Burned by the Church

sermon by Carrie Eikler
Acts 2:1-21
Pentecost

I have never been one for what you would call the “hallmark holidays,” and even on this 100th anniversary of the first Mother’s Day, I’ve always considered Mother’s Day a “Hallmark Holiday.” Generally I’ve cynically viewed them as simple advertising schemes to get us to buy things, hallmark cards at the very least.

And it seems to me like new holidays pop up all the time. Such as “Sweetest’s Day,” an autumn version of Valentine’s day. I guess it exists to help the economy get through the slump between the Fourth of July and Halloween. I’ve wondered if all these hallmark holidays work so well in our American culture because we have very few true celebrations deeply engrained in us, celebrations that bind our collective experiences as a people, beyond being simply consumers.

It’s not that don’t I think we should give thanks to our bosses on Boss Day, or secretaries on Secretary Day, or even fathers on Fathers Day. But I’ve wondered, “why do we need a special day to appreciate someone?” and does buying a card and balloons really mean that much? So to my mother’s dismay, I rarely have given her anything on Mother’s Day, except maybe a hug or a phone call. And I can honestly say that I don’t expect Sebastian to give me anything on Mother’s Day, other than his daily hugs and snuggles.

But I can tell you, I was pretty excited the other day when Torin and I were with my mother downtown. Torin bought be a $10 belt I was eyeing at a vintage store and as he presented it to me, he smiled and said “Happy Mother’s Day.” I clapped my hands like a kid at Christmas who gets her first bike. One more time, my bubble of superiority was humbly busted.

As I have grown with my mother over the years I’ve come to understand our relationship as one of dynamics. Dynamics of a child growing into a personality that will be hers for a lifetime; dynamics of a teenager seeking independence; dynamics of a college student who thinks she knows everything; dynamics of a woman who somehow discovers that she is more like her mother than she ever thought she would be, and now looking to her for advice on being a parent.

On my mother’s side: dynamics of raising an overly energetic little girl; testing the balance between trust and protection; biting her tongue when she wants to give her daughter a sense that she has won an argument, while not being afraid to reign in on her daughter’s attitude when it gets out of hand; and delicately observing and venturing into the places where a little mother’s guidance might be helpful, hoping that she’s not overstepping the line. After all, her daughter is now grown. Her daughter is now a mother.

My mother is a source of frustration, and she is the closest thing that reminds me who I am, where I come from, and the source of my life. It is a dynamic relationship indeed. It keeps us leaving and returning, embracing and relinquishing, loving and gnashing teeth.

I was talking to a friend from seminary the other day. She is getting ready to pack up her apartment in New York for the summer to live with friends in Ohio. As we talked she was looking around her room at the boxes half filled (or half empty, depending on your perspective). She was looking at the systems left unmanaged, and the work yet to do. Her mother is what you might call a pack rat. She never got rid of a single thing, and many days and weeks my friend has spent at her mother’s house trying to find a system in the chaos, helping organize and discard.

My friend has always known this trait was passed onto her. And ask we talked on the phone that evening as she struggled with this inherited dysfunction, she sighed and said “It’s all my mother’s fault.” We kind of giggled at that, knowing that it would be a wonderful world if all our problems could be blamed on our mothers, or fathers. And in a way, that world of blame is a world we live in.

But it also seems a bit more complicated to me than simply assigning blame. On one hand we recognize the power family dynamics and family systems play in constructing who we are. We seek ways to console ourselves that it is not all our fault that we are messed up, that we need therapy. But then we have other voices telling us that we don’t need to be victimized, that we can change anything about ourselves we might not like-from our looks, to our attitude, our financial situation, even sexual orientation—if we just try hard enough, believe enough in ourselves, if we just become the little engine that could.

I don’t know where it all lies, ultimately. Somewhere in the middle I suppose. So today we recognize mothers, whether we celebrate the wonderful relationship we have, or if it allows us to confront the dark side of our maternal relationships. Maybe we can make a hallmark holiday one of celebration and redemption, depending on your need.

The religious calendar this year lines up nicely with the Hallmark calendar, so today we also celebrate Pentecost, we celebrate the formation of Mother Church. Fifty days following Passover, all Jews would gather to celebrate the Feast of Weeks. This is the day, fifty days after being liberated from Pharaoh’s Egypt, that YHWH gave the law to the Hebrew people at Mount Sinai. It was a day of rest, of reading the Torah, telling stories, and having celebratory meals.

So it is very likely that this is what these Galilean Jews who had been close to Jesus had gathered for in our story today. For rejuvenation, for learning—sharing stories and celebrating God’s nurturing spirit by eating and fellowshipping. I’m sure they welcomed this time, after their teacher had died, went missing, showed up again alive, and then magically transcended into the heavens – poof. A good reason to remember where you came from, who your family is, maybe try to rest a little.

But it wasn’t just locals who were in Jerusalem for the celebration. Our scripture today gives a whole laundry list of nations who were present, all varieties of peoples and languages. It sounds as if they were probably celebrating with their own people—Galileans with Galileans, Elamites with Elamites, Pamphylians with Pamphylians, and so on. But as they celebrated, the group of Galileans had the most peculiar thing happen to them.

Now I’m sure there are many accounts of what happened on that day. I have often pictured images of fiery tongues—and I mean, real tongues, like the iconic Rolling Stones logo—these sorts of tongues flying out of the sky, licking the hair of each of the disciples. I can’t imagine what it really must have looked like, how other people perceived it. But as in any such group recollection, the salient points tend to surface over time and find their place in the "official" retelling, and that retelling is what we have here, in the book of Acts.

What happened, whatever those tongues really looked like, is that out of chaos, there was unity without uniformity. Out of pandemonium, there was understanding without squelching the different voices. The Holy Spirit, the Breath of God and the Heartbeat of Christ, made herself present to her people. The Holy Spirit fashioned a clarity expressed in a beautiful diversity of language and understanding. What emerged that day, was the Birth of the Church.

A beautiful image. Bizarre…but beautiful. But since the two millennia since Jesus walked on earth, it seems like that excitement of the spirit has been washed out. Instead of small groups gathered to fellowship, and learn, and celebrate, it can’t be denied that Mother Church has taken ugly and deplorable twists and turns. Nancy Bowen, our Hebrew Scriptures professor at seminary is a Methodist woman originally trained as a mathematician before pursuing doctoral work in Biblical Studies. Nancy had the dubious task of teaching Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, to Quaker and Church of the Brethren seminary students.

For peace-loving Brethren and Quakers, who often look to the gospels for their scriptural link to religious life, and the gospel of peace as foundational in our lives, our questions of the Hebrew Scriptures and its seemingly violent and vengeful God were well grounded. And Nancy anticipated all of the questions and critiques each semester . She would start her Introduction to Hebrew Scripture class recalling the conversation she once had. A man had asked her, like some strange pick-up line, “So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in Old Testament?” She smiled at him and said, “I’m in it for the sex and the violence.” I’d like to think that I’m as quick witted.

But she would continue that line of conversation with us. She said she could predict many of our concerns we brought with us about the teachings and the images of God in Hebrew Scriptures. She acknowledged that it’s theologically challenging to read some of these scriptures, particularly coming from the background many of us came from. But she warned us about the all-too-easy trap to fall into, the trap of separating the God of Hebrew Scripture from the God of the New Testament—saying that the God of the Jews demands obedience while the God of Jesus expects love. She helped us think through the many ways this misconception has damaged Christian and Jewish relations, and easily manifests itself into harmful anti-Semitism.

And she reminded us: The Hebrew Scriptures is a story of a people who struggled to understand their place with God and narrates their struggle over thousands of years. Our New Testament is only a snapshot of the early Christian story, a story of only about one hundred years. If the entirety of the Christian story from Christ to the present day was written down, if future generations read what the Christian Church believed their God demanded of them over two thousand years--the Crusades, the Inquisition, condoning war and slavery—what might they think of us and our God. We might see that our Christian ancestors have not always worshipped a God of love, mercy, and grace but a jealous, vengeful, and violent God. Maybe our stories are more similar than we think.

I think it is that part of the Church’s story that has led many people to question the place of Christianity in the world, leads people to reject Mother Church and abandon faith, at least, abandon the Christian Faith. In this and many other ways, people have felt burned by the Church, abandoned by their Christian Faith. This has certainly happened to me, and surprisingly, I wrestle with it every single day.

It began in college. Now, I know many religious conservatives will blame higher education for corrupting our youth, that liberal arts will bring downfall of our Christian society. But it wasn’t only my education that led me to question faith. I considered myself to be a very strong Christian that entire first year, standing the tests of classes in sociology and philosophy, even one the inner lives of animals. I was still a strong Christian, believed all the right Christian things.

No, it wasn’t until I worked at a Church of the Brethren camp in Virginia that I began to get angry. It happened when the groundskeeper of the camp told me that he was my superior, not because he was older, but because he was a man; when he told me that my purpose in life as intended by God was to find a husband, have children, and submit; when he told me that women should never preach.

And then it snowballed. I began to see it all around me what the church had done in history, what it was doing even now, at home and abroad. Hand in hand with governments decimating cultures, spilling blood or at least washing their hands of it. And I thought, if this is the church then it is not for me. I am disowning my mother, my Mother Church.

And yet, I could never totally leave it. I still felt pulled to justifying God in some way. I was among the countless who identified themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” In many ways I still saw the divine in the world around me so I realized I wasn’t abandoning God, just church. But it wasn’t even that, because I still was involved in Brethren communities, I still went into Brethren Volunteer Service. And there I connected with Catholics who were active in social justice as well as deeply cultivating their spiritual lives. But it wasn’t an amorphous “spiritual but not religious” type of faith. It was faith in the restorative power of Christ. It was faith that there was a holy spirit of God that moves us from beyond what has been, into a future that can be different. And somehow, in the midst of that, I found myself coming home…to the church. I wasn’t the same, I’m not the same, by any stretch of the imagination. I couldn’t, and can’t, believe some things that had been assumed you must believe to be Christian. But somehow I found my way home.

Are we victims to the distasteful forces of our Mother Church? Or can we simply change the course of our history by our own efforts? I’ve never quite known how to deal with this question, how to bring it to the language of the church and to our lives of faith. But recently I heard Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso speak about her work with young families and what she said found a powerful resonance in me. She often works with couples who, after abandoning the church for whatever reason, seek her counsel when the have children. They want to return, to somehow be part of a religious experience with their children.

But many have found certain aspects of the institutional church so distasteful, certain experiences as children that turned them off. “Many times we have bad experiences with particular religious traditions, but that is not the best of the tradition,” she said. “We need to look to the best of the tradition…and [these traditions] give us this language that allows us to speak [of God].” What she tells them, is that while there are things about the tradition that have rightfully given bad impressions, they themselves are part of the tradition too. She said that you are not just a descendent of your tradition, you are also an ancestor. (“The Spirituality of Parenting.” Speaking of Faith, National Public Radio. April 3, 2008)

We are not just descendents of our church, but we are also ancestors, creating and molding and directing where we will go and what we will become. Today we celebrate the birth of our church, knowing that tongues of fire are needed in our lives. But I think we already have the fire present. What we may lack is the perception to know that it is the Spirit burning us to move.

There is the fire in our belly, and it burns us with anger when we witness a justice system that is so blatantly skewed against those who are not white. There is the fire in our hearts, when we burn with excitement and enthusiasm when opportunities come our way that we feel called to. There is fire in our souls, when we burn with mercy and confession and compassion as we watch the death toll from cyclones in Myanmar rise in the hundreds of thousands. There is fire in our minds, when we burn with wisdom as we see with new clarity, new perspectives, new realities.

We too quickly pass it off as simply anger, or excitability, or emotion, but I think that burning is the fire of the Spirit, compelling us to wake up and to see the best of what God gives us through the Spirit: unity, passion, mercy, peace, and forgiveness. The face of the emerging church has each of our faces in it. How people see the church will be how they see those of us who profess to be followers of Christ. We are not simply descendents of our tradition, we are also ancestors giving birth to a new relationship between ourselves and our God, between ourselves and the world. It is a relationship of dynamics. But I think if we are to live in the story of the Pentecost, we must recognizing that the fires we feel in our lives are the fires that renew, because they are the source of our frustration…and the source of our life together.