Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ (UCC)

Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17, 25-27
For the text of the readings go the end of the sermon.

I have an old picture at home. In it a soldier in World War II uniform stands with his arm draped over his 12 year-old daughter. Next to her is a younger sister of 5 or 6. And they are flanked by the soldier’s wife. They all are looking into the camera with a pleasant smile. Except for the wife, who looks perturbed. The soldier was my grandfather “Pop Pop” and his wife, my grandmother “Grammy.” The girl on whom Pop Pop leans is my mother and her younger sister, my aunt “Nan.”

A decade or so before Grammy died I had thought it safe to venture into one of my curiosities with her: why did she look so perturbed in the picture? Did she remember? Indeed she did! She told me the story of Pop Pop’s desertion. Pop Pop had gone off and joined the army: as a single man! He left home without informing Grammy where he was going or what he was planning to do. He had deserted them. And there she was left in North Dakota living in her father’s house with two young daughters, no idea where her husband was, and no source of income.

Well, being the hard-headed Norwegian that Grammy was she hunted Pop Pop down. She found out that he had indeed joined the army and learned where he was stationed. He was at a base in the U.S. So, she called the base. Now she didn’t just call his platoon sergeant, not even his company commander. She called the commanding officer of the entire base! As I recall it she said something to him the effect of, “Here we are engaged in a war to end tyranny overseas and bring freedom to the people of Europe and Asia, yet here at home our own government seems content to let its soldiers ignore their families and let them starve without any financial support!” (She never was a shy one this grandmother of mine). She says that the Commanding Officer was horrified and promised that he’d look into it personally and immediately. Well, he did. And from that point on Pop Pop’s wages were diverted to Grammy!

So, why is she perturbed in the picture? Grammy said that she was convinced the only reason he came back home was to get money from her. And, while home, he insisted on having a nice, pleasant family photo. So, she says that she was perturbed by his charade. As it turned out that disappearing act was not the only time that Pop Pop neglected his family. He was an alcoholic and chronic gambler who was known to gamble away his family’s rent and grocery money. His daughters often went without because he had misused and abused the family resources. And he was also wont to take off, leaving Grammy and the girls to fend for themselves. Within a decade of that family photo Grammy would finally divorce Pop Pop.

Years after hearing that story, when Grammy was in a nursing home and her vitality and acuity were fading, I remember talking to her about family. At some point in the conversation I mentioned Pop Pop saying, “It’s too bad that Pop Pop was such a lousy husband and father.” Grammy responded, “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. He did the best he could.” Amazing! Grammy had filtered the years of neglect, abandonment, and abuse. She had come up with a pleasant misremembering of my grandfather.

Apparently she’s not alone in her pleasant misremembering. The eminent developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson, discovered a similar tendency among elderly people, as reported in his book Vital Involvements in Old Age. Utilizing data from a multi-decade panel study Erikson discovered that elderly respondents frequently remembered their marital relationships as being much more intimate, satisfying, and fulfilling than they actually had been. It seems that we have a natural tendency to filter pleasant misremembering. It’s not abnormal. How nice that Grammy died with a pleasant misremembering of my grandfather. Personally, I liked her pleasant misremembering, because in my few encounters with Pop Pop before his death when I was 10, he was good, kind, and attentive to his grandsons.

But, when I told Nan of Grammy’s response, Nan would have none of it! For her, her dominant memory is NOT pleasant. Her remembering evokes the hurt and anger that lingers from his neglect and abuse. My mother, too, carries pain and anguish in her remembrances of her father, though not with such a sharp edge. Here’s the problem with Grammy’s pleasant misremembering. Her misremembering makes it easy for me to embrace a pleasant picture of my grandfather. Yet, it potentially cuts-off and discounts Nan’s and my mother’s remembering. The point is not whether or not Nan’s or my mother’s remembering are more accurate than Grammy’s. Rather, the TRUE picture of my grandfather must include all of these stories, all of these misrememberings.

Today, we celebrate a pleasant remembering. We celebrate Pentecost: what we have come to call the birthday of the church. It’s a popular story. In fact, it’s the dominant remembering of how the church came to be. At passover Jesus and his disciples had gathered in Jerusalem, and there he was crucified. But on Sunday he appeared to his disciples and instructed them to remain together in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes upon them and then they will be his witnesses into all the world. After forty days Jesus left them, promising yet again, “Remain in Jerusalem just a little longer and the Holy Spirit will soon come upon you.” As he ascends into heaven a divine messenger tells them that Jesus will come again from heaven in exactly the same way as the disciples saw him go into heaven. Then, ten days later there they are at the Jewish feast of Pentecost in Jerusalem. They are gathered together in prayer when tongues of fire dance over their heads and they begin to speak in the tongues of people from the many nations of the Roman empire and even lands beyond the empire.

From this basic remembering, the dominant story of the church takes shape. Jesus passed on his power and authority to the 12 apostles gathered as one heart and mind. And from the Pentecostal beginning the 12 apostles establish the church and spread its Gospel into all the world. The apostles in turn ordained successors who vouched safe the Gospel handed down from Jesus himself. Division only came about by those who opposed the truth taught by Jesus and handed down by him to the apostles and to their legitimate successors who hold to the orthodox faith. The story of the miraculous origins of the Apostles Creed illustrates and feeds this memory of the church’s origins. Each of the 12 apostles articulated in one sentence what was for them a central tenet of the Jesus’ Gospel. Each was different but together they formed the statements of the Creed, which simply and faithfully articulates orthodox Christian faith.

Now, this remembering of the church’s birth at Pentecost is a pleasant and compelling one for many. It presents a simple, unified, and harmonious succession of the Gospel directly from Jesus to the New Testament Church through the apostles. But there is trouble with this remembering. On the one hand, for many today it is not even a pleasant mis-remembering. It demands too much that is no longer believable. Or it flies in the face of their own experiences of neglect and abuse at the hands of a church obsessed with orthodox purity. On the other hand, the memory of a single, unified “New Testament Church” is clearly, misremembering. It is inaccurate. There are other, different voices and different memories of Jesus, the spirit, and the church.

There are at least two other voices; two other ways of remembering how the Jesus movement came to be. One is heard in John’s gospel. In today’s lesson we read Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit to his disciples. And with the Spirit he also promises to leave them his peace. As we read further we discover that, in John, this gift of the Holy Spirit is NOT Pentecostal. And it is not apocalyptic — focused on a cataclysmic return of Jesus from heaven at the end-of-time. It is an Easter event that happens right there in the Sunday-evening gathering of the disciples. The risen Jesus appears in their midst and says, “Peace be with you. Receive the Holy Spirit.” And he breathed on them the Spirit (see John 20). In the chapters surrounding today’s lesson the promises of the Holy Spirit are intertwined with Jesus’ command to “Love one another” and his vision that all will be one. As Jesus is one with God, and his disciples are one with Jesus, so the Spirit will make them one with one another and God will be one with them. By this all people will know that we are Jesus’ disciples, if we have love one for another. Here’s where we witness the Holy Spirit. This is Christian spirituality in John.

A second way of New Testament-era remembering was so different from the dominant remembering that once the Church became the imperial religion it used the power of the empire to suppress this memory, banish its advocates, and burn its writings. Yet at least one voice survived in the Gospel of Thomas — a gospel composed almost entirely of Jesus’ sayings that likely was compiled a generation before the Gospel of Mark. In Thomas there is no Pentecostal Jesus. There is not even an Easter Jesus, because the death and resurrection of Jesus aren’t even mentioned. They aren’t essential to Thomas’s way of remembering. Instead, Thomas’s gospel tells of the “Living Jesus” whose teachings inspire life and wisdom among Jesus’ disciples. Its light sparks the light of knowledge and discovery within them. The Spirit sparks an awakening to the light of God’s reign shining among them and around them. It is not distant nor future. It is here and now.

As with Grammy’s remembering, our dominant memory of the Church’s “birthday” is actually a misremembering. The church was never either so unified or so simple as the Pentecostal story suggests. If we limit ourselves to this and only this memory of the church we close ourselves off to other voices from those first decades of the Jesus movement that also shaped the origins of the church. We risk limiting our own understanding of spirituality to just one way of remembering the Spirit’s operation in the church. We stand to discredit or discount other expressions of Christian spirituality that differ from the dominant one that pervades Christian practices today.

However, the point is not to try to figure out which remembering is “truer” or even more accurate than another. We don’t have to figure out what the REAL story really is. Instead, the point is that we recognize that one person’s pleasant misremembering might be oppressive or irrelevant for another. A remembering that comforts one, might discount or exclude another. Instead, the challenge is for us is to embrace the diversity of remembering that go into making up this “family picture” of today’s Christian Church. However we remember the story, we listen for a voice of the Holy Spirit. Whether we wait and listen for the Risen Jesus or Living Jesus or Pentecostal Jesus, we can be of one heart as we await the Spirit’s breath sparking us to love one another and to embrace all who come to our table.

Amen.

(Both of the Scripture quotations below are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyrighted, 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, and are used by permission. All rights reserved.)

Acts 2:1-21
1   When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5   Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

14   But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
17 ‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy.
19 And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
20 The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

John 14:8-17, 25-27
8   Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” 9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. 12 Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.

15   “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

25   “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. 26 But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. 27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.