Mother's Day...

As we passed the peace in worship Sunday morning, I looked over and saw my Mother being embraced by an African American Grandmother, silver heads together, dark and light skin, Sunday best dresses, and I wept. Two old mothers, worlds apart in life experiences, one in the Body of Christ...
Once upon a time I belonged to a church that didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day. Many reasons were given. It was a cultural holiday not a religious one... so what? Christians have been appropriating and transforming other’s holidays for generations. We didn’t want to cause pain for those who had abusive mothers, absent mothers or were unable to be mothers. We didn’t want to use gender specific nouns and pronouns in worship either male or female because using mother (or father) as an analogy for God would make somebody mad. I was always a little sad on Mother’s Day when it passed by without much attention being paid in worship.
Sunday I went to church with Michael and my mother. We sat in the congregation, saw roses and orchids pinned on in remembrance of mothers and grandmothers. We heard the prayers of the people as they stood to voice words of honor, praise and concern. One young African American woman stood to thank her aunt (in the congregation) and her grandmother for being her mothers when her mother was unable to mother her. She gave God praise for her mother growing and changing and for the steadfast love of her other mothers. Another woman requested prayer for a woman she met in the doctor’s office who had lost all three of her children to death this past year. An aging Viet Nam vet gave thanks for his wife who mothered their three daughters while he served in the military. Prayers were offered for the pastor who was home in Georgia with her family for their first Mother’s Day without their mother.
Such a powerful word...mother... it evokes an emotional response, a deep down in your belly feeling that will stay with us all our lives. Perhaps that is one of the reasons we should re-examine our use of mother-father language for God. Too many of the words we use for God these days... Holy One, Three-in-One, Source of all Being... may connect us to the awe and mystery of God but we have no gut connection, no skin face for God in those words. When my child calls me weeping over the loss of a baby, I do not pray to the Source of all Being. I call on God as Father or Mother, one who understands the anguish of a parent. My grandchildren are learning to pray surrounded by the faces of God in other mothers and fathers in their church congregations.
So this Mother’s Day I celebrate the faith of the mothers (and fathers) who have been my birth parents as a Christian. Mr. and Mrs. Thompson who led our youth group, Mrs. Tyre who led the Sword Drill team, Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Morris who included me in the music program of the church, Brother Kannon who lived the Golden Rule, Walter and Mary Lynn who taught me how to think about my faith, Celeste who shared her creative spirit with joy, Grady whose laughter was infectious and most precious in church, John Claypool who blessed me out of worship every Sunday with words that ring in my heart still... faces and names that stretch out through the days of my life reminding me that God first and foremost wants to be in relationship with me. Because of the gifts I have been given by these skin face representatives of God, I want to be a faith mother for others, sharing my peculiar (I hear the laughter) gifts with others. May it be so, Lord Jesus.