Ridgewood United Methodist Church
100 Dayton Street, Ridgewood, New Jersey 07450
Telephone 201-652-2868 FAX 201-652-6522
www.ridgewoodumc.net email: ridgewoodumc@verizon.net
Mother’s Day 2013
Family is said to be the smallest, organized, durable network of kin and non-kin who interact daily, providing domestic needs of children and assuring their survival according to urban anthropologist Carol B. Stack. No two families are the same, although however constituted, they are similar. I compare families to power plants. From the outside they look static. But from the inside they prove to be dynamic, kinetic, and often chaotic, but finally producers of energy that drives individuals and society – even history. (Sometimes they drive us crazy.) The second Sunday of May finds us celebrating Mother’s Day or Festival of the Family in the church. Granted the latter has never quite taken off, but Mother’s Day helps us honor the deeper meaning of nurture, compassion, and intimacy that helps us all survive.
One defining aspect of Christianity is that our Lord and Savior Jesus had a mother and was raised in a family. Although we know little of that family, I can only assume that it had some of the same dynamics that yours and mine had. We know Mary swaddled Jesus, fretted over him, and loved him when no one else could or would. She provided his first meal, first embrace, and his last. Mary loved Jesus. Hopefully we had mothers that provided for us or someone who did – a dad, a teacher, a mentor, someone who mothered us, interacted and assured the survival of our whole self. So we celebrate “Mother’s Day.”
I’d like to challenge you this year to send that card, buy an appropriate gift to your mother and one more thing give a gift to RUMC in honor or memory of your mom. In this way you help to assure that the “little ones” Jesus spoke about will receive real and durable care. Your gift now will go to our own Clergy Emergency Fund, Camp Lots-Of-Fun in Ridgewood for homeless children, Family Promise Bergen County for homeless families, UM Homes for the elderly, Shelter Our Sisters, for battered women, Methodist Hospital New York, Goodwill Industries of NJ, Friends To Friends a ministry to the disabled, Valley Hospital Chaplaincy and Polaris (Newark based project combating human trafficking.) Please be generous as God has been to you
With the Love of Christ,
Pastor Victor