I’ve said before and it remains true that of all the controversies that I have encountered in the church, I have met no greater passion than in discussions about “Mother’s Day.”
Quite seriously, if you want to get people riled, you don’t talk about whether or not our church has a position on abortion or if the United Church of Canada welcomes gay & lesbian persons into full church membership, you don’t discuss what it means to say that Jesus embodies God. No, If you really want to get some heat in a conversation you talk about “Christian Family Sunday” instead of the phrase “Mother’s Day.”
I understand the sentiment about mom and wanting to have those apple pie feelings about motherhood and family. And there is no shortage of stories that help us try to capture those feelings.
James Taylor, author and united church member illustrates my point in his Everyday Psalms when he paraphrases the twenty third psalm by replacing the image of shepherd with one of mother or more accurately, Mommy. The perspective is of a young child considering the expressions of God to be like those of a mommy.
Today, is a fitting time to share it with you.
God is like my Mommy.
My Mommy holds my hand;
I'm not afraid.
She takes me to school in the mornings;
she lets me play in the playgrounds and the parks;
she makes me feel good.
She shows me how to cross the streets,
because she loves me.
Even when we walk among the crowds and the cars,
I am not afraid.
If I can reach her hand or her coat,
I know she's with me,
And I'm all right.
When I fall down and I'm all covered with mud
and I come home crying,
she picks me up in her arms.
She wipes my hands and dries my tears,
and I have to cry again,
because she loves me so much.
How can anything go wrong
with that kind of Mommy near me?
I want to live all my life with Mommy,
in my Mommy's home for ever and ever.
My heart is warmed as much as anyone’s by such an image of God and of a child’s love for God expressed as to one’s mommy.
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Also on Mother’s Day you can expect to hear tributes to moms from all over the world.
Joseph Rosenbaum speaks about his mother when he says, Mother is always there when you need her. She helps, protects, listens, advises and nurtures physically and morally. She makes sure that her family is loved 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. At least that's how I remember my mother, for the few precious years I was blessed to have her. But no words can describe the sacrifice she made out of love for me, her young son.
I was 19 years old, and I was taken to a concentration camp with a large group of other Jews. It was clear that we were destined to die. Suddenly my mother stepped in and traded places with me. And although it was more than 50 years ago, I will never forget her last words to me and her good-bye look. “I have lived long enough. You have to survive because you are so young,” she said.
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Most kids are born only once. I was given birth twice - by the same mother.
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"And Jesus said to the people, 'I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd is willing to die for the sheep. No one takes my life away from me. I give it up of my own free will. I have the right to give it.”
Looking at Joseph Rosenbaum’s experience in light of our scripture reading today offers parallels between a mother’s selflessness and the reality of Christ’s ministry.
So whether we celebrate a child’s love or a mother’s selflessness our image of God is strengthened.
But what about the people who haven’t children… or the people who have lost children. What about the people for whom mom, for whatever reason, was abusive, inattentive, selfish and not self-less, what of the people for whom mom was detached from their life experience… those given up for adoption or the women whose life experience included abortion or any of the people for whom the very thought of family may be a painful thought.
For those folks the very phrase “Mother’s Day” is like a knife that cuts through their being and continues the injury to their very core.
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I’m one of those folks whose life has not been defined by my mother being the perfect mom and I’m sure my mom would not think that her life has been blessed with the perfect kids. Because of that my story is rather ordinary and because it is, I can reflect about the position of those on both sides of the raging debate—the hurt and the wonder that has come to be known as “Mother’s Day.”
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I know I am, at times, a bit of a skeptic… no probably more than a bit of a skeptic and so it is with that part of me that I say it is the merchandising genius of companies and individuals that have managed to keep the merchandising machine of “Mother’s Day” alive long beyond and in opposition to its original intent.
In case you didn’t know, it is the busiest day of the year for North American restaurants and telephone companies, and the best single week of the year for florists. In spite of the calculated frenzy to encourage everyone to show materially how much mother is loved, the fact is that Mother’s Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women outside the home.
It became trivialized and commercialized only after it became confined to “special” nuclear family relations. ///
The people who inspired Mother’s Day had quite a different idea about what made mothers special. They believed that motherhood was a political force. They wished to celebrate mother's social roles as community organizers, honoring women who acted on behalf of the entire future generation rather than simply putting their own children first.
The first proposal of a day for mothers came from Anna Reeves Jarvis, who in 1858 organized Mothers' Work Days in West Virginia to improve sanitation in the Appalachian Mountains.
During the American Civil War, her group provided medical services for soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict. After the war, Jarvis led a campaign to get the former combatants to lay aside their animosities and forge new social and political alliances.
The other nineteenth-century precursor of Mother’s Day began in Boston in 1872, when poet and philanthropist Julia Ward Howe proposed an annual Mother’s Day for Peace, to be held every June. Part of her speech reads: “Arise then, women of this day! Say firmly: “Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage.” “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.””
Howe's Mothers' Day was celebrated widely in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other Eastern states until the turn of the century.
Most of these ceremonies and proposals, significantly, were couched in the plural, not the singular. Mother’s Day was originally a vehicle for organized social and political action by all mothers, not for celebrating the private services of one's own particular mother.
When Anna Reeves Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, began a letter-writing campaign to have a special day set aside for mothers. But by this period, there was already considerable pressure to focus on the personal meaning of motherhood and not its earlier political associations.
The mobilization of women as community organizers was the last thing on the minds of the prominent merchants, racist politicians, and antisuffragist activists who, sometimes to Jarvis' dismay, quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
In fact, the adoption of Mother’s Day by the 63rd Congress on May 8.1914 represented a reversal of everything the women of 50 years earlier had stood for.
By 1914 the speeches proclaiming Mother’s Day linked it to the celebration of home life and privacy; they repudiated women's social role beyond the household.
Politicians found that the day provided many opportunities for self-promotion. Merchants hung testimonials to their own mothers above the wares they hoped to convince customers to buy for other mothers.
A day that had once been linked to controversial causes was reduced to an occasion for platitudes and sales pitches. Its bond with social reform movements broken, Mother’s Day immediately drifted into the orbit of the marketing industry.
I trust folks are slowly becoming aware of that history…and so we should. I still suspect most think of today as a day to get mom a little something special… to phone or send flowers or visit, a day to reflect about memories of a mom no longer here or maybe to feel again the hurt over the picture of motherhood that they never knew nor had a hope of knowing.
Our thought today says, “If you want to keep your memories, first you have to live them.” Today is the day…do it now… we can’t know when the opportunity will simply flee. ///
Is it “Just Another Mother’s Day?” I would think that with all the emotion those two words are capable of generating, that the place of the church in the middle of that furor would be to honour the love of the Good Shepherd that makes us all family.
I would like to think that I might be someone within the church who is willing to uphold the original intent of Mother’s Day, a day of peace and care for the world. A day to celebrate the mothering qualities upheld by those whose original vision had nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with justice and world peace.
The kind of vision that had less to do with individual motherhood and the isolation ‘that emphasis’ can have on great groups of people, and more to do with the way God calls all people to be God’s children in one large diverse family all over the world.
For many it is true that the notion of family often upheld by advertisers at this time of year has not been part of their experience. I think of those who don’t hear the praises of children or can’t sing the praises of mommy because that is not a reality for them.
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While I have known people in each pastoral charge I have served who have avoided the church on Mother’s Day because we in The United Church of Canada refer to it as “Christian family Sunday” I have likewise known folks who have avoided the church on this day because of the pain that prevents them from celebrating the notion of motherhood they can’t possibly know.
I am proud to be a part of a church that doesn’t ride that marketing train that portrays a family that for most people doesn’t exist.
Our Sunday school has been arranging images on the peg area of Memorial Hall to depict a variety of family types.
I’m proud to be part of a church that champions the cause of all those for whom the church is and should be a place for people who while not biological family become family through the love and witness of Jesus Christ.
If we think of ourselves as members of a congregation we have a built in safeguard that keeps us from being our brother’s keeper. If we think ourselves part of a family we have no such luxury. We are all in this together.
So “today”, I celebrate our opportunity as a church family to gather and share in our Spring Brunch, a feast that is open to all because everyone here is part of the family and is invited to come in, sit down, share life, love and hope through the love and power of the good shepherd. Amen.