Sermon for Pentecost/Mother's Day (May 11, 2008)

Acts 2:1-11 May 11th, 2008
John 7:37-39 Pentecost/Mother’s Day

In the Name of God, who is Spirit and who is Holy. Amen

Pentecost is an excellent day on which to begin a new chapter in a parish’s unfolding story. And when you add Mother’s Day to the mix, then we are triple blessed. For the next few minutes I will try to keep those three realities of mother, church, and new beginning in focus.

A while back, Barbara, my wife, was in Williamsburg helping her mother move from her apartment into an assisted living unit. Mom has not been very happy with the new arrangement. She was reluctant to give up some of the trinkets she has gathered over the years, reluctant to acknowledge the necessary changes in her life, but new circumstances required some letting go of old memorabilia. So Barbara returned to Fort Ashby with some things of her mother’s. We have hung in our home a Bavarian cuckoo clock that has hung in Mom’s dining room for as long as I can remember.

Mom’s name is Agnes and she is 95 years old, the last surviving of Barbara’s and my parents. For the past 44 years she has been a great mother-in-law and I love her dearly. Even though she grumbles at times, she can be funny and even a bit flirtatious, as she has always liked to be. When Barbara and I last visited, we took Mom out to lunch. She told us where she’d like to eat. She studied the menu with care. A gin and tonic, she thought, was in order. We had a good time together.

Over the past couple of years Mom has taken some falls that knock the stuffing out of her for a while. Her emotions are frayed and she is lonely, even though she has a lot of company, and she is fearful but does not know of what.

If it is a painful thing to see our parents as they struggle with changing life circumstances. I can only suppose that it is much worse to be on the inside of that struggle, trying to make sense of changes that don’t seem fair or necessary. Mom has adapted to using a walker, but she is rebelling against the other changes going on in her life. She does not like the sense that the boundaries of her life are shrinking. She does not like this new feeling that the world is somehow alien, perhaps even hostile. When she says she wants to go home, that means where she lived until fifteen years ago.

She did not used to be like that. As a young mother of three daughters – Barbara being the middle child – Agnes would push her girls out into the world to explore and to meet new people. Barbara tells stories from her childhood about forts built by the creek behind her home, and about playing with friends, unsupervised for hours. By contrast, our two grandchildren in Colorado hardly ever have an unsupervised moment. When Barbara was called home it was not because the world was dangerous but because supper was ready. Barbara remembers once when a man came to their house. It was the late 1940s, employment was scarce in upstate New York, and the man was looking for a meal. In those days they were called hobos. Mom made him a sandwich and talked with him as he ate it on the porch. It was simple hospitality.

Throughout her life, Mom has loved to play music. When Barbara and I were dating, as we walked up the pathway to her home we could hear Mom playing her Wurlitzer organ. She rarely played for any audience other than herself.

Above all, from her mother Barbara knew with complete conviction that she was loved. Her mother told her that regularly. No comparisons were made nor were conditions laid down. Barbara and her sisters were loved, and not much was feared.

Mom was widowed ten years ago. We, her family, all worried that she’d miss her husband so much that she’d shrink inside herself. Though she still misses Gerry, she did anything but shrink. She continued to make new friends in the retirement community to which they had moved a few years earlier. It is in the nature of retirement communities that the population turns over with some regularity. It is important to make new friends. In the years of her being a widow she has seemed even more unapologetically herself. She became a bit more connected to her faith. In her better moments she has had a sense of moving onward.

But moving onward doesn't always mean a cheerful journey. The death of someone we love is a burden to carry. Onward for my mother-in-law meant making a new life after 60 years of a partnership in which she had become a mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. Onward for Barbara and her sisters means feeling less grounded, less able to relax while Mom carries on. And Mom does carry on, often irascible, sometimes charming, and occasionally confounding. She loved Bill Clinton and would have kept on voting for him; and now she loves George W. Bush just as much. Loves ‘em both. Go figure.

And in all of that, Agnes might not be a bad image for how the church is called to be. Today is the Feast of Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. And it’s a day when my life is joining with yours, so it’s a new birth for all of us.

One of the medieval images used to describe the Church is “Mother.” It does seem to me that Mother Church is a lot like my beloved mother-in-law. She is in danger of becoming brittle in her old age. We are irascible and contentious about things that either do not matter or that Jesus would resolve simply by opening his arms a little wider, welcoming a few more people into the family. We are often pretty good at feeding people who are hungry – but too often we do it through the safe distance of an anonymous check.

I fear that the church is no longer the young mother who sends her children out to meet new people and to explore, unsupervised for hours. The church has become old, pre-occupied with fear, caught up in worldly conflicts and forgetting that her Lord makes all things new, young again. How might it be if we, as church, decided that the most important thing was to make sure that we each are loved – without comparison and without condition. Loved.
- How might it be if we sat down with someone who is eating a needed sandwich and we talked with them for a while? Not trying to straighten them out, but just being a kind ear.
- How might it be if we loved equally people on both sides of a political divide?
- How might it be if we made music and danced for the pure delight of it?
- How might it be if we were all encouraged to explore the world in which we live – explore it without fear of being so closely supervised that we are nervous about our own thoughts and questionings.

This morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles describes the puzzling and happy chaos of the earliest disciples of Jesus as they felt a new Spirit move amongst them.
This was an adventurous spirit that embraced people across every imaginable line of division. This spirit was one that made all things new and propelled the early believers out into the world as ambassadors of God’s love for all people. The promise of that spirit is what embraces Emmanuel Church in Keyser, WV, as we gather today.

We live in a fearful and backward-looking age, in which the church sometimes seems trapped in nostalgia, convinced of its own rightness and resentful of new ideas, trapped in a religiosity that is more interested in being safe than in being either adventurous or generous.

We forget that we come from adventurers like Abraham and Moses and Paul and most particularly Jesus. They were guided only by promise and hope. Those whose faith we claim never knew what was around the next bend. They only trusted that God was with them. And we all know that that is what “Emmanuel” means – God with us. Both personally and institutionally, as we try to protect what we have earned, created or horded, we forget that Jesus promised a new creation, more in the tradition of Moses the adventurer than of the Pharisees who had transformed faith from a lively relationship with God into a set of rules.

We are called to better than that. We are called to love one another and to love strangers. We are called to love people at all points of any political spectrum. We are called to a lively relationship with God, not to an obligation to maintain the political balance of an ancient institution.

Do not forget for a moment that we are called to serve the hungry, not to argue about doctrine. We are called to welcome the stranger amongst us, not check credentials and vie for status.

So on this Feast of Pentecost I give thanks for my mother-in-law Agnes. I give thanks for the way she pushed her daughters out into the world to be adventurous. And I give thanks for all mothers who have taught their children that the world is an exciting place to explore, that the hungry should be fed, and that they- both the children and the hungry - are loved without comparison and without condition.

As we all begin together this new Pentecost for Emmanuel, may Mother Church grow in such an understanding of what it means to be church.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermon by Bishop Martin Townsend, D.D., Priest-in-Charge