Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization,

using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent

and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and His Church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's

word where it is most needed.

Today, we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you.

Friends, we come to the great Feast of Pentecost, along with Christmas and Easter, the most

important feast of the Christian year.

The celebration par excellence of the Holy Spirit.

It's also the birthday of the church, so all of us who are filled with the Holy Spirit, members of Christ's mystical body of the church, were meant to see

ourselves in this feast and see ourselves in these readings. So they're exceptionally important.

You know, first of all, that term Pentecost, from Pentecost stay in Greek,

having the sense of 50th day. So the 50th day after Passover in the Jewish calendar was indeed

a very high feast, also called the Feast of Booths. What they celebrated that day, it's interesting, was the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

So think in those accounts in the book of Exodus, of the giving of the commandments in the Torah,

accompanied by flame and earthquake and wind these dramatic signs.

Well, they're duplicated, if you want, on this later

day of Pentecost. The giving of the Torah, the giving of the law, and now the giving of the

Holy Spirit. So there's a link between ancient Jewish Pentecost and now the Christian idea of

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