Praying At Pentecost

By Bishop Kumara Illangasinghe -June 11, 2014 

On Pentecost Sunday we celebrate the great feast of God’s gift of God’s very self, the Spirit of God to us. The Risen Lord breaths his Spirit on his disciples and sends them to bear witness to his mission. The Holy Spirit appeared in the form of tongues of fire and enabled the apostles to preach the word of God with courage.

Bishop Kumara Illangasinghe

The Holy Spirit came upon the disciples  when they had gathered in prayer. The Spirit of God prays with us too, when we gather to pray. St Paul says, “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes, with sighs too deep for words”. Further when ever the community is founded on faith, there the Spirit of God is alive. Only when our community is grounded on their own spiritual resources, will we experience the presence of God. Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I, in their midst”.

Just like God who raised Jesus the Son of God, from the dead, the Holy Spirit becomes the agent of our own everyday resurrection, in our mortal flesh. The Apostles were transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit and it is our hope that we would be transformed too by that same Spirit. Therefore, let us pray that the power of god be active in our lives.

We need to first pray for ourselves that we will be strengthened, encouraged and empowered to discern the truth, amidst so much of deception and untruth around us. Let us pray that God will help us to develop a Sri Lankan spirituality. A spirituality of silence and a spirituality of voice, which will go side by side and hand in hand. ‘Silence’ to listen to the still small voices of God, that will also come to us through the cries of God’s people around us. Also to understand our own calling and to realise what God is calling us to do, amidst such cries. The ‘voice’ is to express and reveal this reality of God’s crying people around us. This is also to give a voice to the unheard cries, the voiceless in our society, there by to enhance the bond of solidarity in the community. Such binding will also express the ‘community salvation’, rather than individual and selfish salvation or the liberation, that is much prevalent in our religious as well as social aspects of the community. This is important because even in the calling of individuals in the Bible, God calls them to be co-workers with God for community salvation. Certainly not for individual, personal or selfish inward looking liberation. Therefore, it is necessary for us to pray for ourselves, so that we uphold each other, in the total mission of God in our own country and in the world, for the liberation of the community.

The Spirit of God is also the Spirit of Freedom and Liberation. The apostles were freed from all bondage and fear. As much as in the world, it is also a reality in our own country that freedom is only served with lip service. Therefore let us uphold in our prayers all those whose freedom has been curtailed or denied in our society. We need to identify al least some of the main areas where freedom is being curtailed.                         Read More