Acts 16:9-15; John 14:23-29
May 9, 2010: Sixth Sunday of Easter
When the spirit is on the loose, there’s no telling what will happen. People do unpredictable things, and sometimes they change the course of history along the way.
In John’s gospel today, Jesus is talking to his disciples shortly before his death. As their friend, he shows concern for them, knowing they might feel abandoned and lost when he dies. As God’s living presence in their midst, Jesus tells them, as he has been telling them all along, God will not abandon them, they will not be lost, and will in fact go on to do even greater things than Jesus did.
Although Jesus will be gone, the Holy Spirit will come and lead them to extraordinary lives they probably couldn’t have imagined in that moment. The spirit will be a comforter, but it will also be like the wind – blowing them in new and surely challenging directions. Jesus knows this from first hand experience, and so he encourages them; “don’t be afraid, go with bold hearts.”
Paul wasn’t there when Jesus said these words, but he sure got the message. Oh how the spirit worked in Paul and the early disciples – the spirit Jesus promised came to them, and it was exciting. We see evidence of the blowing, unpredictable spirit just by looking at their movements from one place to another as they worked with people to start house churches. They went this way and that, trying one village and then the next. They did not seem to sit still for very long. And they were directed by the spirit. In our passage, the spirit worked through a vision given to Paul. They were beckoned to Philippi.
After arriving in Philippi, on the Sabbath they go looking for a place to pray, and they find what they are looking for in a rather odd place. It’s not a synagogue. It’s outside the city – with women who were outside the community. They were on the margins. Paul already upset people because he reached out beyond the Jewish community, taking the good news of Christ to Gentiles. Now, he was going to women…women who, for some reason, were not a part of the local Jewish community. First Gentiles, now women. Paul’s spirit-led work changed the course of Christianity, opening it to all people: there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, he wrote. Where others saw barriers, where others saw divisions and categories, Paul saw the possibility for God’s love to transform lives – regardless of these cultural divisions and categories.
But the spirit was at work in more ways than one that day. The spirit was working in one of the women: Lydia. God opened Lydia’s heart, we read. And she listened to her heart, breaking from cultural norms to worship with Paul and the others – to talk with Paul, to lead her entire extended family to faith, and she chose to open her home to the disciples and likely to becoming a place of gathering and worship. She was a leader in every sense of the word – defying every sense of decorum at the time.
Another woman who was blown by the spirit to do unpredictable, amazing things was Julia Ward Howe. She went with the spirit even though people she loved and respected were telling her it wasn’t a woman’s place; even though, like Paul, she was called far beyond the boundaries and norms of her day. The spirit led her to shatter assumptions and the status quo, and through her we can see the course of human history change.
Julia Ward Howe was born in 1819 and lived to be 90 years old. Her life spanned the civil war and she, like pretty much everyone at the time, was greatly influenced by it. She was privileged in many ways. Because her family had money, she was freed from traditional female household duties. She had time to study, time to write, and her family had connections with people in “high places” as they say. Her writings reached influential audiences – and even led to a meeting with Abraham Lincoln. Julia would use these privileges well. She studied hard, wrote beautifully, and used the opportunities handed to her in ways that eventually led to large scale changes in this country.
Her religious upbringing was, like so many, steeped in pietistic theology, focusing on right behavior that, when followed, would keep you out of hell. This right behavior, however, predictably reflected the cultural norms of her day, including the confinement of women to domestic roles. But because of her studies and reflection, her faith began to change. The spirit began to move. She writes, “I threw away, once and forever, the thought of the terrible hell which till then had always formed part of my belief. In its place I cherished the persuasion that the victory of goodness must consist in making everything good, and that Satan himself could have no shield strong enough to resist permanently the divine power of the divine spirit." That power of the divine spirit would so often be what guided her life.
In a letter she wrote to her sister in 1844, when she was 25 years old, she was trying to convince her sister that she shouldn’t be brow-beaten into believing the church had the whole truth. She was advocating that, even though they were women, they needed to speak the truth. She wrote: “I think perfect and fearless frankness [is] one of our highest duties to man as well as to God…There may be a hell and a heaven, and it may be good for most people, for you and me, too, if you choose to think that is so. But there is a virtue which rises above such considerations – there are motives higher than personal fear or hope – the love of good because it is good, because it is God's and nature's law, because it is the secret of the beautiful order of things.” In other words, the church’s ideas of what someone should do is no substitute for doing what you know to be right – what the spirit has placed in your heart.
In her early years, the spirit led her to work hard as an abolitionist. She co-published the anti-slavery newspaper, The Commonwealth, with her husband. Her work and influence was through her writing. She wrote poems, plays, books, essays and eventually lots of sermons. And her writing was widely read. When the civil war began, she joined her husband and other men in supporting the Union in their fight for freedom of slaves. It was at that time she wrote one of her most famous and influential works: The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Her words became the inspiration for Union soldiers everywhere, and we know they have influenced so many others throughout history who have battled for the freedoms needed in their day.
But writing wasn’t all the spirit had planned for her. She had more to do. She had more to learn, and she had much to say – out loud, and in public. According to her daughters, the three years after the civil war ended were “notable for our mother. Heretofore her life had been domestic, studious, social; her chief relation with the public had been through her pen. She now felt the need of personal contact with her audience; felt that she must speak her message.”
One of her first public events was reading some of her essays in Washington, speaking to elected officials. This was no small thing. She encountered many hurdles – including protest from her husband and friends. But she writes, “I go in obedience to a deep and strong impulse which I do not understand nor explain, but whose bidding I cannot neglect. The satisfaction of having at last obeyed this interior guide is all that keeps me up, for no one, so far as I know, approves of my going.” A deep and strong impulse – an interior guide: That’s the Holy Spirit at work within her.
As she moved from writing to public speaking, she also changed some of her views and beliefs. Prior to this she was more than a little reluctant to join the women’s suffrage movement. But that changed. She began organizing for women’s rights, and became one of the great leaders in a movement that surely changed history. She worked for the right to vote, the right to higher education, the ability to have legal rights regarding children and property. She was also deeply concerned about the Franco – Prussian war, and this concern affected one of the most significant changes in Julia. She began to see war for what it is. Reflecting on the sheer number of lives lost in the civil war, and the men being killed on both sides of the current war, she started down the road to becoming a pacifist.
She writes, “"As I was revolving these matters in my mind, while the war was still in progress, I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, 'Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone bear and know the cost?' I had never thought of this before. The august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities now appeared to me in a new aspect, and I could think of no better way of expressing my sense of these than that of sending forth an appeal to womanhood throughout the world, which I then and there composed." In 1870, she called together the World’s Council of Women on Behalf of International Peace, and she gave the opening address.
I think it’s a bit unfortunate that her best known piece of writing is the Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861). It’s true that it was fitting given her commitment to the abolition of slavery, and it was a comfort to the troops, which is hardly a trivial thing regardless of how you feel about war in general. But the hymn does not reflect her final feelings about battle. The words glorify war; they give purpose and meaning to something she later believed was futile and meaningless.
Her writings reflected this change and one of the best examples we have is especially fitting for today. That 1870 call to gather women together for peace was actually a poem, and it became known as the Mother’s Day proclamation. It called for much more than freedom through war – it called for freedom through peace. She was devastated by the loss of men, on both sides of the war. She wrote as a mother and wrote for mothers everywhere who lost their sons to war.
Today we celebrate Mother’s Day – a day rooted in the proclamation of Julia Ward Howe. Mother’s Day now is mostly about thanking and celebrating our mothers (and don’t get me wrong, I have grown to love this in the last couple of years). But when it started, it was about calling women to account for the violence in the world. It was reminding mothers of their responsibilities to end the violence – to bring about peace. We may not like remembering that part as much. But, let’s not completely forget it at a time when sons and daughters are dying the world over.
Listen now to Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day proclamation:
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
Amen.
