Acts 2:1-21; Numbers 11:24-30
Pentecost, May 11, 2008
Bethel Presbyterian and Kingston United Methodist
Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD
In our joint staff meetings the last couple of weeks, I must confess I didn’t quite grasp why our Methodist friends kept referring to today as Mother’s Day when we all knew it was Pentecost. I thought, what will the Bishop think if, in a couple of weeks when he’s here, it slips out that Pentecost, the so-called birthday of the church and one of Christianity’s high and holy festival days, had taken a back seat to a holiday not even on the liturgical calendar! But then, on Friday, imagine my surprise when I checked the Presbyterian Church’s official calendar, and lo and behold, in the little block for May 11, right alongside “Pentecost” it said “Mother’s Day.”
I was all prepared, with only the slightest hint of liturgical condescension, to excuse this moment of Methodist maternal excess because I knew Mother’s Day has its 1907 origins in the Andrew Methodist Episcopal Church of Grafton, West Virginia when Anna Jarvis honored her mother’s pioneering efforts to bring reconciliation between the post Civil War North and South. And today, you may know her Methodist church as the one that houses a museum displaying the fruits of that effort 101 years ago. It would seem supremely un-American, if not a violation of the 5th Commandment, should we not all alike be swept up into the holiday spirit of this day. The national restaurant association knows well the truth of this day’s popularity as their single busiest day of the year!
It’s an unusual calendar coincidence that these days do overlap, and it’s tempting to let a sentimental religion of domesticity -- of roses, chocolate, Hallmark cards, of sweet words and kind gestures -- take center stage ahead of the astounding appearance of the Spirit to those frightened believers cowering behind closed doors in Jerusalem.
When I juxtapose Mother’s Day with our two scripture readings, I come up with some paradigms for thinking about religious experience and the place of the church in our communal and national identity. And that’s what I’d like to speak about this morning, hoping that you will be able to beat the Baptists to your favorite restaurant!
First is what many scholars of American religion have called the religion of the domestic sphere. It may well be that the nearest and dearest form of Christianity to a good many folk gathered here: the sanctification of the home and deep affection for the one often considered the emotional center of the Christian home: the Mother.
When Anna Jarvis hit upon the idea of the first American Mother’s Day, she struck a chord already running deep in the American experience. At least since the time of the 19th century Industrial Revolution when the sphere of work began to split between the factory and the home, many American Protestant leaders began to highlight the role of the home in the formation of civic virtues and Christian character. And as the father’s work obligations increasingly drew him out of the picture, the Mother became the daily guide and driving force teaching scripture, morals, and righteous living.
The 19th century was the great era for tract and temperance societies and missionary aid groups, precursors of our modern-day support group for every occasion. Much of that moralistic literature is concerned with saving young men from the temptation of poor choices: drinking, gambling, carousing – problems not much different than today’s problems. But what’s striking is how often the appeal to right living is framed by little stories about all the sacrifices mothers have made for her children, and how guilty the sinner should now feel since he (and it’s always a he, a son or a husband) has done so much that is wrong and wayward.
While men still ran the factories and the churches, the woman’s sphere of influence was the home, and as her social influence grew throughout the Victorian period and into the 20th century, the so-called feminine traits of sympathy, sentimentality, displays of affection became definitive categories for Christian devotion and piety. This has led some scholars to refer to that time in our nation’s religious history as the “feminization of American religion,” a label quite different, even opposite from, variations of feminist theology in our own day. But, it should be no surprise that Mother’s Day results from that mix of religious and cultural forces that have been swirling around in the American experience for a long time.
Certainly family, no less than motherhood, has always been central to the Church and to Christian experience. We recall those words of Jesus from the cross in John’s Gospel”: “Jesus said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son. Then he said to the beloved disciple, ‘Here is your mother. And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.” (John 19:26) Responsibility to one’s family and a home, organized around a common commitment to Christ’s sacrifice and love, have been defining faith experiences for many, and the family, especially, remain central metaphors for our life together in the Church.
Yet, at the risk of throwing cold water on Mother’s Day, I think we also need to be reminded that the Jesus of the synoptic gospels made it quite clear that devotion to one’s family, even to one’s mother, should never be placed ahead of following him. In Matthew, he speaks these disturbing words: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” In other words, we have to be on the guard, lest even the love we feel for parent, for children, for family, might become a substitute for our ultimate allegiance to Jesus.
Which leads into a second model for interpreting our common religious experience, a reality that also threats the practice of true religion, that of elevating the nation as the highest good, a reality that has recurred time and time again in our own American story. I take as my point of departure this rather cryptic passage we heard from the Book of Numbers.
It’s a passage appointed by the lectionary for today because it deals with the Spirit and the distribution and parceling out to 70 elders of that same Spirit God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai. These 70, apparently, were only supposed to prophesy when in the sacred space of the tabernacle, that is, only among the priests and sacred things; two of them, however, Eldad and Medad, spoke a word from the Lord while in the profane space of the camp, that is, while out among ordinary people. Joshua, alarmed that Medad and Eldad haven’t obeyed the rules about where to utter holy speech, complains to Moses, who then responds with these memorable words: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!”
Dividing the Spirit and giving it to the 70 elders seems to have been God’s response to an upsurge of anxiety about wilderness scarcity and the Israelites’s nostalgic longing for life back in Egypt. They complain about the manna and wish for a return to the cucumbers and melons they enjoyed along the banks of the Nile. But there are other complaints as well: Moses complains to God that the burden of managing the distribution of the manna to all the Israelites is just too overwhelming for one person; and then, a few days later on the journey, Miriam, the sister of Moses, and his assistant Aaron, get into the act and complain that Moses has added a Cushite woman, a foreigner, to his harem.
You get the picture. Even though they are God’s people, a liberated people, a people with a promised-land destiny, their complaints only seem to keep multiplying.
But, the message of Israel’s Exodus experience is that even constant complaining can’t undermine God’s plan for this chosen people, this holy nation. When they complain about the cuisine, God sends the sweet meat of quail from the sea that drop down into the camp; when Moses can’t take the demands of leadership anymore, he gets not only 70 spirit-inspired elders to assist him but a Cushite woman added to his herem. The providence of God is going to get the Israelites through to the Promised Land, regardless of their rebellious behavior.
There was no sacred narrative more important for the first Europeans who came to our shores than this story of freedom from Egypt and wilderness sojourn to the land of Canaan. As Moses outfoxed wicked Pharaoh, so the colonists escaped an evil British empire. As God protected Israel from all her foes, so God would bring victory to those who defended the holy cause of righteousness and liberty.
This rhetoric of God’s favor towards America as a chosen people and light to the nations, especially effective in times of war or national crisis, plays well against the backdrop of Old Testament notions of Israel as a chosen people, a holy nation.
It fails, however, to mesh particularly well with the message of peace and unity furthered by Jesus, the gospel hope for the dissolution of all national and ethnic barriers, salvation to all the nations.
Debates among America’s theologians and historians have abounded as to whether our destiny is finally to be that of a Christian nation or one that embraces a pluralism of religious voices. We all know about and have heard the voices on the Christian right, such as the Moral Majority in the 1980s, making claims for a Christian America and as well as the many other expressions of bigotry and opposition to religious toleration in our history: from Catholics whom urban Protestants widely persecuted in the mid-19th century to all the extra scrutiny and vilification Muslims have had to endure following 9/11. We all know that far too much evil and violence have been perpetuated in the name of religion and in the name of religious truth.
If America enjoys any kind of chosen nation status, it is that God has chosen us to reveal to the world the ideal of inclusivity and the virtues of a broad religious freedom where all are truly welcomed and where state and religion are kept truly separate.
Whether its Mother’s Day or Patriot’s Day, there’s nothing at all wrong with either family or country as resources to help foster and celebrate our religious identity and convictions; I’m glad I’ve got both and give thanks to God for all they mean to me.
But there is a third way of thinking about our faith that transcends categories like home or nation, neither of which can be the highest good. And that gets us to the Pentecost story for today.
What more important vision for life together in homes, in communities, in the nation could God possibly entrust to us than this one alluded to in the second chapter of Acts? There are at least two miracles here: one, that people with different languages, different understandings of Judaism and religious orthodoxy, different value and belief systems, different home communities, all managed to come together in the same space; and then, second, there is the miracle that good news got spoken in the various tongues of everyone there and that everyone was able to understand! No one had to renounce his or her ethnicity in order to hear the Good News!
Underneath differences of ethnicity and geography, differences of scriptural interpretation, even differences of religious orientation and ultimate values, there is the impulse of the astounding spirit of God, that mystical and mysterious spirit that brings unity and the ability to hear the other. That wind, the fire, that presence, that’s what brings us together in worship and celebration today!
It’s the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel -- the pride of thinking we could become like the gods by building a temple into the skies, that ancient story of confused languages, reversed: instead of competing languages being the means of a curse, now, at Pentecost, different languages have become a blessing and the medium through which the Spirit brings unity to all the nations gathered together in Jerusalem.
Some, on that first Pentecost scoffed and blamed this cacophony of languages on too much drink. There will always be those who interpret even the most amazing events through the eyes and ears of cynicism and disbelief, who try and laugh off the work of the Spirit as just another utopian ideal destined for failure. But those with hearts and minds open to the movement of the Spirit knew that a new day had come.
This global, unifying work of the Spirit across boundaries and borders represents a minority report within the Christian tradition; in denominations like ours we generally don’t pay much attention to the Holy Spirit except on Pentecost Sunday, this “red-headed stepchild of the Trinity.” But yet, if we are anything, we are called to be a Pentecostal people.
Maybe, as we think about all the divisions in our world perpetuated in the name of religion and religious truth, maybe its now time for each one of us to seek ways to bracket for a season those theological matters related to eschatology, afterlife, and all dogmas declaring there is an “us” and there is a “them;” and, instead, to seek, as if it is the very first Pentecost, all those things of the Spirit that make for peace, harmony, and the ability to listen to those who are different, even if their language, their customs, their beliefs seem at first strange and foreign.
The perennial question for us, as both the Church and as a nation, which is the truest measure of our greatness, is this: “how can we reach across so many differences, not only in language and culture but also in religious upbringing, economic class, educational background, basic personality types, to communicate effectively, to hear what God is still speaking today – bringing us a call that may still astound us and gather us into something more effective and more amazing than we ever dreamed of becoming?” (Kate Huey, “Life-Giving Spirit”)
Maybe Moses had it right when he said, “Would that all God’s people were prophets,” for a prophet in the biblical tradition is always one who looks at the world upside down, who feels called to critique the status quo, who won’t settle for anything less than the truth of God’s love for all people, regardless of ethnicity, creed, or station in life.
May that same spirit who inspired Moses and the prophets, who touched that variety of believers gathered in Jerusalem long ago, still come to us and bring us hope and renew within us God’s dream for a new earth. So let it be. Amen.
