What a joy it is to return to this pulpit and to find so many familiar and beloved faces still here, and others from around the diocese gathered in for this very special occasion. It's hard to believe that thirteen years have passed since it was my privilege regularly to stand here and reflect with you about the meaning for our lives of the day's lessons from Holy Scripture. Thank you, Dean Blackman, for inviting me back to help celebrate the fortuitous change in the role of St. James Church that occurred fifty years ago.

That we should be commemorating such a milestone on the feast day of Pentecost is singularly appropriate. There are wonderful parallels in the transforming ways the Holy Spirit moved among those devastated disciples of Jesus so long ago huddled behind locked doors, and how she has worked and continues to work in our individual lives and in the life of this Cathedral Church. Much of it has to do with the Spirit's awakening us to new possibility, the rest with her empowerment to avail ourselves of those possibilities, to live into our potentials and thereby into God's desires.

Pentecost is sometimes called the "birthday" of the Church, because it recalls that awesome day when God's Holy Spirit first came mightily to generate in Jesus' followers a passion to live by and perpetuate our Lord's message of love and mercy. From this day forward, those once beleaguered mourners perceived of themselves in terms of a mutual purpose and destiny, grounded by their shared devotion to Jesus.

You will recall that just ten days ago, at the Feast of the Ascension, when we left the disciples, they were praying, following Jesus' instructions to wait in Jerusalem "until you are clothed with power from on high" (Luke 24:40). And today we have heard of God's response to their faith-filled prayer in the riveting descent of God's Holy Spirit in tongues of fire and a mighty rush of wind. Now they knew what they were to do with their lives and they knew, in the power of the Holy Spirit, they could do it. The lock was thrown open and they burst forth upon the world forever to change it.

At St. Mark's Cathedral in Minneapolis a wonderful Pentecost banner leads the procession on this day, similar to the one, new to me at St. James, that led us in this morning, its fiery tongues of color swirling overhead, invoking the image of God's powerful initiative to assure that the Gospel would be made known to all. Simple Galilean fisherfolk spoke in languages that were unintelligible to themselves but altogether comprehensible to those foreigners whom God wanted to reach through them.

Suddenly Jesus' followers were capable of things that alone they could never have done, because God the Holy Spirit was working in and through them, unifying them, inspiring and enabling them. The disciples could articulate the gospel according to the unique needs of each of their listeners. They could dream dreams and make those dreams reality in the Lord's Name. By word and example they could define Christian expectations and inspire people to live into those expectations.

How effective is our reading of the Gospel in multiple languages this morning! Just as it was to the 1st century listeners in Jerusalem, God's word is spoken in a cacophony of diverse tongues, simultaneously made intelligible by God's will. God will be heard by everyone, everywhere. That is God's intention, because:

God's Word is a universal Word;

God's Son is a universal Savior;

God's Spirit is a universal Guide.

Without doubt, the Day of Pentecost was highly dramatic, the better to demonstrate the transforming way the Spirit works. When she takes hold, there's no containing her. The Spirit gives mushrooming, expansive power. The Spirit also gives vision. She enables us to see possibilities and to move from the present moment, the constrictions of current ! circumstance, to bring into being those possibilities.

Certainly there are many examples in the history of this cathedral of the dramatic ways in which the Spirit works. I am indebted to Lyle Roebuck, the Dean's able assistant, for calling to my attention your wonderful website. If you haven't visited www.saintjamescathedral.org, by all means do. It is artfully conceived and offers, among other useful information, a concise history of St. James from its founding as a parish in 1834 to the present day. In reading that history, one is struck by the resilience of this community through very trying times and by the slow but steady outward expansion of its embrace. Bishop Burrill's naming of St. James Church as the diocesan Cathedral in 1955, gave new impetus and authority to that expanding outreach.

As the Bishop's home church, a cathedral is also the mother church of the diocese, a symbol of the unity in our Anglican tradition of every parish and mission with every other, every Episcopalian with every other. Ours are not single, discreet, independent congregations. Our commonality in God's service under the guidance and leadership of our Bishop distinguishes our self-image as Episcopalians, and strengthens our purpose. Even as individuals are bonded within parishes, so are parishes bonded within dioceses. Reflective of that self-understanding is the presence here this morning of representatives from many parishes of the Diocese of Chicago, "for just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ" (I Cor. 12:12). It is truly glorious to be together to celebrate this occasion.

Now, lest you think that God the Holy Spirit always does things with a remarkable splash, in tongues of fire and a mighty rush of wind, let me remind you that the other notable symbol of the third person of the Trinity is the dove. God's Holy Spirit is often gentle, and she is infinitely patient, knowing just how and when to bestir us, by murmuring encouragement in our hearts' hearing, nudging us with a feather's kiss, coaxing us in a soft breeze of refreshment. She is willing to wait until the moment is right for us favorably to respond and she'll use whatever means necessary to get through the barriers of self-sufficiency we construct.

Often the Holy Spirit works through other people. That, too, is the message of Pentecost. Our individual capacities and gifts were bestowed upon us not simply for our own pleasure and profit but for mutual service and benefit. It was God's stated intention establishing the Church to draw together in common purpose the multiple gifts of the Spirit with which individuals are endowed. All that is good in ourselves and in our lives is attributable to, reflective of God's goodness. The sooner and the more deeply we apprehend that reality, the more desirous we become of seeking and serving God's goodness and the more faithfully we are empowered to do so. And the amazing thing is that sometimes we aren't even aware that we are being used, that we are made to be instruments of God's purposes. Now, that is a fearsome truth to contemplate!

The Church is founded on the premise of mutuality and inclusivity. As individuals we are drawn to the fellowship of kindred spirits, fellow seekers, would-be servants. Through Baptism eagerly we bring ourselves and our children to be dedicated by love to live lovingly. As his community of faith and faithfulness, Christ charges us to be the demonstrators, the wavers of the banner of God's love at work, the ones in whom the flaming tongues of the Holy Spirit's fire are translated to a zeal to "proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ" (BCP, p. 305).

As we see about us evidence of that zeal, we come to appreciate its infectiousness and we welcome it. Pentecost calls us as the Church to act according to a special vision of our own empowerment. To claim the name Christian is to know oneself by the Holy Spirit to be infused at Baptism with the love of Christ to do the work of Christ. It is a two-way, relational love, a love that unconditionally receives and a love that unstintingly gives. To be Spirit-filled is to be always ready once again to be surprised by the depth and breadth of God's love. To be Spirit-filled is to be overbrimming with a willed response to that love, that transforms us even as it translates faith into thought and word and action.

As St. James the Cathedral moves into its second half century, let us resolve to make obvious the Spirit's transforming, unifying power. Let us proclaim by the way we live, and the way we love, that God the Holy Spirit is alive and well and working in and through us in 2005. How wonderful to be assured as individuals of multiple parishes, inextricably linked to the Cathedral Church of St. James, that as our earliest antecedents were recognized by the Romans, so "They will know we are Christians by our love!" AMEN