Father Randy Koenigsknecht
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In this homily, Father Randy reflects on Gaudete Sunday and the joy that marks the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Drawing from the Creed’s profession of faith in the Holy Spirit, he explains how the Spirit is truly God—active, personal, and at work within us—bringing healing, transformation, and a lived, experiential faith rooted in God’s love.
Read the Homily Short
The theme, the Advent theme of this week, is joy, and that lines up very well with this third part of our preaching series on the Holy Spirit. The clearest sign of the Spirit at work in our lives is often joy—a supernatural sense of joy that is able to endure through difficulties because it reveals that God is present among us and the Holy Spirit is God working through us.
So when the Creed speaks about the Holy Spirit, it is a very short paragraph. It says: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.
Most of that little section is dedicated to conveying one simple truth: the Holy Spirit is God, the third Person of the Trinity.
On a human level, we can struggle with this a little bit. We naturally know how to approach the Person of the Father. We have our own experiences of fathers in our lives. We have authority figures, parents, and others who help us understand something about who God is. Something about God is revealed through them. We know how to talk to Him because we know what it is like to be sons and daughters. We have that natural experience.
But when it comes to the Holy Spirit, we are often left a little behind. The number one symbol for the Holy Spirit is a bird, and I am not sure about you, but my relationship with parakeets, pigeons, and the occasional dove does not correlate very well to my relationship with the Holy Spirit. It is not a symbol that always helps us connect in a meaningful way.
What does help is when I think about what the Holy Spirit actually does.
The Holy Spirit is active. He is probably the Person of the Trinity that we are most engaged with in our daily lives, all the time, without even realizing it. The Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts, connects us to God the Father, and empowers us to live like Jesus.
When we take in the breath of God, we become like Him. We receive God’s own life. We are intimately united with Him. We are transformed and animated from within.
So when we pray, “Come, Holy Spirit,” when we breathe in and receive the life of God—the very breath of God—He dwells in us. He comes to those places of greatest shame, of greatest isolation, and He transforms them into places where God’s love for us is revealed.
He moves us from places of shame to places of connection and intimacy—places that we can continually return to and say, “This is a place God has transformed.” His power is greater than my sins. His power is greater than my suffering. He has come to be with me, to transform me, to heal me.
I spoke at the beginning of our preaching series about the Father, and I said that our faith is meant to be experiential, not just intellectual. We are meant to know it in our hearts. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that happen concretely. He is the one who cries out from within us, “Abba, Father.” He prays within us and teaches us how to receive God’s love for us.