Entrusted with Resurrection Power

It was most distressing for those communities ravaged by fires in Los Angeles these past months to see the baren hills and flat lands.  Mile after mile of charred skeletons of houses and businesses – what many had spent a lifetime building only to see it go up in flames.  Some of the many landmarks communities grieved over were the loss of many of places of worship.

These hallowed landmarks were places of deep joy and sorrow, places of desperate prayer and joyful song.  Now, all gone.

The first church I served in the upper Mojave Desert had gone through a similar experience, though many years ago.

Soon after I arrived, I began visiting the three small communities, Randsburg, Johannesburg and Red Mountain that were served by this old United Methodist congregations.  Since the former pastor was so shy and introverted, he hardly visited anyone.  With a little effort the place began to grow.  The woman next door who had been a member long ago, wrote one of the former pastors, now living in Ohio.  Mother Carrie, as she was affectionately known by the other Methodist clergy, was the first woman in that conference to pastor a church.

A most amazing thing then transpired.  Mother Carrie wrote me a wonderful letter concerning her time out there in the 30s through the 50s serving that congregation and another close by in Inyokern.

Her husband, John Oval had been the pastor, arriving in the late 20’s.  Shortly before he died his brother had come to visit – his brother with a serious drinking problem.  One night he fell asleep drunk with a cigarette still burning.  A fire began in the parsonage, which was attached to the wooden church.  The whole thing went up in flames.  I still have a picture of that tragedy that someone had taken.  Fortunately, everyone, including the brother, escaped unharmed.  But the church was a total loss.

Not long after that, Pastor John died.  Carrie had been going through the conference course for lay preachers, so she asked to be appointed in her husband’s place.  Mother Carrie was not without her detractors; in fact there were many.  Not at all used to a woman preacher.

Mother Carie soon organized a rebuilding effort while the congregation met in the VFW hall.  This church would not be of wood.  Mother Carrie had managed to get hold of some concrete block making machines.  These were third-world devices operated by hand.

Every evening as the miners came out of the mines she had them organized to begin making concrete blocks.  The women would arrive to cook dinner and they would work late into the night.  After many, many months, through a joint effort of church members and many others not connected to that congregation, a Resurrected church arose.

It wasn’t long after completion that one of the usual fierce desert winds came up and tore a good chunk of the metal roof off the new church.  Some of Mother Carrie’s detractors wrote the superintendant down in Pasadena, “We told you not to send this woman preacher out here.  Now God has taken matters in his own hands.  Soon, we will have nothing again.”

Mother Carie wrote me of that message to the superintendent with the follow up, “And I was reappointed for another year.”  And many more years to follow.

Today we celebrate such mothers, whose fierce love for us has made us who we are.  A blessing to ourselves and many others.  And they didn’t do it all themselves.  They organized the necessary resources to keep going.

When we read the Resurrection story in Acts of Tabitha (known as Dorcas in the Greek), it’s essentially a community effort.  After she died, the attending widows, having washed her for burial, sent two men from Joppa to Lydda, having “heard that Peter was there with the request, ‘Please come to us without delay.’ So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs.  All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing him all the tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them.  Peter put all of them outside, and then knelt down and prayed.  He turned to the body and said, ‘Tabitha, get up.’”

Peter, with Resurrection Power, awakened the woman. In our hyper individualistic culture, we tend to focus only on Peter – one individual.  But it wasn’t just Peter.  This Resurrection of their lost Dorcas was a community effort — God in them, they in God. The entire community is endowed with Resurrection Power.

The entire community, using all the spiritual resources at their command is empowered.  Facing their tragedy, just like Mother Carrie, this little band of the faithful used all the resources available.  They shed tears; they prayed, they hoped together.  They summoned help.  they waited in expectation.  It took many to summon Resurrection Power.

It will take many to summon the Resurrection of the democracy of our nation.  The call has gone out, in many cases led by strong women, many of whom are mothers who know what’s at stake as programs like Head Start, Women Infants and Children (WIC), Planned Parenthood, and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, and Medicaid are all on the chopping block to provide gigantic tax cuts for the richest ten percent.  Mothers know what’s at stake.

Sarah Palin was right about one thing concerning a mother’s fierce love: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull – the lipstick.”

At a corner demonstration, widows in their 70s and 80s, even one in her 90s know what’s at stake when the Veteran’s Administration is eviscerated and benefits cut.  Where’s the “Thank you for your service” here?  Yet that small monthly survivor’s check along with SSI is the meager amount that pays the rent, provides heat, cover medical expenses and puts food on the table.

All across the country Resurrection Power is in the hands of us ordinary folk, mass gatherings in the unlikely places as Utah, Alaska – did I mention that I saw a picture of our former hometown of Petersburg – Idaho and Montana, Alabama and Mississippi.  Resurrection Power amplified through our common strength.  Mama pit bull love.

It was a distant relative of our family, Julia Ward Howe – Grandma’s lineage on my mother’s side), who summoned up the strength of our mothers in her first Mother’s Day Proclamation.  She was a feminist, a Suffragist, an activist for the woman’s vote, an abolitionist — I close with that.  Maybe that’s where I get my activist genes – a goodly heritage indeed!

Mother’s Day Proclamation – Boston, 1870

“Arise, then… women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!  Say firmly:  We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.  Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.  Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.  We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.  It says:  Disarm, Disarm!  The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.  Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession.  As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.  Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask
that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality,
may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient,
and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.“

~ Julia Ward Howe

And I tell you what – This sure beats the hell out of the simpering Hallmark sentimentality found on our supermarket card racks.  Today we celebrate the Resurrection Power inherent in all those pit bull women who have fiercely loved us and passionately cared for this nation.  Yes, these women of the Spirit knew – it always takes a village.  Amen.

May 11, 2025
Easter 4

Acts 9:36-43; Psalm 23;

Revelation 7:9-17; John 10:22-30

“Entrusted with Resurrection Power”