Scripture: Matthew 10:34-39; 12:46-50
There is a school of thought that says that Mothers’ Day doesn’t belong in the church. Jesus didn’t decree it. At least as far as the United States is concerned, Woodrow Wilson did that in 1912, I think it was. In fact what Jesus did have to say on the subject of mothers was, I think we would have to say, somewhat inconvenient so far as Mothers’ Day is concerned—as you have heard. I’ll come back to what he said a little later. It’s true that the Ten Commandments do say that we are to honor our fathers and mothers, so if you want or need a Biblical foundation for bringing Mothers’ Day into the church, I suppose it’s there. Briefly and thinly there, but there.
But the real reason some people resist making any sort of deal about Mothers’ Day in church has less to do with whether there is a Biblical foundation for it than it does with the question of what churches ought to be all about. In far too many places and far too many times the Christian church in the United States has done little more than reflect the customs, values, and lifestyle of the culture of which we are a part. Mothers’ Day is a part of that, not the most troubling or obnoxious part of that, but part of the general tendency of churches to reflect, and celebrate, and offer blessing upon our “American way of life”. That has often included being uncritically patriotic, reproducing the racially segregated patterns of our society and by silence and inaction condoning racial and economic injustices, condemning socialism, commending democracy and free enterprise, seeing prosperity as a sign of God’s favor, sponsoring such things as boy scout and girl scout troops, and celebrating such things as Mothers’ Day.
The point here is not that everything I have just mentioned is necessarily in every way bad, but that very often some combination of such things have been packaged in our church life in such a way that made it seem like Christianity and the American (North American, United States) way of life are identical. And because that has so often been the case, there are those who would say that the church needs to be quite intentional about not promoting the American way of life but promoting a Christian way of life—or as I would prefer to see it a human way of life (because I don’t happen to think Jesus’ goal was to promote Christianity).
In any case, the idea is that churches need to have a clear and separate identity from the culture of which they’re a part and a prophetic presence in that society, not of course to be unthinkingly critical any more than unthinkingly uncritical, but to have values that come from someplace else and to be willing to stand at least apart from and sometimes in opposition to the general culture. And for some people that has meant not making much of a deal at all about what is undeniably this cultural occasion of Mothers’ Day. Maybe say a sentence in the prayer. That’s about it. Otherwise focus on something else.
I understand and generally agree theoretically with this point of view, though I have never felt the need to apply it to Mothers’ Day in the way some of my colleagues have. Sometimes I have even made it the focus of the service, as we are doing today. But just because I freely include Mothers’ Day as a part of worship doesn’t mean I think it is a given how we should observe it here, or with what words. In fact some of the words I find it important for me to say today are going to seem to some people rather counter-cultural.
I have been in the ministry quite a while, and I have led worship now on quite a few Mothers’ Days. If all the people I have ever preached to on Mothers’ Day were brought together into one room, they would include:
…people who were there to celebrate Mothers’ Day in sort of a straightforward way, maybe grown children living in a different town coming to be with mom, go to church, take her out to eat afterwards, spend the day, say I love you to each other, and go home
…people who would be doing that, except that their mother is no longer living, or in a few cases are not having this family occasion because a child is no longer living
…people who would be doing that, except that their mother is living but no longer recognizes who they are
… people who are estranged from their mother, or who if not completely estranged have not said I love you and meant it in a very long time, or who could not remember if their mother had ever said I love you to them
…people who were abused by their mother or whose mother did nothing to stop a father from abusing them, or who as mothers were on the verge of being an abuser themselves
…people whose mothers were their best friends
…people who were alcoholic and in no position to offer mothering to their children
…people raising children by themselves with unbelievable love, and strength, and determination
…people raising someone else’s children with unbelievable love and strength and determination
…people who wanted to be mothers but who had so far been unable
…people who were mothers but didn’t want to be
…people who were step-mothers
…people who had chosen not to be mothers
… people who were deeply grateful to be mothers, wholly and happily involved in raising children
…people who were happy enough to be mothers and who certainly loved their children but whose being apart from motherhood had never really been recognized or given freedom
…people who, on Mothers’ Day were more likely to be celebrating their freedom from motherhood
…people trying to balance, with great difficulty, being a mother and being someone in addition to mother
…people in families with two mothers
…people in families with no mothers
These are not fictional people. They are not theoretical people. They are not people who probably exist somewhere. They are people who I have known, cared about, ministered to and with, and who have been present at one time or another when I stood up on a Mothers’ Day morning to invite people to worship together. Although I don’t think all of the people I just described have been in the same room at the same time, typically in any given congregation, a great many of the people I just mentioned would all be together. A great many of the people I just described are here this morning. And I have wanted to honor them all. And so Mothers Day has always had many faces for me. It’s never been all one thing. And if I’m going to acknowledge it at all, I can’t do it in just one way. There are too many parts of it that bear on my mind and spirit.
I bring Mothers’ Day to the center of our worship today because it does bear on my faith, not just in one single way, but in many ways. One way it bears on my faith, this year especially, is that I believe we need to honor the mothers among us who happen to be lesbian by making it possible for their loving relationships to be recognized in law. And for mothers who are lesbian to have the same rights of custody for their children as any other mother. And for those who are lesbian and want to become mothers by adoption to have the same rights and opportunities as anyone else. These are matters of faith for me, and are part of my prayer life, on this Mothers’ Day—not just on Mothers Day of course, but appropriately part of my Mothers Day this year. It is not because this is a social issue of the day that I want to campaign for. It is also because of the real people who have been part of my church families, who are part of my life, and who I want to honor. Because of this concern Mothers’ Day needs to be in the church today.
I want to lift up the brokenness of families, a brokenness caused not at all by same-sex relationships but by a hundred, a thousand other things and showing itself in the form of divorce and in situations where divorce would have been the better option, in domestic violence, in abuse or neglect, or love-deprived relationships of all kinds. There are many people for whom Mothers’ Day does not naturally conjure up warm, fuzzy feelings. They are people whose faces I have seen when I lifted my eyes to look out over the congregations I have been with on Mothers’ Days over the years. They have sometimes sat quietly while no one said a word about their reality. I want to lift up the brokenness of families, not merely to raise another social issue, but to honor the people whose faces I see in my vision of the real, live people of God I have known, people who today are part of my prayer life. Mothers Day needs to be in the church today.
I want to lift up people who live in broken families—that would be all of us—people who live in broken families whose love is flawed but real, married people, partnered people, single people, divorced people who do their best to provide loving environments and build loving relationships, sometimes against great odds. I want to recognize that love doesn’t have to be perfect to be love. I want to acknowledge the difficult choices people make and the sacrifices people make in the course of trying to mothers and trying to be daughters and sons in the best way we know how. I want to hold all those efforts up in prayer. Mothers’ Day needs to be in church.
I want to lift up the hope that all of us find places of gratitude to dwell in. Mothers’ Day makes me think of that, but Mothers’ Day doesn’t make me think there is only one kind of gratitude or only one way to be thankful. There are some things and some relationships that it is hard to be grateful for and some things we shouldn’t be grateful for, as I’ve already suggested. The process of getting to gratitude is going to be a lot harder for some people than for others. But there are for all of us places of gratitude, things to be grateful for, people to be grateful for, and those are places worth getting to. Mothers’ Day leads me to reflect on that too. It is part of my prayer life today—finding, rediscovering, my own places of gratitude. Mothers’ Day needs to be in church.
I want to lift up mothers and others who march, two weeks ago for reproductive choice and today for handgun controls. I want to lift up people who struggle with decisions of life and death and people who support, counsel, and care for them. I want to lift up all who take action to reduce the level of gun violence and the level of violence in general. I want to recall the two women who are often given the shared credit for thinking up Mothers Day in the country: Anna Jarvis who wanted to honor the work her mother had done during the Civil War in caring for the wounded of both the union and confederate armies, and the work she had done after the war in trying to heal the divisions caused by the war; and Julia Ward Howe, writer of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, who called on all mothers to work for a world where their children would never again have to be sent off to war. I want to honor all mothers, all women, all people who work for peace, who work to end violence of all kinds. They are very much a part of my prayer life today. Mothers Day needs to be in church.
And we need, don’t we, to try to hold together all these different aspects of the day, all these things that don’t quite fit together, or don’t easily fit together, the serious, the solemn, the heavy, the uplifting, the brightening, the warm-hearted, the difficult, the discouraging, the hopeful, the grateful—to hold it all together and to lift it up, to offer it to God, to make it all included in our prayer life, because however uneasily all these things fit together, however little they fit together at all, however much they may quarrel with each other as they mingle in our spirits, they are together because they are all part of Mothers’ Day—you may have your own version of what I’ve been saying—part of our world, after all, part of our lives. No one ever said our lives, neither our outer lives nor our inner lives, were going to be consistent, logical, all tidy and well organized. We do our best to hold together all the variety and contradictions of our lives in our hearts and give it all to God, who will hold them all together in hers.
I said I would get back to Jesus—maybe you thought I was avoiding that. He really doesn’t seem very nice in these passages. His family comes visiting, wants to see him. He puts them off, dismisses them. Who are these people? They say they’re my mother and my brothers and sisters? Not really. You’re my brothers and sisters and mother. Anyone trying to do the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. Not very nice. At least not in this way of reading it.
I choose another way. I don’t think the point of all this is that those relationships are unimportant. I think Jesus probably knew just how important they really were, how all-consuming they could become. I think he knew that sometimes we can lose track of who we are apart from our families, given how powerful those relationships are in good and not good ways. I think he knew that there is more to women than motherhood, more to all of us than son-and-daughter-hood. And so he invited us—this is what I hear him doing in these funny sounding passages—invited us into an identity as children of God that will free us to be mothers or not, fathers or not, daughters or sons or not, free to form and honor families of many kinds, free to be God’s children, free to hold God’s children in our prayers of concern and of hope and of gratitude. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 9, 2004