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May 11 "Passing On the Faith"

I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you. — Timothy 1:5

Today is Mother’s Day, an occasion the preacher learns to respect. In seminary we were told that Mother’s Day is not a religious event at all but a product of purely commercial interests — the greeting card people, florists, and restaurant owners — so the faithful thing to do is simply ignore it. But the preacher learns that it is not a wise thing to do. Robert Fulghum was a minister before he become the best-selling author of All I Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten and he remembers: “For twenty-five years of my life on the second Sunday of May … I was obliged in some way to address the subject of Mother’s Day. The congregation was quite open-minded and gave me free reign in the pulpit. But when it came to the second Sunday in May, the expectation was
summarized in the words of one of the more outspoken women in the church: “I’m bringing my mother to church on Mother’s Day, Reverend, and you can talk about anything you want. But it had better include MOTHER, and it had better be good!” I am old enough to remember a custom at the small village church where I grew up: we wore a flower in our lapel when we went to church on Mother’s Day — a red carnation if our mother was alive and a white carnation if our mother had died. Either way, it was a tribute to the one who had first given us life and nurtured us along the way. “Let us make humanity in our image,” God says in the Genesis creation
account. “So God created humanity in his image — male and female, God created them.” You’ve got to have the feminine if you want to have an authentic biblical image of God. The prophet Isaiah wrote, “Can a woman forget her nursing child? ... Yet, I will not forget you.” (Isaiah 49:15) So today as our culture celebrates Mother’s Day and as we celebrate or remember with gratitude our mothers, I for one will also say a prayer of thanks that there is another One whose love for me is as strong as my mother’s.
(Adapted from an article by Rev. John James, St. Andrews, Niagara Falls)
Blessings, Orville

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May 11 "Passing On the Faith"

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