spiritual life again.

But that begs the question.  What role does the Holy Spirit play in an active, healthy spiritual life?  That’s what Jesus is speaking about when He says, “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate.”  The Holy Spirit will appear front and center in two weeks on Pentecost Sunday.  But even today, two Sundays beforehand, Jesus is preparing us for Pentecost.  He wants us to understand how the Gift of the Holy Spirit animates the active, daily, healthy Christian life.

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Consider what the Creed tells us about the Holy Spirit.  We will profess the Creed in just a few minutes.  The Creed is usually printed in our missals and missalettes in 32 lines.  Yet only four of these lines concern the Holy Spirit directly.

During the Creed, you as a Christian disciple profess:  “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.”  In that sentence there are two titles by which we honor the Holy Spirit.  First we profess that the Holy Spirit is our “Lord”.  Then we profess that the Holy Spirit is “the giver of life”.  Both of these titles for the Holy Spirit run against the grain of the modern world.

In our day and age, when individualism is prized so highly, we minimize the notion of God as our Lord.  Certainly, we might consider God the Father as a “lordly” figure.  We are less likely to consider God the Son as our Lord.  This is because we want Jesus to have a softer image, and we want to consider Him our friend (which is right to do).

Yet least of all do Christians consider God the Holy Spirit to be their Lord.  We often reduce the Holy Spirit to a gentle breeze who encourages us to follow our hunches.  However, it is essential to recognize the Holy Spirit as our Lord.

We are meant to be subject to the Holy Spirit.  He means to rule our lives, to give them order and purpose.  He means to do this for the same reason that Jesus came into this world.  Jesus proclaimed:  “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”[2]

This life is what we’re speaking about when we profess the Holy Spirit to be “the giver of life”.  This abundant life is what gives our earthly days authentic meaning.  When we choose to recognize the Holy Spirit as our Lord, there is peace.  But in all honesty you have to ask:  do you want this peace?  Or do you want instead what the world offers?

As Christians, we need to allow the Holy Spirit to be our Lord.  We need to allow the Holy Spirit to rule our lives and give them order, even when this demands that we admit our sins. 

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So given this, how can we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives?  How can we allow the Holy Spirit lordship over our earthly lives?  One simple way is frequent, worthy reception of the sacraments. 

Another way to foster devotion, dedication, and service to the Holy Spirit is to make a Novena to Him.  We can make this novena any time during the year, of course.  But it’s very powerful to make this novena on the nine days before Pentecost.  This year the ninth day before Pentecost will be this coming Friday, May 15.

One thing to keep in mind about a novena is that it’s usually prayed for a specific intention.  For example, since this weekend is Mother’s Day, you might want, as a gift to your mother, to offer the novena for her and her intentions.  Or since the novena starts on May 15, and May 15 is the feast of St. Isidore the Farmer, you might want to pray the novena for good weather for our crops.  Or you might want to pray the novena for someone suffering from serious illness and disease.  Or you might want to pray the novena for Deacon Peter Bergkamp and his fellow deacons in our diocese.

God the Holy Spirit is the Love that God the Father and God the Son bear for each other.  God the Holy Spirit is the Gift that God the Father and God the Son gift to fallen man.  The Gift of the Holy Spirit allows a sinner like yourself or myself to become an adopted child of God the Father.  That divine love of the Father and the Son for each other allows us to love as God loves, if we allow the Holy Spirit to be our Lord, and to rule our lives.

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[1] John 20:23.

[2] John 10:10.

CLICK HERE FOR THE NOVENA TO THE HOLY SPIRIT

The Fifth Sunday of Easter [A]
Acts 6:1-7  +  1 Peter 2:4-9  +  John 14:1-12
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
May 3, 2026

“… like living stones, / let yourselves be built into a spiritual house / to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices / acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, Deacon Peter Bergkamp will be ordained to the Priesthood of Jesus Christ.  Each of us needs to keep Deacon Peter and his fellow deacons in our prayers between now and May 23rd.  The blessing of having a fellow parishioner ordained to the priesthood reminds us to pray always for more vocations.  Our Scriptures this Sunday help us see why the priesthood of Jesus Christ is so important.

However, sometimes it’s difficult to appreciate the depth of Jesus’ Priesthood.  We might think of His Priesthood in just one way:  that is, the ordained priesthood that we see at the altar at Sunday Mass.  But actually, there are three distinct forms in which Jesus lives out His Priesthood within His Church.

The first is in history:  that is, what Jesus accomplished when He walked this earth some 2000 years ago.  This is most especially true of what Jesus sacrificed for us sinners on Good Friday.  Jesus acted as a priest in offering His Self for us sinners on the Cross out of love for us.  Jesus acted as a priest in giving us the Eucharist the night before He died.

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So while the first form in which Jesus lives out His Priesthood is historical, the second and third are sacramental.  In the second and third, Jesus lives out His Priesthood through the lives of Christians:  through the members of His Mystical Body.  The second is the ordained priesthood, which Deacon Peter is preparing to enter into.  The third is called the baptismal priesthood, which every Christian enters into at the moment of baptism.

Today’s Second Reading points our attention towards the baptismal priesthood.  During the ritual of Baptism, the celebrant anoints the newly baptized person with Sacred Chrism.  At the same time, the celebrant says, “[Almighty God] now anoints you with the Chrism of salvation, so that you may remain as a member of Christ, priest, prophet and king, unto eternal life.”

It’s important to understand how much the baptismal priesthood and the ordained priesthood have in common.  However, it’s also important to understand how they’re different.

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There are two things that the baptismal priesthood and the ordained priesthood have in common.

The more important of these is that both are only possible because Jesus makes them so.  When an individual is baptized, Jesus by His grace makes it possible for that Christian to live her or his life through Jesus’ Priesthood.  When a man is ordained a priest, Jesus conforms that man to the life of Jesus Christ.  Once a man is ordained, when he carries out the sacraments, he acts in persona Christi:  “in the person of Christ”.

However, in the case of Baptism and in the case of the ordained priesthood, what happens is not a one-time occurrence.  It might be better to say that when these sacraments are received, Jesus establishes a link between Himself and the individual.  To use a modern metaphor:  you might say it’s like an internet connection between the Web and an individual computer.  The computer is always dependent upon the Web for internet access.  So when Jesus baptizes someone, or ordains a man, Jesus establishes a link, or a relationship, between Himself and the individual.

Through that on-going relationship, Jesus gives the power to make loving acts of sacrifice.  This power to make acts of loving sacrifice is the heart of both the baptismal priesthood and the ordained priesthood.  In fact, this is the second thing that the ordained priesthood and the baptismal priesthood have in common.  Both exist for the sake of making loving sacrifices.  Again:  both the ordained priesthood and the baptismal priesthood exist for the sake of making loving sacrifices.

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So given those similarities, what distinguishes these two forms of priesthood?  One important difference is the type of sacrifices that are made.

Those who are ordained priests offer their most important sacrifices within the walls of the church.  The ordained priest’s chief sacrifices are liturgical.  He offers sacrifice to God, and then he gives God’s grace—the fruit of the sacrifice—to God’s People.  The ordained priest offers the sacraments:  most importantly, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  The ordained priest makes Christ present truly and substantially at the altar.

By contrast, the baptized person makes most of her or his sacrifices out in the world.  This begins in the home, and for those who live with family, these sacrifices are made for the sake of their families.  Of course, this also extends outside the home:  into the workplace, the marketplace, the community, and elsewhere.

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Consider all this from a practical perspective, with some statistics that are both sobering and hopeful.  Last year, in the entire country of Germany, there were 25 men ordained to the priesthood.[1]  Last year in the Diocese of Wichita, there were 51 seminarians, and six of them will be ordained to the priesthood this month. 

Many people ask why the Diocese of Wichita has so many ordinations year after year after year.  While there are many factors, the most often cited is the number of people in our diocese who pray in Eucharistic Adoration.  Both laypersons and priests sacrifice their time to pray in Eucharistic Adoration, before the Lord Jesus.  They pray to Him who, in the Eucharist, is our High Priest.  They pray to Him who, in the Eucharist, strengthens us to live lives of loving sacrifice.  They pray to Him for their families, and they pray for more vocations to the ordained priesthood.

In the Catechism, the Church teaches this:

“The Eucharist is ‘the source and summit of the Christian life’.  ‘The other sacraments, and indeed all [church] ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it.’”[2]

The Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life”.  Therefore the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christ’s Priesthood within His Church.  For both the baptized faithful, and ordained priests, the closer they draw to the Eucharist—the closer they draw to the Sacrifice of the Mass, and the more they spend time in Eucharistic Adoration—the more they become like Christ, and so are able to allow Christ to love through their lives of sacrifice.

Jesus gave the Eucharist to His disciples at His Last Supper, on the night before He sacrificed Himself for sinful man.  Jesus gave the Eucharist to be an everlasting means of sharing in the power of His Self-Sacrifice on the Cross.  The Eucharist makes us present at Calvary on Good Friday.  Jesus through the Eucharist calls us to share in His sacrifice, so that we can share in His divine life.

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[1] https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/how-priestly-formation-is-changing

[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church 1324, quoting Lumen Gentium 11 and Presbyterorum Ordinis 5.