And we also heard that metaphoric tongues “as of fire” seem to rest upon each of the apostles.

This aberration that appears like violent wind, but is not violent wind and “as of fire,” but is not fire, is the work of the Holy Spirit who has shown up and appears to be indescribable without reference to metaphors. “Like” this or “as” that.

This indescribable Spirit fills all the apostles and they began to speak and be heard in other languages.

The sound that is made by the Holy Spirit does not bring out the neighbors. Nor do the fire-like tongues that rest upon them.

What brings out the neighbors is the sound of the apostles speaking in languages in a way that was bewildering since everyone in the crowd could understand what was being said in their own native tongue.

Some in the crowd were confused. Some were amazed. Some were perplexed. Some asked what it meant. Some sneered that the Spirit-filled apostles were drunk – filled with spirits alright, but of a different sort.

Whatever the folks who were present witnessed no one seems to be able to explain what happened or how it was that lowly, mostly illiterate, Galileans were communicating in ways understandable in any language.

The Lectionary reading for today has only a part of the sermon that Peter preaches. In a portion of the sermon mentioned in today’s reading Peter tells the crowd those speaking strange languages “are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.”

Peter goes on to explain that

Today we are going to consider for few moments a portion of that sermon, a theme, a thread that is woven throughout what Peter has just said. Quoting Joel, Peter notes in no uncertain terms that God “will pour out [God’s] Spirit upon all flesh.” All flesh. Not just followers of Jesus. Not just the gathered. Not just Jews. Not just men. Not just free men. All flesh. Everyone.

And the portion of Joel that Peter quotes spells this out in a remarkable way. Sons and daughters are to prophesy. Young and old shall have visions. Even the lowest of the low in the culture, both male and female slaves are to have the Spirit poured out to them and they too shall prophesy. Can you hear how nobody’s going without the Spirit? It’s going to being showered on everyone. All of us.

This matches exactly what we know about Jesus and his radical embrace of everyone. Jesus’s community was open and all inclusive. His radical egalitarianism, as John Dominic Crossan puts it, was about absolute equality “deny[ing] the validity of any discrimination . . . and negat[ing] the necessity of having any hierarchy . . .” 1. Crossan asserts that what Jesus’s practice of radical egalitarianism exemplifies – and calls us to – is a “just and equal world.” 2.

Listen carefully to Jesus’s famous words from Matthew (5:43-38) you’ll hear that no one is left out of who we are commanded to love: ” You have heard it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Jesus commands this because his teachings to his followers – whether we like it or not– was and still is that God loves everyone even our enemies, and we are supposed to love everyone too.

The gist of last week’s sermon –at least the way I heard it– was that the story of Jesus ascending to heaven with the promise of the Holy Spirit to come was like waiting for a baby to be born. Jesus ascension leads to a transition period for the followers of Jesus, a period similar to labor pains and the process of birth leading to a newborn.

The bodily Jesus has done all that he can, but, must go and the followers must find their way on their own together and with God’s presence coming through them, not through the historic Jesus. Remarkably what they are awaiting the birth of happens in today’s story: the birth of the Church, the newborn reborn Body of Christ.

The Pentecost story is all about that birth of the Body of Christ (the Church) through the Holy Spirit’s action in the followers of Jesus.

As I pointed out Peter puts in his sermon a note from the Old Testament book Joel (2:28-32) that God says “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

Joel was originally written in Hebrew and the Hebrew word for spirit is “ruah”3 (roo-ack). Ruah is a feminine word expressing female gender. In English we don’t ordinarily give genders to things, except sometimes in words ending in “ess,” like actress, or better yet goddess. When we hear “ess” in these words we think female. That’s similar to how feminine words are meant to be heard in Hebrew, So “ruah,” Spirit, in the Old Testament conveys a female attribute to God.

There is, in fact, a growing body of scholarship which asserts that the early Christians also understood the Holy Spirit to have a feminine nature. 4 We know this not only because they started as a Jewish sect using Jewish texts and theologies, but, also because early Christian writers like Jerome in the fourth century claimed the Holy Spirit was expressed in feminine gender. 5

Another example is a third century Coptic Christian book called The Acts of Thomas which portray Thomas as “invoking the Holy Spirit as ‘the Mother of all creation’ and ‘compassionate mother.’” 6

Now, this is not some off-the-wall concept by your pastor or a twist of a Hebrew phrase. In the Eastern Orthodox Church “Spirit was always considered to have a feminine nature. She was the life bearer of the faith.” 7.

Not only that, but as I have mentioned up here before and in classes on the female images of God, the Bible often refers to female images of God. For instance we know that both males and females are created in God’s image which necessarily means there is no getting around the fact that God’s image includes the feminine.

In fact when God first appears giving birth to the earth in the Genesis 1 she appears in the female ruah – Spirit– form.

You can hear this particularly well in the King James version of Genesis 1:2 “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit (ruah) of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The Spirit of God is a like a mother eagle moving over the face of the waters.

It is natural to think of a female image of God at the birth of the world. It’s natural also to think of the Spirit of God giving birth to the Church as female.

There are other female birthing and mother images of God in the Bible. In Isaiah 42 (14) God says “I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp I will pant.”

Later in chapter 49 (15), in reference to concerns about being abandoned, God refers to God’s self as a mother, answering: “Can a woman forget her nursing child or show no compassion for the child of her womb?”

Psalm 22 (9) refers to God in a midwifery image “it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.”

In Hosea 13 (8) God is a protective mother “like a bear robbed of her cubs.”

We can also hear Jesus refer to God in a mother image. In Luke (7:35) Jesus asserts that wisdom (another feminine word) “is vindicated by all her children.”

And later in Luke at chapter 13 (34) Jesus unmistakably refers to God as acting like a hen, a female animal protecting the children of God, pulling her brood close beneath her protective wings.

I suppose by now most of you have figured out where I am headed with this. I am pointing to a natural link between Pentecost and Mothers’ Day. Today the religious and secular holidays converge! Pentecost, the day we remember the Holy Spirit– a female person of the Trinity– gave birth to the Church falls on the very same day as Mothers’ Day, the day we remember the female person who gave us birth.

Last week I mentioned that just before Jesus leaves the apostles they want to know if he is going to do that Messiah–warrior thing and restore the kingdom of Israel. They want the stereotypical manly macho resolution: conquest and peace through violence. Jesus, The Prince of Peace, promises something else completely: baptism by the decidedly unmacho feminine aspect of God, the Holy Spirit. Why? so that Jesus’s followers can be Christ’s witness for peace and love to the ends of the earth.

This will probably come as a surprise, believe it our not, the story of the Pentecost is a mirror opposite of the story of the Tower of Babel.

Remember in Genesis 9 mortals have been told by God to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” In Genesis 11, though, mortals decide to go against the commandment to fill the earth by settling instead on a plain in Shinar.

After settling they start making bricks out of dirt or dung and then decide to build a tower, very likely meant both as a male fertility symbol to the Babylonian gods, as well as to avoid being scattered to the ends of the earth.

This settling down to mess around with a towering fertility idol, as well as to avoid God’s command to fill the earth, as you might imagine, does not set very well with God. A fertility symbol reaching into heaven is a defilement, a desecration, a pollution, a rather profane intrusion into God’s abode.

So God comes down to earth, knocks the symbol completely down and forcibly, but, non-violently scatters the builders by confusing their language so they could not understand each other. Making babblers of the builders of Babel so that they will do their duty and fill the earth..

Can you hear the contrast the Pentecost story offers to the Tower of Babel?

Echoing Genesis 9 Jesus’s command is for the apostles to witness Christ to the ends of the earth. The apostles are told to go wait in Jerusalem. And unlike the mortals in The Tower of Babel they do what they are asked to do.

Moreover unlike the Babel story we do not have the graven image of a male fertility symbol, but rather mortals awaiting the Holy Spirt, an actual female image and the Mother Nature of the One God.

And sure enough the Holy Spirit descends not to tear down anything or to cause babbling but to undo for the faithful the confusion and babble created at Babel.

Why? because the mortals obeyed God this time and are prepared to got to the ends of the earth as Christ’s witnesses. Those who are filled with the Holy Spirit can speak so that all may understand.

Now we don’t know if the apostles that first Pentecost actually instantly learned to speak the many languages of the people gathered. While the story certainly suggests that they did literally speak languages instantly – and we are free to believe that it is historically true– but we can also choose to see the story as symbolic of the Church and its Spirit-filled followers speaking a universal language.

The small Jewish sect of Jesus’s followers as Church begins to reach out to the world spreading the Good News to the ends of the earth. And the Good News is in it’s essence that God is Love. And Love, well Love is a universal language.

At our core we all want love and we all want to love. And this core love has since humanity began been symbolized in Mother love. We can see a picture of a mother lovingly holding her child from anywhere in the world or history and it does not matter what our respective native tongues are, the language of that motherly love transcends all language barriers.

It is a universal language. A mother plus the loving embrace of child everywhere means love. That’s why Mother’s Day is so popular. Culturally Mom’s mean love. And we, we love Love!

Can you hear how the love in the Pentecost story can be heard to include God’s motherly love for us with the birth of the Church through the Holy Spirit, and a motherly embrace upon Jesus’s followers even after Jesus ascended?

There is more.

This story holds another form, another universal symbol of Love. The promise woven throughout the portion of Peter’s sermon we heard earlier where God claims God “will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” All flesh. On everyone. Sons and daughters. Young and old. Male and female. Slaves and free.

Pentecost is more than the birth of the Church. It is the promise that through that Church –through the continuing Body of Christ– no one will be without the Spirit. All are loved. It is the aim Jesus began his movement with: radical egalitarianism. Universal love looks like Jesus’s call for absolute equality, a call that denies the validity of any discrimination, negates the necessity of any hierarchy. 1.

Pentecost is not just about the birth of the Church and God’s motherly love for us. It is about a call to a “just and equal world” to the ends of the earth. 2 Love for everyone, not just by God, but by God’s images – us . . . BY US– too. That’s a notion that transcends all language barriers.

That’s the Way Jesus taught us.

That’s the Way the Holy Spirit our Mother image of God set the Church off toward at the start and still calls us toward today.

May we all listen to that Mother Spirit this Pentecost, this Mother’s Day. AMEN.

ENDNOTES

1.Crossan, John Dominic, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, San Francisco:HarperSanFrancisco, (1994), 71.