St Luke’s, Havelock North – Pentecost 2008 - Sermon

Lots of things happen when Easter comes early. February gets really busy, school terms get all out of whack, Easter Day attendance figures drop way down, and you can easily end up with Pentecost and Mother’s Day sharing the same date.

I have to admit, my first instinct is to get stuck into Pentecost and ignore Mother’s Day altogether. That’s what I usually do and to be honest you can get away with it here. Mother’s Day might be a thing but it’s not really that big a thing in New Zealand, unlike elsewhere. Preachers in the US, for example, would be risking their skins if they ignored Mother’s Day. In the States it’s often the third biggest pew-filler of the year after Christmas and Easter. Families actually make a point of going to church on Mother’s Day. Imagine that, ‘good morning honey, happy Mother’s Day. We’ve planned a special trip to church to celebrate.’

So I could ignore Mother’s Day, but I won’t, partly because I always get a few grumbles when I do, but mostly because during last week I actually found out a bit about it and I was amazed to discover Mother’s Day has some relatively radical roots.

For a start I was surprised to learn that this year is the 150^th anniversary of Mother’s Day. 1858 it was when it all began in West Virginia as a movement for social change. Anna Reeves Jarvis was the young woman who organized a special day to raise awareness of the poor health conditions in her community. Believing mothers were the best people to advocate for change, Jarvis organized ‘Mother’s Work Day’ which became a fixture right through the American Civil War, with the focus shifting to advocating for more adequate care for wounded soldiers and then later to working for reconciliation between Union and Confederate neighbours. Sometime later, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made the second Sunday in May a national holiday and called for it to be marked as a day "for the public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country." So here we are today, making Mum breakfast in bed and hoping the kids spent the money we gave them on her and not themselves.

But does this have anything to do with Pentecost? Well, first we need to look at the Pentecost story itself and I want to encourage us to recognize the drama and symbolism inherent in that story and not get tied up in whether what Luke describes in Acts really happened just as the story says it did, that’s not what this is really about. This is Luke, the master storyteller. This is the same person who brings us the Christmas story as a Peter Jackson masterpiece and Good Friday as a blockbuster. Luke knows how to use imagery and symbols to fire up the imagination and create a sense of the passion and excitement that the story tries to describe. If we had special effects in our church services, this would be the day to use them because Pentecost at its heart is a moment of great drama.

Look at the scene we’re given; the disciples are huddled away once again in a locked room when suddenly there comes a great roar of wind and tongues of fire appear out of nowhere and sweep over them and suddenly the whole lot are babbling in foreign languages and then they’re outside. It’s the Festival of Weeks so Jerusalem is full of pilgrims from all over the place and the disciples are out there telling them all about Jesus in their own languages and the people think they’re either crazy or drunk, and Peter gets up on his soapbox and tells them, ‘no they’re not drunk, it’s only 9 o’clock in the morning.’

Leaving aside the fact that Peter obviously missed some of the sorts of parties I went to when I was younger, the amazing thing here surely is that it’s Peter! This is the same Peter who only a short time before was skulking off and denying Jesus before the crucifixion. This is the same Peter who while undoubtedly loyal just never really seemed to get it when Jesus was around, the same Peter who was a simple, uneducated fisherman before answering the call to ‘follow me’. Now this Peter is getting up in the middle of Jerusalem and preaching a blazing sermon to all and sundry and warning them that the end is indeed nigh.

‘This is what Joel was talking about,’ says Peter. ‘The time is getting short and things are getting tough and God’s Spirit’s going to be on the move. Young men are going to see visions and old men are going to dream dreams and young girls will prophesy, and all these things are going to encourage you to call out to God for salvation.’

That’s the Pentecost story and yes it does connect with Mother’s Day, I want to suggest, because it’s really not like that much anymore.

When was the last time you felt as passionate about your faith as Peter does? When did we last feel the Spirit sweeping through us, almost forcing us to get out and do something? When were we last moved to share our faith with a stranger on the street? Likewise, when was the last time you used Mother’s Day as an opportunity to advocate for social change?

Pentecost, like Mother’s Day I believe, has lost its radical roots. Perhaps not everywhere, but in most places, Pentecost has become just another quaint old high and holy day, perhaps with a bit more colour than other times, but not much more bite or any extra passion. Oenone mentioned the other day that when she went looking for a Mother’s Day card last week the only choice she had was between pink and pink, while I was looking at some Christian clipart on Thursday which offered either a simple dove or a flame with a smiley face for Pentecost bulletins, neither of which excited me.

And that’s the key really isn’t it. Are we excited this Pentecost? Truth be told, many of us are probably more excited about Mother’s Day, and I’m really wanting to ask why – why is it that Pentecost today is so unlike that first Pentecost? Why is it that we struggle to put the fire back into the Spirit’s flames?

I’ve been asking that question most of the week and on Friday it struck me. While I was watching the news on Friday morning it struck me that added to Pentecost and Mother’s Day this week we’ve had the almost all-consuming and slowly dawning awareness of the full scale of the awful tragedy that is the aftermath of the cyclone in Burma, and as I watched the coverage and listened to those who are doing everything they possibly can to get in and make a difference and offer some help to those hundreds and hundreds of thousands who need it, it dawned on me that the Spirit really comes when the need is greatest.

Think about those disciples for a moment, left alone after first three years of intense and incredible experiences with Jesus, then the devastation of his crucifixion followed by the absolute miracle of the resurrection, and now what do they do? When they need it the most, the Spirit comes. Think of some of the incredible stories that have been handed down through the history of the church, the stories of saints and martyrs right through to today, over and over again at the time of direst danger and greatest need, that’s when the Spirit shows up.

How great is our need? How desperate are we to make a difference, to do God’s work, to be the Church here and now? These are questions I would hope would excite us at least a bit. I’d love to think that at our AGM in a couple of weeks time we could arouse at least as much passion for what it might mean to connect with our communities like the apostles in our Pentecost story as we would for suggesting the removal of some pews perhaps, or maybe that’s a bit optimistic.

Perhaps for a start we could just aim for all of us here this morning to leave knowing that there’s a bit more to Mother’s Day than just the Hallmark moment, and Pentecost is really about something other than wearing red and saying happy birthday to the church, and maybe from those beginnings more will flow.

I’d like to finish with just a few words from a Pentecost prayer used in the Lutheran Church in Australia; “Come, Holy Spirit. Fill the hearts of your faithful people and kindle in them the fire of your love.” Amen.