Mother’s Day & Church: The Annual Conundrum
by Talbot Davis, Pastor of Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC
Back when I was in seminary and serving an internship in a small church in central Kentucky, the pastor let me preach on the second Sunday in May. So I did. I have no idea what I preached about.
Except that I didn’t preach about mothers.
Afterwards, I was sort of baffled by all the cold shoulders I was getting in that normally warm church. And that’s when the pastor leaned in and said, “You’ve got to talk about mothers on Mother’s Day.”
So once I graduated from that seminary and began serving here in North Carolina, I pretty much followed the pastor’s advice.
While I’ve never led a service in which we a) had all the mothers stand and b) gave a bouquet to the oldest mother in the house (a tradition observed by many, many churches), I have nevertheless devoted a fair number of sermons to mothers, motherhood, and even mother and child reunions.
Yet devoting a Sunday to such a subject is fraught with difficulties and even pain if you don’t do it with sensitivity. Why?
Well, just yesterday in our worship services we had a woman who had tended to her mother’s death and funeral in January, another woman who has had years of struggle with infertility and musters all the courage she has to show up to church on Mother’s Day, and several other women have relationships with their own mothers that are rocky at best and abusive at worst. So while it’s a day for celebrating and appreciating mothers and motherhood, it’s also a time to acknowledge that for many, Mother’s Day is more bitter than sweet.
How have we handled it in years past? We showed a short, whimsical video clip as the gathering began, followed by Chris Macedo’s invitation to “give it up” in applause for our moms, and then launched into a “traditional” (for Good Shepherd) worship set.
Then, just before I gave the sermon, I mentioned the day again and let the church know three words that describe my own mom: Freak Of Nature. Why? She’s 97, lives by herself in Austin, Texas, and still plays tennis.
People gasped, then laughed, then applauded.
Then it was on to the real business at hand: preaching the gospel of Jesus.
THANKS for these good reflections on an issue we all face! As I struggled with it this year, remembering that we were still in the “Eastertide” season and should be emphasizing resurrection (even though our church does not always follow standard lectionary), I preached from Luke 24 about the women who went to the tomb, talked with angel, and explained things to the disciples (including perhaps the sons of one of the women), but no one gave much attention to them. I called the sermon “Listen to Your Mother.” I mentioned that some missed a blessing on that Resurrection morning because they wouldn’t listen to an important message from middle aged mothers, then reviewed how Jesus DID listen to mothers and other women, that mothers are blessed when they listen to Jesus, and that we all need to listen more to mothers who have listened to the living Jesus. Not a masterpiece, but I felt good about connecting the dots! An unexpected blessing was a testimony from a pastor visiting from Guatemala, but I did not know that the focus of his testimony would be recounting his conversion on the 39th day of his mother’s 40 day fast while he was separated from his wife and running from God!