Pentecost News

5-22-2020
Ron Saladin

My aunt died a few weeks ago. She was a good woman, and I loved her dearly. We decided to take flowers to her gravestone in memory of her for Memorial Day.

The cemetery is located in a small southeastern Missouri town, a very poor community with many rundown buildings. Nevertheless, the cemetery was very pretty, already showing a wide display of flowers distributed around the grave stones in anticipation of Memorial Day. There’s something to be said for people who remember their loved ones. And maybe even their not so loved ones.

After placing the flowers on the gravestones (My parents are buried there too.), we spent some time just exploring the cemetery. The oldest gravestone we found was of a child who died in 1867. Some stones looked older but had weathered to the point we could not read the etchings.

There was a certain sadness in that for me.

Time eventually even erases the marks in stone we make in an effort to remember people who once experienced life.

Looking out over the cemetery, I could see in my mind the layer of caskets beneath the surface of the ground following the contour of the land like a vein of ore waiting to be mined. The value of this vein is not in the materials making up the caskets, substantial even though that might be. Rather, the value resides in the caskets and their contents as markers of prior lives God has not forgotten over time. There is no weathering of God’s memory.

Atheists would say this is a religious pipe dream.

I’m glad I’m not an atheist.

I have hope, a strong conviction, from what I have learned from the Bible.

Pentecost is about a harvest season, not of grain or even of valuable ore, but of people. Walking around in that cemetery I could almost feel the waiting, the listening for the call from Christ to come forth.

John 5:28-29  Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth, they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.

One of the messages of  Pentecost is to remember we are workers in a harvest season. In the not too distant future, this particular harvest will end.


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We are planning to observe Pentecost on Sunday, May 31st at 11 a.m. at the Knights of Columbus hall in Washington, MO. This is our first meeting in many weeks, and we will not have a potluck this time. You are welcome to bring your own snacks/drinks if you so desire.

We do plan to follow the guidelines on social distancing. If all goes well, we may return to our regular sabbath schedule at the Opera House in June.

I know some of you have plans to meet elsewhere, and that is fine.   Please feel free to observe Pentecost wherever you so desire. Regardless, may we all enjoy the Holy Day!