First things first: Happy Mother’s Day to all our hard-working mothers out there. You are appreciated, and we’ll say a prayer in honor of our moms here, and all mothers, at the announcements. Also today we’re celebrating one (as it happens) mom in particular who will be the recipient of this year’s Audrey Davies Award--Tracy Haffner. This award is given each year for outstanding service to the parish, and Tracy deservedly joins the list of truly dedicated women who’ve received it in years past. We’re grateful for your work and we’ll be saying a prayer for you as well during announcements. Congratulations.
We’re busy today. I was mindful of that as I wrote this sermon. Not only will we hear about Tracy and her work at the announcements, but we’ll also continue our spring appeal to help support our ministries here. Both those are important, and deserving of the space they need.
This is, in fact, a busy time in the church year--not in terms of our programs (though it’s that too) but liturgically speaking. This coming Thursday is the Feast of the Ascension, the official end of the Easter Season when Jesus rose up, or ascended, into heaven, leaving his disciples to continue his work on earth.
Ten days later comes Pentecost, another major feast in the church where we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples and the true beginning of their ministry and birth of the church.
Before any of this, though, and starting today, we have Rogationtide. That’s the period from the Sunday prior to and leading up to the Ascension (this Thursday) where the church has traditionally blessed the crops and new plantings. Rogation comes from “rogare” in Latin meaning “to ask,” because we ask God’s blessing on the growing season ahead. It dates back to at least 6th century France but was probably, well before the church took it up into its calendar, a secular festival celebrating the spring planting. (I think in the Celtic calendar these were known as cross-quarter days, between the solstice and equinox. Or something like that -- it’s all very ancient, in other words, like the earth itself.)
I like that these days put us in mind of our dependence on the earth, and our interdependence on all those who make it possible for us to go buy groceries in the absurdly convenient fashion we do. Behind everything we pluck up at the supermarket or from our Fresh Direct bags is a farmer, a planter, pickers, harvesters, nearby and halfway around the world. People. With lives and families, children, worries and joys, just like us.
We have a relationship here at St. James (as many know) with Rural and Migrant Ministries, which advocates for the rights of the men and women who grow and pick our food. Some of us will be taking a pilgrimage this fall--on the other side of what we celebrate today, the planting, then the harvest--to meet these men and women and learn what they do and the hardships they face. I’m so thankful for Rural and Migrant Ministries’ presence in our diocese, and their vigilance in reminding us of the people hard at work even now to give us food, and life.
I also like to observe Rogationtide as a church because it puts us in mind of a different sense of time. We’re so rushed, things are so immediate. We want something, we order it. We run to the store, maybe. What a hassle!
Of course before any of that became available to us to receive at the click of a button, someone was tending to the slow, steady growth that brought that piece of fruit, or vegetable, or package of skinless chicken breasts into existence.
My daughter every spring always gets very excited about seed packets we see in the store--those wire rotating racks that they always place right there where you can’t miss them and that suburban kids with little backyard gardens find especially enticing. Every spring we buy and plant a few, to varying degrees of success. It used to be that I’d read the back of the seed packet to her and it’d say “germination time 50-75 days” and she’d go “50 to 75 days!!??!!” But the other day (now she’s 11) she read the back of the packet aloud in the car, and said, Wow, that’s pretty good! 50-75 days.”
Perspective is everything. But growth takes time. Putting a seed in the ground takes patience. It takes faith, too. Persistence, careful attention. In my house we like pumpkins because they can survive much benign neglect. We preach time and patience and care, but aren’t always very good at practicing it.
It’s not a given that Rogationtide starts the Sunday of Mother’s Day; in fact, usually it falls a week before, or after. But it’s a nice convergence of events. Because mothers know all about the patience, and persistence, and unrelenting care it takes to raise a another person in this world. Just like we sometimes forget about the farmers, the growers, the pickers, and all the forces that went into bringing food to our tables, we can easily forget the importance of a mother’s labor.
I’m going to tell one anecdote to wrap up, maybe at the risk of digressing, but I do love this story. Three weeks ago our confirmation kids had to meet with the bishop before the service for short conversation and check-in. He asked them who the emperor Constantine was--the emperor who took Christianity from a minority sect and turned it into the religion of the empire. The kids know this, but of course they wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of blurting out the answer. Until finally, one student, a girl, offered up a better answer than I ever could have dreamed: “Well, Constantine’s mother was Helena.”
Indeed, no Helena, no Constantine.
So today, as we enter into these few days of Rogationtide, we “ask” for God’s blessing on the food we’re about to plant, and nurture, and eventually eat (with greater gratitude for our attention to it now), and we also ask God’s blessing on all our mothers, who’ve nurtured us, and helped us grow. Amen.