Saint Nicholas Cathedral
May 31, 2026
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
My beloved children in the Lord,
According to the Gospel we have just heard, today is “the last day, that great day of the feast.” The work that was begun at the time of the Lord’s Nativity and perfected in his Pascha has now borne its fruit.
The Spirit whom Christ promised has come. The Comforter whom Christ desired to send is poured out on all flesh. And with his coming, with his outpouring, the eschaton, the end of the world, has come upon us. We Christians are, in the words of St. Paul, those upon whom the end of the ages has come. Christ came to make sinners into saints; the years that we lived in sin are now restored to us as the years that lead us to repentance in Christ. And henceforth, anointed with the Spirit, we are empowered to live in accordance with his call to holiness.
Wherever the Spirit blows and comes to rest, there life flourishes; what is dead is made alive and fruitful. Wherever the Spirit is, there the fruits of the Resurrection are already known. Wherever the Spirit is, the end of time, the fullness of the ages, is already present, though hidden from the eyes of the world.
According to the Book of Acts, “divided tongues, as of fire” came to rest upon the disciples on the day of Pentecost. They all received the same fire—and yet the tongues were divided: each received the gifts of the Spirit suited to his particular mission and vocation. So it is with us. Each of us has received a portion of the Spirit according to our need: choir member, reader, deacon, priest, monastic, parent, child, witness for Christ in the world.
Now, this gift does two things at once, and we must hold them together. On the one hand, it fires us for our calling. On the other, it quiets us. The Holy Fathers speak of hesychia—that interior stillness which is not our own achievement but the Spirit’s gift. The flame that rested on the apostles did not agitate them; it clarified them. It burned away the noise and the fear, and left them knowing, with luminous certainty, what they were to do next. This is the gift we must ask for: not merely enthusiasm for our vocation, but the inner quiet in which vocation itself becomes unmistakable.
The life of faith is long, and it is not always luminous. There are seasons—and perhaps many of us know them—when the initial fire seems to have cooled, when the practices that once felt vivid feel merely dutiful, when we wonder whether we are making any progress at all. This is not a sign that the Spirit has departed. It may, in fact, be the very moment when the Spirit is doing his most serious work in us: stripping away the excitement and the novelty, the consolations we mistook for the substance, so that what remains is something quieter, more deeply rooted, more truly our own. The apostles themselves passed through such a season—between the Ascension and Pentecost, ten days of waiting in an upper room, not knowing exactly what was coming. The fire did not fall until they had learned to be still.
The spiritual life is not measured by what we feel, nor by what we have accomplished, nor even by the clarity with which we perceive our own progress. It is measured, if at all, by our faithfulness—our patient, humble return, again and again, to the One who called us. That return does not need to be dramatic. It only needs to be real. The tongue of flame that rested on us at our baptism and chrismation has not gone out. It burns, perhaps low, perhaps hidden—but the Holy Spirit does not abandon his dwelling. “Quench not the Spirit,” St. Paul tells us. And the surest way not to quench it is simply to remain: to stay, to pray as we can, to receive the Sacraments, to love the person in front of us—and to trust that the God who began a good work in us is faithful to complete it.
We Orthodox Christians, all of us, have received the heavenly Spirit. We each possess a divided tongue of flame. And it is our duty to cherish that flame, to let it grow into a blaze, and to share that fire with the world, spreading the Gospel of the burning love of the God-man, the Good News of his forgiveness that consumes all the power of death and sin.
To him who came to cast fire upon the earth, our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, be all glory, together with his Father, who is a consuming Fire, and the All-holy Spirit who appeared as tongues of flame. Amen.