“Towers of Babel” based on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts…

June 5, 2022
by Sara Baron

If you hear the story of the
Tower of Babel and scratch your head in confusion, I believe that is
a sign you are hearing it right. “Why build a tower?” “Why
was God upset about a tower?” “Huh?”

The context clue that I believe
we need to understand the story is that some of ancient Israel’s
neighbors were really into building HIGH “towers” You may think,
perhaps, of the pyramids of Ancient Egypt, or the Babylonian ziggurat
which was a huge temple, sort of like a pyramid, built as a worship
complex for their deity.

So, in the midst of an old, old
myth trying to explain why different peoples spoke different
languages, the Ancient Israelite’s also managed to sneak in some
propaganda against their neighbors. So, that’s why a tower, and
since those towers were parts of other faith traditions, that’s why
God was said to be jealous.

I rather like this confusing
ancient myth. I appreciate the question, “why can’t we communicate
with each other” and I even like the premise that if we could just
communicate well, we could do anything. I find this to be a story I
go back to, as I think of various things that confuse language or
communication, and I associate them with the Tower of Babel.

To some degree, I think the
story claims that the Tower was a sign of arrogance, and arrogance
needed to be tapped down. More directly, it claims the people were
getting too powerful, and God was jealous of their power, but that
doesn’t sound like good theology to me.

The Tower of Babel story tries
to explain what separates us from each other, why we can’t work
together, perhaps even why we so easily perceive ourselves as groups
of “us” and “them.” These are some big, important questions!
I’d like answers too! (I’d rather not blame God.)

What keeps us from working
towards the common good? Why do we perceive others as “others,”
and sometimes as enemies? What keeps us from seeing that justice for
any moves us towards justice for all? Why DO we throw each other
under the bus?

When we are clearly hardwired
for connection, made by God for connection, why does it so often
fail?

Why are there wars? Why is there
hunger? Why is there abuse? Why is there violence?

Why can’t we just care for each
other, and use the abundant resources of the earth for good?

It is hard to consume the news
without landing on these questions. Why is Russian invading Ukraine?
Is it about power? Money? Prestige? Why are there so many mass
shootings? What has happened in the lives of the shooters to lead
them to their actions?

We don’t even need the news. We
can just look around. Why is there a need for a free community
breakfast in one of the wealthiest countries in the world – why do
we have a society that allows people to go hungry when it doesn’t
have to? Why are beloved children of God homeless, when it would be
LESS expensive to house people than it is not to?

Relatedly, why is mental health
care hard to access when so many people need it? Why are so many
people self-medicating with drugs that lead to addiction – what is
aching in them, and how could things be different so it wouldn’t
ache?

As a note, I believe that the
answer to a lot of the questions I’ve asked is actually “trauma”
and the extent to which we can become informed about trauma and
responsive to people in their midst of their trauma MAY WELL be the
extent to which we are useful at changing the world towards the
kindom.

There are smaller, and still
important, pieces of separation too. The ones we all experience.
Friendships that fall apart. Distance from family members.
Disagreements in groups we’re part of, sometimes ones that create too
much conflict to keep the group together. Violations of core values,
that can’t be overcome. Experiences of God as distant. And those
hurt too. And those matter too.

The Tower of Babel story invites
us into these questions, it invites us into the heartbreak under
these questions. Because it isn’t an intellectual exercise to say
“why is there war?” Even from afar, it is heartbreaking to know
what is happening to human beings because there is a war. It isn’t
an intellectual exercise to say, “why do families fall apart?”
It is heartbreaking to see families fall apart, and the stories I
hear tell me the pain can last for generations.

There are so many ways to
distract ourselves from these questions, and from the pain under
them, but I don’t think we do ourselves any good with avoidance. I
think we have to face the heartbreak, and sit with it, to hear it out
and letting God move us to healing.

And, being me, that’s what I
hear in Pentecost. It is, I hope, easy to see that the story of
Pentecost is an undoing of the story of the Tower of Babel. People
from many different places can suddenly understand each other.
Communication is restored. The preaching of Peter suggests God is
active with the people, all the people, erasing divisions between
them. Peter says even nature will take note of the difference!

And where does it end? With
healing. “Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be
saved.” For some of us (me) the word “saved” has been laden
with layers of problematic meaning. I have to be intentional in not
running away from the word, and in reminding myself what it means to
the Bible.

Peter wasn’t talking about
heaven and hell. Peter was talking about a wonderful combination of
important things: healing the sort of healing that goes right down
the core of a person’s soul as well as their body, and also to their
RELATIONSHIPS and connections to community; along side something we
might call freedom, but is so much more – freedom from fear,
freedom from oppression and freedom from oppressing, freedom from
continued cycles of abuse and violence and brokenness. Peter was
talking about life with God, at the very best it can be.

Peter is talking about life in
the kindom of God, and how it changes everything. The “saving”
he is talking about is the undoing of all the things we’ve been
taking about with the Tower of Babel and SEPARATION.

Saving, here, is connection,
relationship, full and abundant LIFE.

These stories, held together,
offer us space to reflection on disconnection and connection,
miscommunication and good communication, brokenness and healing.
And, I hope, they invite us, again, into the kindom. To live with
connection, communication, and healing. To pay attention to what
brings full and abundant life, including the need to sometimes sit
with our heartbreak until it releases us, and then to seek, once
again, full hearts, by the grace of God. May God help us. Amen

Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

June 5, 2022

Uncategorized

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May 30, 2021
by Sara Baron

“Come, Holy Spirit”

In Easter evening the disciples were locked up together in a house, afraid of what would happen to them. It was into that enclave that stories of resurrection started to be told. And, it was in that enclave that some experiences of resurrection happened. According to Acts, the disciples were mostly together in that room for a rather extended period of time, praying, and …. just a little bit… starting to organize. As time went on, there were more people gathering together, functioning together as an extended family, but still they were gathered together in a tight circle, in Jerusalem.

And then came Pentecost.

Pentecost was and is a Jewish festival celebrating the first fruits of the wheat harvest. Faithful Jews had gathered in Jerusalem for the festival, just as faithful Jews had gathered for Passover, 50 days earlier. It was another of the 3 festivals that was a traditional pilgrimage feast.

A colleague of mine suggested that the first Christian Pentecost story, the one we read in Acts, required those days apart from the world.

Of course, at this point, we may scoff at 50 days. 😉 To the scoffers, I’ll offer a reminder of the 40 years of wandering in the desert, which the Bible also said was necessary to “get the people ready.”

As you may know, I do not believe in a God who punishes. I do, however, believe in a God who is willing to use any situation as a jumping off point for good. ANY situation. Those ideas can get confusing sometimes for people, because talking about what God does with a situation can SOUND like “God created this situation for good” but I don’t mean that! I just really believe that God is willing and able to enter any situation and seek the best possible outcome from that point, and often God is far more creative than we’d be able to imagine!

In Acts, 50 days after Easter, The Holy Spirit showed up, with gusto. God’s Spirit is a part of the understanding of the Divine in the Hebrew Bible as well, but the way the Spirit shows up is new. To be fair, the symbol of fire as representing God’s presence isn’t new, the burning bush helps us out there. And “tongues of fire” is a phrase that comes from Isaiah 5. The wind a symbol of the Spirit isn’t new either. But added up, it IS new.

God’s Spirit shows up, sounding like a rushing wind, looking like divided tongues of fire, and imparting the gift of being understandable to people of many nations, languages, and cultures. Robert Wall in the New Interpreter’s Bible says, “God’s spirit is poured out upon a community of believers. The Holy Spirit is not a ‘personal’ gift from God that each believer privatizes – ‘you can have your Spirit if I can have mine.’ This same Spirit of one God ‘appeared among them – on each of them’ as the distinguishing mark of a people belonging to God. The restoration of Israel is the work of this Spirit sent by God as promised (see 1:6) which is why the first auditors of the miracle of tongues were ‘devout Jews from every nation’ (2:5).”1

I must admit that this year I was particularly astonished by the list of the places the devout Jews were from. It served as a profound reminder of the history of the diaspora, of the people of Jewish faith being displaced, which is especially notable when Judaism has an especially strong theology as being people of the (promised) land.

This fits the history of the Jewish people, of course. They settled on land that was a crossroads between civilizations, and as Empires expanded they expanded to include the crossroads. As Empires contracted, other Empires expanded, and a long, difficult history of independence, tributes, colonization, and external control ALREADY characterized their history by the time of Jesus. Wars had come and gone. Empires had come and gone. And each time, people had come and gone, dispersing the “people of the land” to many lands.

It fits, as well, that dispersed people of the land would have a tradition of pilgrimage to come back home to the land.

These themes of place feel so strong in this story this year. The followers of Jesus being so afraid that their world contracted to a single room, or perhaps a home. The devout Jews being so broadly scattered and making such profound efforts to come “home” to worship. The ways that distance separated them even when they were in Jerusalem, by dress, and culture, and LANGUAGE.

The idea of a miracle of understanding. Of course, it makes sense to think about Christian Pentecost as being the antithesis of the Story of the Tower of Babel. In the Tower of Babel story, God was afraid the people had too much power together and seprated them with language. In the Pentecost Story, God’s Spirit blesses the people with connection and the capacity to speak and be understood. It could be said that God has gained trust in the people (and then it becomes a question of if we’ve earned it or God just gave it because God’s like that.)

Sometimes I yearn for the miracles of Pentecost, most often when I am speaking with someone whose language I share, but with whom I’m clearly not managing to communicate. The barriers of assumptions, connotations, life experience, expectations, values, and fears can make “shared language” distinctly insufficient for shared communication.

Yet, we are the inheritors of the Pentecost story. As one person put it, in Christmas we get the story of “God with us.” At Easter we learn that “God is for us.” At Pentecost we tell the story that God is IN us. The Spirit residing in and among us makes it possible for us to do God’s work in the world, to share love, to build the kindom – and sometimes even to understand and be understood.

While the pandemic continues around the world, and right here at home, in the United States many people are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Vaccines are making it possible to for life to change again. It may make sense to think of us as emerging from an overly small room. (Acknowledging, of course, the many who cared for us so well that they never were able to protect themselves. I hope for front line workers there is an emerging from fear.)

I believe that God is up to good among us, now, as God was up to good among the disciples then. I’m not arrogant enough to claim I know what God is up to, but I can sense…. something. This sermon is the last one I’ll preach exclusively online, at least for a while and perhaps for always. While we will keep online worship, we will also offer an informal outdoor worship service starting next week. Like the disciples, we’ll be in the city, able to be heard by those walking by. Maybe, God’s Spirit will make us audible in a new way as we emerge. But whatever God is up to, I know it is good. Amen

1Robert W. Wall “Refections on Acts 2:1-13” in New Interpreter’s Bible Vol X, ed. Leader E. Keck et al (Nashville: Abingdon, 2002), p. 57.

Sermons

“Resonance” based on Genesis 11:1-9 and Acts 2:1-15

May 20, 2018February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

I have a lot of questions about Pentecost. I wonder what “divided tongues as of fire” might be trying to explain. I’m curious how a bunch of men from Galilee with the two or three languages they likely spoke could communicate effectively with people who spoke many other languages. I wonder what other names and words they used to try to describe the Spirit, and what the Spirit meant to them them, a number of years before the church created the concept of “Trinity.” Moreso than with most stories, I can’t tell what the kernel of it really is, what likely happened that day that they’re telling about with such passion.

There are a few things I can make good guesses on from Acts 2. It seems to be a story that is told to reverse of the Tower of Babel story. In doing so, it suggests that God has the power to connect us. It speaks of the power and mystery of the Holy Spirit, and explains that the Spirit is able to connect people across seemingly impossible barriers. Beyond that, I’m not really sure what it means, but I find those two pieces worthy of attention.

Let’s look at the Tower of Babel story, to make sense of my claim that Pentecost “undoes” it. The story is set in Babylon, and seems to make reference to the temples of Babylon to their god Marduk. Those temples were ziggurats, sort of rectangular towers with ramps. They are look like segmented pyramids. They were made of bricks, and could easily be called towers.

Ancient Israel’s history with Babylon is complex. Babylon was located in one of the early centers of human civilization, Mesopotamia. According to Genesis, Abraham himself left that area when he came to find the Promised Land, and the patriarchs’ spouses also came from there. So, it was a motherland to ancient Israel perhaps similar to how Great Britain is motherland to the USA (even though many of us don’t have British ancestry). Like the complicated history we have with Great Britain, so too did Israel and Babylon. Babylon defeated Judah in 587/586 BCE after an extended siege, destroyed the temple and the city gates, and took the leaders into exile as slaves in Babylon.

I believe, that the Hebrew Bible itself was written during and immediately after the exile. The stories, commands, and prophecies were usually much older, but they came into their current form at that time. They were both told and edited to answer the question “why did this happen to us?” alternatively phrased, “If our God is powerful, how did we get defeated (by Babylon)?”

In the story of the Tower of Babel, the story ends calling the tower “babel” which in Hebrew is “balal” which means “to confuse.” I think the story aims to diminish the power of Babylon by demeaning their temples, and at the same time tries to give an answer to a big human question: “why can’t we understand each other?”

It is a good and big question. It is much larger than even confusion about why various human languages exist, or why language itself keeps changing. Even when we speak the same language, it can be VERY DIFFICULT to understand each other. In this story, the confusion is said to be a punishment to limit humankind. It is funny though, isn’t it, that the diverse and wonderful cultures and languages of the world are perceived as a punishment?

Sometimes the challenges to communicate and understand each other are really frustrating. I guess they could reasonably be seen as a punishment. The ways that we as humans feel disconnected from each other feels wrong. Furthermore, we often feel incapable of changing it.

I can sense in the Tower of Babel story a quest to understand the human condition. The Pentecost story in Acts, by inverting the Tower of Babel story, says that the Holy Spirit changes the human condition that keeps us separate from each other and unable to understand one another! Even better, in the Pentecost story, the vast diversity of human language continues to exist, it just ceases to be a barrier.

The more I thought about this story this week, the less I was distracted by the “whys” and “hows” of it, and the more I found myself thinking about that mystery of the Spirit. The story says that the Spirit came and changed everything, connected them to each other, and made possible what had seemed impossible. That is, it says the Spirit is a Spirit of connection.

One of my all time favorite books is “A General Theory of Love” written by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, all of whom were professors of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine at the time they wrote it. It is a book about love and human connection, from the perspective of brain science. They spend a lot of time explaining the function of part of the human brain that we share with other mammals: the limbic brain. The limbic brain is the brain that connects. Because of it, mammals are inherently social, and we impact each other, deeply. As they say, “A mammal can detect the internal state of another mammal and adjust its own physiology to match the situation—a change in turn sensed by the other, who likewise adjusts.”¹ That’s pretty amazing.

We mammals have the capacity for “limbic resonance—a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other’s inner states.”² Not only can we do it, it is our normal and constant state! General Theory of Love explains, “So familiar and expected is the neural attunement of limbic resonance that people find its absence disturbing. Scrutinize the eyes of a shark or a sunbathing salamander and you get back no answering echo, no flicker of recognition, nothing. The vacuity behind those glances sends a chill down the mammalian spine.”³ Among humans, “Because limbic states can leap between minds, feelings are contagious, while notions are not.”⁴ Feelings are contagious! We do know this, when someone in a terrible mood walks into a room, we all feel it. The same happens with someone in a great mood. It happens on more subtle scales too. This may even explain some of why we get so much out of worship – we are able to build on each other’s good feelings and joy in seeing each other.

Of course, while we are able to connect to all mammals, but we only form attachments to some. They say, “It is attachment that makes familiarity trump worth. A golden retriever thrills only to his owner. He is amiably and helplessly indifferent to passersby who may be kinder, fonder of walks, quicker with treats—he does not, he cannot value them. Everyone is in the same limbic boat as those patient, expectant dogs.”⁵This is, in part, because bodies aren’t as stand alone as we think! We as humans can’t function alone. They say, “Most people assume that the body they inhabit is self-regulating— that their own physiologic balance occurs within a closed loop.”⁶ However, “The mammalian nervous system depends for its neurophysiologic stability on a system of interactive coordination, wherein steadiness comes from synchronization with nearby attachment figures.”⁷ Or, to put it another way, “But because human physiology is (at least in part) an open-loop arrangement, an individual does not direct all of his own functions. A second person transmits regulatory information that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, immune function, and more—inside the body of the first.”⁸ Given this information, they say human “Stability means finding people who regulate you well and staying near them,” and “This necessary intermingling of physiologies makes relatedness and communal living the center of human life.”⁹

This mammalian attachment stuff applies to partners, to parents and children, to friends and neighbors, and even to church community. Also, as most of us know from experience, it applies to pets. General Theory of Love says, “Somehow the attachment architecture is general enough that a human being and a dog can both fit within the realm of what each considers a valid partner. And the two can engage in limbic regulation: they spend time near each other and miss each other; they will read some of each other’s emotional cues; each will find the presence of the other soothing and comforting; each will tune and regulate the physiology of the other.”¹⁰

Now this information has some serious implications for our lives! We need other mammals who help us regulate well. We can’t function on our own!! General Theory of Love says, “Being well regulated in relatedness is the deeply gratifying state that people seek ceaselessly in romance, religions, and cults; in husbands and wives, pets, softball teams, bowling leagues, and a thousand other features of human life driven by the thirst for sustaining affiliations.”¹¹ Now, that makes sense, huh? But!!! They continue, “Some cultures encourage emotional health; others do not. Some, including modern America, promote activities and attitudes directly antithetical to fulfillment.”¹² They also tell us why: “The simple equations of love. Like this: relationships live on time.”¹³ They say, “A culture versed in the workings of emotional life would encourage and promote the activities that sustain health —togetherness with one’s partner and children; homes, families, and communities of connectedness. Such a society would guide its inhabitants to the joy that can be found at the heart of attachment.”¹⁴

Isn’t it fun when scientists use their own methods, words, and theories and then come around to something that sounds remarkably like the kin-dom of God? Also, it is very good to have reminders to seek out those mammals we love and savor the time we have to be near them!

I want to expand their theory a little bit though. They talk about mammalian limbic resonance, and I am hoping we can consider the capacity for resonance to be one of the functions of the Spirit. After all, God is love; and God is the one in whom we live and move and have our beings. I think power and wonder of attachment and connection is a part of the mysterious loving power of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, I think it is worth considering the Divine as…. mammal-like. At least as far as we could consider the Divine to be another being with whom we share love and intimacy, whose capacity to form attachments with us and resonance with us would be an additional source of health and joy! And, we’re told, relationships thrive on TIME. That would indicate that spending some time aware of the wonder of the Presence of the Divine and attending to it might be a very good use of time.

The Spirit resonates. Perhaps we could say that the Spirit IS resonance, and that’s how all mammalian connection is possible! The Spirit helps us connect, to bring us joy, health, and fulfillment. We can also seek resonance directly with the Spirit. Our brains are already designed to do it, to seek connection through resonance. Through the Spirit we are connected to all that is, and more. Resonance is a language we all speak, and it requires no translation. Perhaps that’s a part of the Pentecost miracle. Thanks be to God. Amen

1Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love (New York: Vintage Books, 2000) page 60.

261.

361.

462.

5158.

682.

782.

882.

984.

1096.

11155.

12189.

13202.

14206.

–

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/

https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady

May 20, 2018

Sermons

“Perplexing” based on Acts 2:1-18 and John 20:19-23

June 4, 2017February 15, 2020
by Sara Baron

Drew,
today’s confirmand, planned this worship service. He had a lot of
leeway. I was surprised at how little of it he used, and how
intentional he was in the decisions he did make. Drew likes worship
the way we usually do it, but there were some tweaks. Please
pay attention to the labeling of the music at the beginning and end
of worship 😉

Some
of the leeway Drew had was in picking the scriptures for today. He
asked what was traditionally read on this day and we read together
the Pentecost texts from the Revised Common Lectionary, year A.
After questions about the texts themselves, he decided that we should
read the two different versions of the Pentecost story from Acts and
John. When we discussed the sermon he suggested that I compare and
contrast the stories, and then pull out the meaning that is in both
of them for all of us.

I
like this young man’s idea of a sermon 😉

The
Christian liturgical calendar follows the Luke-Acts narrative about
Pentecost, placing it 50 days after Easter. The Greek ordinal number
for 50? Pentecosto. Pentecost was a part of the Jewish Celebration
of Booths (sometimes called Tabernacle), celebrated 50 days after the
Passover, and was a harvest festival. Luke’s placement of the coming
of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is saturated with meaning. The
harvest festival becomes a harvest of new Jesus followers. The
harvest festival was celebration of the bounty as a sign of of God’s
care for the people, and Luke reimagines it as a celebration of God’s
care for the people through the sending of the Holy Spirit.

It
is on this basis that Christianity celebrates the Season of Easter
for 50 days, starting on Easter Sunday and culminating in Pentecost.
We do it because Luke and Acts tell us that the gift of the Spirit
came 50 days later.

John,
however, disagrees. Neither Matthew nor Mark present any version of
this story, so the debate is simply between Luke-Acts and John. (Ah,
I should explain my language. Luke and Acts are written by the same
person and meant to be parts 1 &2 of the same book, however the
order of the New Testament messes this up.) John’s gospel places the
gift of the Holy Spirit on Easter evening. We may sometimes gloss
over this story, because it gets used as an opening to the story
about Thomas, who wasn’t there when the Spirit was given. The story
is less often heard standing alone, and it didn’t get prime attention
in the creation of the Christian calendar, which prefers Luke’s
version.

The
stories are VERY different. Luke-Acts takes place in the morning, a
fact we are reminded of because Jesus’ followers are again being
accused of being drunk. John’s version takes place at night.
Luke-Acts’s version happens in public, others see the impact of the
Spirit, and they hear the preaching, and many are converted. John’s
version involves a large group of disciples as well, but without an
audience. There is more FUSS in Luke-Act’s version, more description
of the event, more of a miraculous feel. John’s version is
relatively quiet. It mostly focuses on Jesus speaking.

In
Luke-Acts, the crowd responds to the disciples speak. It says they
were amazed, bewildered, and perplexed. The movement of the Spirit
and its impact seemed startling, and not in particularly comfortable
ways. The Spirit is known to blow as she will, and that often makes
people uncomfortable.

(An
aside: the last time I read about the Spirit, the Bible translation
I read from referred to the Spirit with feminine pronouns. Afterward
I was asked about it, and had the chance to share the fact that the
Spirit’s pronouns in Hebrew are feminine, and some translators follow
the Hebrew, despite the fact that in Greek the Spirit is gender
neutral and in Latin the Spirit is masculine. Since the Creator most
often gets male pronouns in the Bible, I also tend to want to follow
the Hebrew pronouns for the sake of balance within our conceptions of
God.)

In
both texts the Spirit comes to the Body as a WHOLE. The Spirit is
NOT received by one person, but instead by many. In Luke-Acts, given
that the occurrence is during a Jewish pilgrimage festival, faithful
Jews had filled the city to be witnesses, but the people in the house
together all receive the gift together.

The
writer in the New Interpreter’s Bible, has a fantastic comment on the
fact that the faithful Jews from around the diaspora took note that
the Galilean men were speaking to them in their languages. They
could still tell that the men were Galilean, including by their
speech. Robert Wall says, “The language of the Spirit is not
communicated with perfect or heavenly diction, free from the marks of
human identity; it is the language of particular human groups, spoken
in their idiom. God works in collaboration with real people –
people who are filled with the Spirit to work on God’s behalf in
their own world.”¹
I rather love that idea. The Spirit moved, and certainly in
unexpected ways, but still worked within the people as they were,
including with their existent accents!

Now,
likely because of the tradition doing so, I associate the story in
Acts as the normative Pentecost story, which means that I’m intrigued
by the version in John. As previously mentioned, it also involves
the Spirit coming to a group of Jesus followers, it was likely NOT
just the 12 because John doesn’t tend to think in terms of just the
12 and he didn’t designate them as such. A group of followers were
simply gathered, and they had an experience of the Risen Christ,
which IMMEDIATELY involved receiving the gift of the Spirit.

Jesus
speaks in five sentences, and two of them are saying “Peace be with
you.” This is a particularly apt greeting for the frightened
followers who had fearfully locked themselves into an upstairs room –
after hearing the women’s Easter story! The double naming of peace
both sounds like a traditional greeting imbued with God AND serves as
a reminder that fear need not define their lives. Those faithful
disciples were going to face significant persecution in coming days
and years, but Jesus, God, AND the Spirit were calling them to do so
in a different way, with the Peace of God within them.

In
this version the gift of the Spirit is the gift given so that the
followers of Jesus can continue his work, they become HIM and are
empowered to do as he had done. He was sent, so they are sent. He
breaths on them as God has breathed on the first humans in Genesis.
A new life is beginning, one that is defined by peace.

Now,
I have never much liked the LAST line of this passage, John 20:23,
which has Jesus saying, “If
you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain
the sins of any, they are retained.“ My objections aren’t
particularly deep. I j shy away from sin language, as I’ve too often
seen it lead to guilt and shame rather than to a free and abundant
life of peace and joy with God.

However,
Gail O’Day’s commentary on John (also in the New Interpreter’s Bible)
fixed a lot of problems for me, and made me rather glad that line was
included. She says that, “In John, sin
is a theological failing,
not a moral or behavioral transgression (in contrast to Matt. 18:18).
To have sin is to be blind to the revelation of God in Jesus.”²
Furthermore, given this understanding, “The forgiveness of sins
must be understood as a Spirit-empowered mission of continuing Jesus’
work in the world.”³
And, finally, this work is the work of the community, and never one
person alone.

So,
let me see if I can remake those words so they fit with O’Day’s
insights. But maybe first, you should
know that Gail O’Day is Dean
and Professor of New Testament and Preaching at Wake Forest
School of Divinity, and was previously professor of homeletics at
Candler school of Theology at Emory. She’s an amazing scholar, and
especially well respected as a scholar of the Gospel of John.
Following her insights, it would be as if Jesus said, “If you work
together to help people see God at work in the world, they will be
free from their fears and able to live in peace with you. If you
leave people in the fear they already know, there they will stay,
without the blessings that you now live with.”

In
O’Day’s reflections on this text, she continually turns back to John
14-17, which is called the Farewell Discourse. Within it are the
defining words, in John 15:12, “ ‘This
is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
O’Day reflects on the continuity between the passages, “By loving
one another as Jesus loves, the faith community reveals God to the
world”⁴
Thus, the seemingly problematic line that the institutional church
has often used to claim authority over people’s lives and access to
forgiveness is really
about
inviting the followers of Christ to share God’s love, and in doing so
to show other people the possibility of living life in peace, love,
joy, and freedom from fear.

Perhaps
it isn’t so perplexing after all. Perhaps the story of Pentecost is
the story we already know: God calls us to love one another and be
examples of the gracious and abundant love of God in the world. And
that can change everything, because it is the completion of the
Easter narrative – no matter when it happened ;). Thanks be to God
for the opportunity we have to extend love into the world. Amen

1Robert
W. Wall, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume X: Acts Leander E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,
2002) 58.

2Gail
O’Day, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume IX: John, Leander
E. Keck editorial board convener (Nashville: Abingdon Press,1995)
847.

3O’Day,
847

4New
Interpreter’s Bible, John, 848.

Rev. Sara E. Baron

First United Methodist Church of Schenectady

603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305

Pronouns: she/her/hers

http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady