Today is Mothers Day, and while it is not a religious holiday most churches will be observing the occasion in one or more different ways. In some churches mothers are handed a flower as they enter the church. In others they will be publicly recognized by being asked to stand, or mentioned from the pulpit, or in the pastoral prayer. Other churches will devote the entire service, including the sermon, to the theme of motherhood. And in still others there is no sermon on this Sunday – the Sunday School presents a program to honour mothers with songs, poems, skits and other ways to single out the youngest, the oldest, the newest mother.
Today I’m going to suggest that while none of the above things is inherently wrong, churches need to re-think the way they do Mother’s Day. Most churches today, if they are doing anything right, will have a diverse congregation that includes mothers and women who are not mothers. There will be women who for whatever reason cannot have children and are reminded of that every Mothers Day. There are others who have miscarried, perhaps in the past year. There are other mothers who lost their children of any age by a tragic death. And of course there are others, both men and women whose mother is deceased, perhaps even in the previous year. Even if it has been a long time since the mother passed away, most of us still miss her. Being reminded that mother “is in heaven” may be true but not necessarily comforting. The point is, she is no longer here, and we miss her.
When I was pastor of a church, I saw all of the things that I described above, and I have done some of them. For example I used to preach Mothers Day sermons about the “Ideal” or the “Godly mother”, using some of the exemplary women from the Bible. One day a mother asked me why we preachers insist on “laying a guilt trip” on mothers every year by “preaching an ideal that we can never achieve.”
It made me think. And it also made me listen to other feedback from mothers, many of whom told me that it is sad to get all this recognition once a year, and be taken for granted the rest of the year.
I will close with two true stories. I once sat through a sermon on Mother’s Day where the preacher spoke about Hannah, the mother of Samuel in the Old Testament. He unnecessarily and unwisely dwelt on the fact that Hannah was barren (infertile) and how that was a sign that God was somehow displeased with her and therefore withheld the blessing of childbirth.
In another church all the mothers who were present were asked to stand and remain standing until a flower was handed to them. In the congregation was a woman who desperately wanted to be a mother, but had miscarried just a few weeks prior. She began to weep, and ran out of the service and never came back again. If you are thinking of writing a comment critical of that woman, please don’t.
I’m not suggesting that we do away with Mothers Day, or that it should be ignored in church. But we need to re-think HOW we do it.