The Holy Spirit will teach you everything and will remind you of all that I told you.  The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the “forgotten person of the Trinity.”  All the time, we pray to our Father, who art in heaven.  We pray to and with Jesus.  What about the Holy Spirit?  Our Lord promises that the Father will send us the gift of the Holy Spirit, but what does that mean? What is his role in our life?  The reading from the Acts of the Apostles can help us.  It describes what has become known in the history of the Church as the Council of Jerusalem.  After the Lord had ascended into heaven, the apostles dispersed to the various parts of the world to found churches and spread the good news.  But before long, around the year 50, it became necessary for the apostles to gather back together again from their various parts of the world to address together a crisis that was enveloping the early Church. 

We know of course that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were Jews; so were the apostles, and most of the first followers of Jesus, who saw in this carpenter’s son from Nazareth the fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies they had known from their childhood.  But the question inevitably came up, what about people who aren’t Jews?  If they become Christians, do they have to convert to Judaism first?  Do they have to keep the complex system of laws and rituals found in the Old Covenant? Can non-Jews even be Christians, some were asking?  This was the first major theological crisis in the life of the Church, and these weren’t questions that could be answered just from the information they had readily available at their fingertips.  But the apostles realized that they had more than just information available to them.  They had the gift of the Holy Spirit bestowed upon them at Pentecost, and they could rely on that Spirit to resolve this important issue.  And of course, their decision shaped the future of our Church.  They discerned that the Lord’s plan was for the Church to be the worldwide family of God, no longer limited to a particular nation or race or people. 

The apostles decided this particular issue that day, and it’s an important one; but a more general lesson is, that they didn’t just make something up; they didn’t even do what they thought would be best from their own insights and preferences.  Instead, they truly discerned: they considered what they knew about the Lord and his teachings, they prayed for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and then they were able to rely upon the Holy Spirit to guide them in this decision, which was so important for the life of the Church going forward.  The Holy Spirit was their guarantee that they were being faithful to the message of the Lord.  This Council of Jerusalem became the model for the 21 gatherings of bishops that have taken place in the Church since then, when the successors of the apostles have met to discuss important matters and resolve problems.  These are called the ecumenical councils, and of course Vatican II was the most recent.  Each and every one has been a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit for the Church, when the Church was in need, when a problem presented itself that didn’t have an easy answer.  The Church, built on the twelve foundation stones of the apostles, as we heard so vividly described in the Book of Revelation today, enjoys the gift of the Spirit in a special way at these important moments.  The Spirit helps us to live the life that God wants for us as a Church, and He ensures that the Church remains faithful to the Truth given to us by the Lord. 

The way this all unfolded in Jerusalem is something that can teach us about our own lives as well.  The way the apostles faced their first major challenge in the church is not a method reserved for these broad, sweeping moments in history.  We’re all faced with challenges and difficulties, obstacles we don’t expect, tensions in our relationships, questions we don’t know how to answer.  The Lord promises us today that he won’t leave us individuals alone in these moments either.  He’s telling us that he’s not just a figure of the remote past, but that he remains with us now and forever, through the Holy Spirit.  Our relationship with the Spirit is a gift that we receive in baptism, which is strengthened and deepened at Confirmation, and is nourished every time we receive the Eucharist.  And the Holy Spirit doesn’t just want to be with us for an hour on Sundays.  He wants to inspire and guide the entirety of our lives, every hour of every day.  So when we’re in trouble and don’t know what to do, when we are just feeling weighed down by the ordinary routine of life, or when we have some decision in our lives for which there is no obvious easy answer, these are opportunities to enrich our relationship with the Holy Spirit, asking him to fill our hearts and lead us in the way we should go.  One of the most beautiful and effective prayers to the Holy Spirit is the simplest, “Come, Holy Spirit.”  Why not add that to our prayer vocabulary?  Whether we are making the most important decisions of our lives, or just trying to get through the routine of a normal day, the Holy Spirit wants to help.  “Come, Holy Spirit.”  Let us try to remember his presence more and more in both the extraordinary and ordinary events of our lives, so that just as he guided the apostles so long ago, he might also guide us into peace, joy, and the fullness of life.  Come, Holy Spirit.