“Collision on the Calendar”
A sermon by Sid Burgess for Edgewood Presbyterian Church,
Homewood, AL
Pentecost Sunday, May 11, 2008 (Mother’s Day)
Text: Acts 2:1-21
Today brings a head-on collision on the two calendars by which the church lives, moves, and has it’s being. On the Roman calendar by which we mark the months and days of the year, to which we have added various civic holidays and observances, today is May 11, Mother’s Day. Welcome to all the mothers, mothers-to-be, grandmothers, and great grandmothers worshipping with us today. On the Christian calendar, by which we commemorate the life of Christ and the history of the church, today is Pentecost Sunday. It comes each year 50 days following Easter. On Pentecost Sunday we celebrate the birthday of the church. Welcome to all church members and friends. You belong to that “great cloud of witnesses” which originates with our Hebrew ancestors in faith, runs through the early Christian centuries, and hovers over this church today.
Pentecost Sunday and Mother’s Day. What a contrast! Pentecost is all about rushing wind, dazzling light and strange sounds. It’s about a huge, multi-national gathering of “amazed and perplexed” people. It’s about astounding preaching and the mass conversion of 3,000 souls. Thus is the Church--the Church of the Risen Christ, born amid dazzling awe and wonder.
Meanwhile, back to Mother’s Day, a sentimental celebration of simple little traditions. A card in the mail, a bouquet of flowers, a thoughtful gift. For some, intimate family gatherings; for others of us, a simple lunch with the church family in the fellowship hall. In the best sense, Mother’s Day is about love and sacrifice, and gratitude and recognition. But, more often than not, it’s about wishful thinking, unfulfilled expectations, and selective memory.
In the familiar tradition of Hallmark Cards Mother’s Day is all about sentimentality. So much so that secular culture’s sentimental observance lacks the energy, the power, and the impact for which Mother’s Day was first conceived. In the current edition of “Presbyterians Today,” our monthly denominational magazine, columnist Kristine Haig reports that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the origins of Mother’s Day. The tradition began as “Mothers’ Work Days,” as if there were not enough of those already. The idea came from a woman named Anna Reeves Jarvis who, in 1858 in a small West Virginia town, began a campaign for improved sanitation in her poor Appalachian community. She focused on mothers because she felt that they disproportionately bore the toll of poverty--thus, the original title, “Mothers’ Work Day,” calling attention to the excessive amount of work required of so many women.
During the Civil War this remarkable woman expanded the focus of “Mothers’ Work Day” to campaign for better sanitary conditions on the battlefields. Following the War, she worked for reconciliation between North and South. Anna Jarvis’ daughter, also named Anna, continue her mother’s work, pushing for establishment of an official, national Mother’s Day. With this success, with official sanction, however, the observance lost it original focus. Anna Jarvis herself led the protest against the privatization and commercialization of the holiday. But it was a losing cause. “Within 50 years what had begun as an expression of social concern and compassion had become a (sentimental) celebration of individual motherhood.”
Now, as these two observances, Mothers’ Day and Pentecost, come this year on the same day--a collision on the calendar that will not occur again until 2035--Columnist Haig suggests that we have a rare opportunity “to reflect upon the original spirit of Mother’s Day” in light of the dramatic origins of the church.
As the story unfolds in the Acts of the Apostles, the first order of business for the New Testament church was Bible study, fellowship, and worship. With three thousand new members, the narrator in Acts says, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread--the Eucharist--and the prayers.” The second order of church business in those early days, according to Acts, was providing for the needy among them: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need”--chapter 2, verses 44 and 45, you can look it up! On into Chapter 4 the narrator says special attention was given to the needs of widows and orphans--that is, to women and children. This extraordinary generosity was the result of that powerful surge of inspiration on the first Pentecost Sunday--when the Spirit descended upon the church “like the rush of a violent wind.”
The church needs just such energy today. We need the wind and fire and the animated speech. As the hymn we sang moments ago suggest, we need the Spirit, “the spirit of restlessness” to “stir” the Church from “placidness;” to stir the Church from stifling sentimentality and into forceful action on behalf of the least of these our sisters, and their children.
There is evidence of the stirring of this wind, this sacred spirit blowing through our Church in our Angel Food ministry. How could we have known that this modest effort to provide grocery relief to working families would prove to be so very timely? A year ago when we first began exploring this ministry, no one was talking much about rising food prices. That has changed dramatically in recent months. Now, the US Department of Labor reports double-digit price increases for common kitchen staples like bread, milk, chicken and more. Eggs top the list, increasing in cost 69% over the past two years.
Of course, our problems here in America pale by comparison to the horrendous losses experienced this week in the beleaguered nation of Myanmar, also known as Burma. And I know you didn’t come to church this morning to hear news reports. But we dare not squander the restless spirit stirring in the church on powerless, mind-numbing sentimentality.
Not when each new day brings reports of the increased suffering of as many as one million homeless people in Myanmar, grieving the deaths of more than 22,000 friends and loved ones, and still searching for tens of thousands who are missing in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear pathway to helping victims and their families in Myanmar. The cruelly-oppressive, self-serving military government there is hostile to outsiders. What Presbyterian presence we have in the country is principally located outside of the region most affected by the storm. Even so, our denomination’s disaster relief agency, funded by our annual Easter Sunday “One Great Hour of Sharing” offering, has committed an initial $100,000 to provide humanitarian relief for disaster survivors. And today, Pentecost Sunday, church leaders are making an urgent appeal to all 10,000 Presbyterian congregations, asking for contributions to increase our relief efforts as a witnesses to Christ’s healing love. You’ll find information about how you can help from an insert in your worship folder, or you may go to PCUSA.org to make an online contribution.
Our PCUSA disaster relief agency is working in partnership with two trusted, international ecumenical organizations. They will move relief aid into Myanmar only when they are confident the government will let it through. In addition, over one million refugees are expect to arrive in bordering countries. Our relief aid may be needed there to feed and clothe those forced to leave their homeland.
As always, there will be those who will declare this disaster an “act of God.” They will declare God guilty of the death and destruction. We know better. We know that a just and loving God, a God of compassion and mercy, a God who loves all children “like the mother who will not forsake her nursing child, like the father who runs to welcome the wayward one home . . . . We know this God, the God who is good, cannot be the source of evil. As Christians, as people of the Book, we are realistic enough to acknowledge that evil has emerged within God’s creation.
We define evil as “whatever works against the loving purpose of God for human beings and all creation.” As with the cyclone in Southeast Asia, as with tornadoes in Alabama, we know that natural forces may have evil effects. We know that evil exists when we see the suffering of physically-abused women and sexually-abused children.
Our Presbyterian Church “Declaration of Faith” concedes,
The power of evil to hurt and destroy, to cut off the possibilities of full human life, calls into question the power and goodness of God. Whether we understand evil personally or impersonally, we cannot explain how it originated in the world made good. But we can affirm that evil is God’s enemy as well as our own.
What is more, we believe “that there is no event from which God is absent and God’s ultimate purpose in all events is just and loving.” God does not cause natural disasters, God does not cause automobile accidents, God does not cause cancer or heart disease. But when these evils strike, we believe God is present, bearing our burdens with us, just as God bore the pain of Christ dying in agony on the cross. Then as now, God is at work to right the wrong, to fight the disease, to feed the hungry, and restore life and liberty.
In the remarkable passage from Acts, chapter 2, Peter gives us an example of divine transformation. The Apostle quotes a text from the prophet Joel, which in its original context, was a forecast of doom and gloom, death and destruction. Now on the lips of St. Peter,
20 The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood,
become signs of the “coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.”
Just as God freed Jesus from the bonds of death, so now we believe
God is at work to restore life in the terrible aftermath of Cyclone
Nargis
And where God is at work, working through helping agencies, relief workers, medical personnel, even through military personnel . . . . Wherever God is at work, there must we be also. As ‘Declaration of Faith” teaches, the church “is to discern what God is doing in the world and join God in that work.”
To Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his
blood
and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father,
to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Rev. 1: 5,6
1 “Declaration of Faith,” PCUSA, 1991, II.2.
2 “Declaration of Faith,” VIII. 1.