The Day of Pentecost      May 11, 2008

Acts 2:1-11

Psalm 104:25-37

Romans 8:14-17, 22-27

John 14:8-17

Today we celebrate both Pentecost and Mothers’ Day. As for me, this year’s Mothers’ Day is fraught with strong emotion: My mom died this spring on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter and now there’s this connection between major Feast Days of the Church and some intense, complicated feelings about my mother and her death.

In the Gospel lesson this morning I’ve found some insight; Jesus is in the Upper room with His Disciples, and He is giving them parting information and instruction as He prepares for Crucifixion and Resurrection.  If you would turn to the scriptural insert please, I’d like you to note something. We’ll begin five lines from the end, verse 15 of the 14th chapter of John’s Gospel.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 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.” These truly are words of comfort.

Earlier in this passage, Jesus says that wonderful power will be given to those who believe in Him, and the Church has understood this to mean that this power will be given by this Advocate, the Holy Spirit.

There are many dimensions and much debate about the nature and effect of this power, but I think the most important is the power to love and the power to forgive sin.

The great commandment of Jesus is to love God, totally unequivocally and to love your neighbor as your self. I think the key to this is to have the ability to forgive, to let go of stuff that weighs you down.  To reinforce this, in the 20th Chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus appears to the disciples after his resurrection and breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” and then he gave them the power to forgive sins.

I’ve thought a lot about the forgiveness of sins recently: not only about my own sin, but also the sin of others. And in case you haven’t noticed, Christianity is a religion in which sinners have all the advantages. Someone can jostle you fifty times, and you must excuse them with a smile. They can gossip about you every time you leave the room and it is your obligation to excuse them with no thought of ever getting even. The burden is on you, the believer, because you have been forgiven yourself, and God expects you to do unto others as God has done unto you.

Here’s the key: If God loves you enough to forgive your sins, if God loves me enough to forgive my sins, if God is willing to stay with us in spite of our self-centeredness and carelessness, our meanness, our weakness, our pettiness, our stubborn self-righteousness, then who are we to hold these same things against another?

Better I should confess my sins than to keep track of yours. The problem is that I am so tempted to stay focused on your sins, especially when they are hurtful to me.

Staying angry with you is how I protect myself from you. Refusing to forgive you is not only how I punish you; it is also how I keep you from getting close enough to hurt me again, and 90 percent of the time it works. The problem is that there are serious side effects: bitterness and resentment can do crippling things to the body, mind and soul.

All by itself, anger is not that damaging. It is not much more than that quick adrenaline rush one gets when you feel you are being threatened. It tells you something you hold dear is in danger: your property, your beliefs and values, your honor, your physical safety, your family and friends.

I’ve learned to view anger as a flashing yellow light, a “Caution,” which is telling me that “something is going on here. Slow down and figure out what it is.”

Over the years, I’ve had people come at me with some pretty hurtful things, and I’ve just learned not to say anything in my defense. The reason is that anything that would come out of my mouth at that time would do more harm than good.

What I’ve also learned is that when I’m silent, I can usually learn something from my anger, and if I’m smart I can use that energy to push for change in myself or to find a way of forgiveness for those who have accosted me.

I call this “appropriate detachment,” and I do believe it is an empowering of the Holy Spirit. It’s in this state of detachment that I have insight; I can more objectively assess my own fault, if the complaint is legitimate. If my anger goes on and on without my learning from it or changing anything, then it is not just plain anger anymore: It has become bitterness and resentment which someone once called “arthritis of the soul,” and it is a great crippler.

So here is another motivation to trust the grace of the Holy Spirit and learn how to forgive.  We not only owe it to God, we owe it to ourselves. The reason is that bitterness and resentment deform us, just as arthritis deforms us. Mixing metaphors, unforgiveness is a boomerang: We use it to protect ourselves; we use it to hurt before we can be hurt again; but it has a sinister way of circling back around and we become a victim of our own ill will.

The other day I ran across a delightful little book edited by Thomas Pynchon entitled “Deadly Sins.” It’s a compilation of essays written by prominent authors about the deadly sins: Joyce Carol Oates wrote on despair, Gore Vidal wrote on pride, John Updike wrote on lust and Mary Gordon wrote on anger.

Mary Gordon had some fascinating insights, especially because she said that she knew a lot about anger from personal experience.

She wrote that on one hot August afternoon she was in the kitchen preparing dinner for ten people.  Although the house was full, no one offered to help her chop, stir or even set the table. She was stewing in her own juices, she said, when her 78 year old mother and her two small children insisted that she stop what she was doing and take them swimming.

They positioned themselves in the car, leaning on the horn and shouting her name out the window so all the neighbors could hear them, loudly reminding her that she had promised to take them to the pond. That was when she lost it.

She flew outside and jumped on the hood of the car. She pounded on the windshield. She told her mother and her children that she was never, ever going to take any of them anywhere again and none of them was ever going to have a friend in any house of hers until the hour of their death, which she hoped was soon.

Then the frightening thing happened. “I became a huge bird,” she said. “A carrion [eating] crow. My legs became hard stalks, my eyes were sharp and vicious. I developed a murderous beak. Greasy black feathers took the place of arms. I flapped and flapped. I blotted out the sun’s light with my flapping.”

Even after she had been forced off the hood of the car, she said, it took her awhile to come back to herself and when she did, she was appalled, because she realized she had genuinely frightened her children. Her son said to her, “I was scared because I didn’t know who you were.”

“Sin makes the sinner unrecognizable,” Gordon concluded, and the only

antidote is forgiveness. But the problem is that anger is so exciting, so enlivening, that forgiveness can seem like limp surrender. If you have ever cherished a resentment, you know how right it can make you feel to have someone in the world you believe is all wrong. However, you may not be up to admitting it yet and the prodding of the Holy Spirit on your conscience is being ignored. You see, one of the great benefits of having an enemy is that you get to look good by comparison. It is also quite delicious to have someone to blame for why your life is not turning out the way it was supposed to.

“To forgive,” writes Mary Gordon “is to give up the exhilaration of one’s own unassailable rightness.”  And there is loss in that, although ironically it is the loss of illusion, and what is gained is unmistakably real: the chance to live again, free from the bitterness that draws the sweetness from out lives, that gives us scary faces and turns us into carrion eating crows who blot out the sun with our flapping. No one else does this to us. We do it to ourselves, but we don’t have to. 

You and I are being forgiven every day of our lives. We are being set free by an Advocate who has arranged things so that we have all the advantages. We have choices. We have free will. And we have this Advocate, who seems to know that we need lots of practice at this forgiveness business. How often should we forgive? Will seven times take care of it?  In the 18th chapter of Matthew, Jesus tells us that we must forgive countless times: I like to think of it as 7 to the 70th power.

The secret is that to forgive is not a chore. You see, forgiveness is the way of the Spirit filled life. It is God’s cure for the arthritic deformity of the soul that resentment and bitterness cause us. And that is the Good News of Jesus.

Happy Mothers’ Day and I pray you a blessed Pentecost.

Amen.