Revisiting Mother’s Day & Motherhood
May 10, 2026
MOTHER’S DAY ~ 6TH SUNDAY OF EASTER
MINISTER
Rev. David J. Wood
SCRIPTURE
Genesis 18: 1-5, 9-15 & Luke 1: 46-56
That was my Senior Minister talking… I was his Associate… some 40 years ago in West Hartford, Ct at the First Baptist Church.
We were planning the worship service for Mothers Day…he had arrived on the scene as the new Senior Minister several months before…and this would be his first Mothers Day service at this congregation…
Here was his plan he had in mind:
We would construct a large styrofoam cross…anything that begins with the construction of a styrofoam cross does not end well in my book.
Anyway, we would construct a large styrofoam cross that we would place on the steps of the chancel… then we would make fake carnations out of tissue paper, equipped with wire stems—
the carnations would be of two colors…pink and white….
We would give the white “carnations” to everyone who’s mother has died…and the pink ones to those whose mothers are still living.
Then, at the just the right moment in the service, we would invite everyone to come forward and stick their carnation into the styrofoam cross. When all was said and done, he assured me, we’ll have this array of tissue carnations in the shape of a cross.
“Trust me,” he said, “there won’t be a dry eye in the house. It works every time.”
You know, I can’t honestly remember what we did.
My guess is that is exactly what we did and I have completely blocked it out of my mind.
All that remains for me is the painful reminder of what not to do on Mothers Day…
When motherhood becomes translated into consumer culture, it winds up as a sentimental story that calls for styrofoam crosses and tissue flowers.
Anna Jarvis is remembered as the person who in 1914 successfully prevailed upon President Woodrow Wilson to establish Mother’s Day as an Official Day that would give “public expression of our love and reverence for all mothers.”
However by 1943 she was so disgusted with how Mother’s Day has become a marketing campaign for florists, card and candy makers she began organizing a petition to rescind Mother's Day. To understand the original vision Anna Jarvis had for Mothers Day, we need to go back to the woman who first called for a Day to Celebrate Mothers: Julia Ward Howe.
Julia Ward Howe is best known for writing The Battle Hymn of the Republic in 1861…the hymn that became the anthem of the Union Army during the Civil War.
What she is less known for is that she was the woman who first called for the celebration of what has become known as Mothers Day.
The year was 1870…the Civil War had ended some five years before…her experience of living through the carnage of the CIVIL war and tending to the wounded and dying kept her from writing anymore anthems for warriors.
So in 1870 she called for a Day to honor and support mothers who had lost sons and husbands in the Civil War.
Let me read a portion of her original Mother’s Day Proclamation:
Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
“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.”
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm! The sword is not the balance of justice.”
Now there’s a sentiment worthy of Mothers Day!
Do I hear and AMEN from the Mothers in the room?
So much for styrofoam crosses and tissue carnations—let’s instead honor this day, to echo the words from the Prophet Isaiah, by subversive talk of “beating a few swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks! “ “Nations shall not lift up sword against nation,” he goes on to say, “neither shall they learn war anymore!”
Too much of history has dismissed the cry of mothers for their children…mothers day should at the very least cause us to listen anew to that powerful passion that is the unique bond between mother and Child…a passion that is resident in everyone who cares as a mother for a child.
It seems to me that, these days, we need more mothers at the tables where war and peace are being negotiated!
Let’s turn from our cultural story of Mothers Day to the Biblical story.
The story of Mothers that unfolds through the Bible…through both the Jewish and Christian
Scriptures…is anything but sentimental…in Scripture motherhood reads more like a subversive story.
Earlier, we read of two of the most famous Jewish Mothers in all of Scripture……
—Sarah and Mary. They are just two of a long list of subversive mothers…of women who embodied a motherhood that played a pivotal role in the changing and making of biblical history…
Sarah, Hagar, Rachel, Rebecca, Jochebed
Hannah, Naomi, Ruth, Tamar, and Rahab.
Bathsheba…and on into the New Testament… we have Elizabeth and, of course, Mary…. each one a mother, each one subversive in their own way and making God’s way…bearing the life of God into time and history…confronting the powers of evil and chaos…God conspiring with mothers to bring new life and possibility into the world…
Sarah…she is told that she will bear a son to her aged husband Abraham. She Bursts out in laughter..at God…at the absurdity of the promise…
When she eventually does bear a son, she names him Isaac, which means “He Laughs.”
“God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”
Sarah gets the last laugh!
There is something bold and fiercely independent in this mother…and God honors Sarah…
Maybe God has a sense of humor..
Throughout Scripture, God calls on mothers to do what no man could ever do…and when it matters most, he bypasses the man’s role altogether!!
Which brings me to the text we read earlier from the Gospel of Luke…and the most famous mother of all in the Christian tradition…Mary.
Mary…she doesn’t laugh…but, as mothers often do, she bursts into song…but it’s not a lullaby…more like a protest song….
There she is singing a subversive song about how through the child she is about to bear, the proud will be scattered, the powerful will be brought down, the lowly will be lifted up, the hungry will be filled, and the rich will be sent away empty.…all of this she saw was coming to life through her…
She is the only character in the New Testament story of Jesus who is there before the beginning and who is there after the end… she is there at his birth and she is found among the followers of Jesus at the scene of his death, at the foot of the cross…
and remains part of the community of followers in the earliest community of Christians…bearing witness…. She stands as a mother…as the preeminent witness to faith and faithfulness….
A few years ago, on a visit to Rome, I remember standing in St. Peter’s Basilica before that magnificent sculpture—Michelangelo’s Pieta….a mother cradling the broken and lifeless body of her son…I saw Mary and Jesus…a mother and a child…God and humanity….and image of suffering love and compassion for the world…
There is was…Motherhood…in Flesh and blood, pain and suffering, joy and rejoicing, Grace, endurance, longsuffering, constancy…styrofoam crosses and tissue carnations will not do. Sentimentality is not what mothers need from us in this society. Here’s a hard fact worth contemplating:
There are only 9 countries in the world who offer no Federally mandated PAID Maternity leave:
The Marshall Islands
Papua New Guinea
Nauru
Palau
Micronesia
Niue (Nee-you)
Suriname
Tonga….
And…ah…The United States of America.
The USA does have Federally mandated 12 weeks of UPAID maternity leave…and that only applies to women who work in a company of 50 or more employees.
Here is just a sampling of PAID Maternity leave policies around the world:
Sweden—480 days of paid shared leave for parents
Bulgaria—mothers are entitled to 410 day of paid maternity leave
Chile—30 weeks of maternity leave at full pay.
China 14 weeks at 100% of one’s pay.
As of this MONTH, Maine one of 13 states that offers paid maternity leave—12 weeks.
In the United States, 55% of working women supply half or more of their family's household income.
For all our debates over the years about a woman’s right to choose—which I support 100%…and will continue to fight for…the importance of that policy for women’s lives….
I would submit, that a society that creates the conditions in which, for too many women and their spouses, childbearing and childrearing feels like an inconceivable choice, is a society that has failed mothers and would be mothers…such a society is an unjust society.
This is not a day for the sentimentalizing, idealizing, or idolizing…of mothers or motherhood. But it is a day for recognition…for embracing, honoring and for much thanksgiving…for the subversive work of mothers and motherhood…It is a day for committing ourselves anew to laboring for those who have labored for us.
We may not all be mothers…but we all have at least one…and we can learn to see and care for the world as a mother for her child. It’s about as close as we get to seeing the world as God sees the world…..
So let us remember and give thanks…for Sarah and Mary…and all those mothers in between and since and yet to be upon which God’s movement in history so thoroughly depends… for all our mothers…for all those who have been a mother to us. Amen.