Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

Mark 3:35

The reasons the latter camp give for their reluctance to focus too much attention on this day are manifold. On the simplest level, some preachers deem it inappropriate to bend the church calendar in such a way as to allow a secular holiday entrance into the pulpit, and into the sanctuary.

Others shy away from the holiday for what amount to ideological reasons. They deem it inappropriate to privilege moms over dads. And to their point, we don't make quite such a fuss over Father's Day in our culture, do we?

And then there are those preachers who avoid the day because it's complicated and full of emotional hazards. Hollywood and Hallmark would have us believe that this day is second only to Valentine's Day in terms of its sentimental and emotional power.

But the truth is that for millions of people, women in particular, Mother's Day is not all sunshine and roses. For example, it can be an especially difficult day for women who long to be moms and cannot be.

It can be a hard day for mom's who, for whatever reason, are estranged from their kids, and for those older moms who hardly ever see or hear from their adult children. And of course for mothers who have lost their children, it is often a day full of heartache.

In fairness, Mother's Day can be a difficult day for children, too, especially those who grew up with abusive mothers, or who are estranged from their moms. So, the point is that this particular day can stir up a lot of negative emotions in mothers and children alike.

But of course for millions of moms and their families, it is a joyous day, too. A day devoted to celebrating the kind of love that will not let us go even when we are at our worst. A love that changes our diapers, cleans up our messes, soothes our hurts. A love that gives us unlimited rides to everywhere we need to go; that sometimes loans us money and sometimes refuses to do that when it's time for us to grow up and take more responsibility for ourselves.

A love that intercedes on our behalf, that fights to protect us, that advocates for our rights, and even, in some cases, visits us in jail--all because this love will not give up on us.

For all those reasons this day, in my view, is fair game for the preacher's task. First, precisely because the day is difficult for many of us, because this sanctuary is a place where you can come and feel what you feel and know that you're safe here, and then let the presence of God wrap around you like a blanket or a bandage.

But also because for many of us Mother's Day is a joyful day. For this is also a place, perhaps the best, maybe even the only place we have in our lives where we can go to give voice to, and give thanks for, our joys. And to sing them aloud, with each other.

And also because a mother's love is so tenacious, is that kind of love that will not let us go, that pursues us and accepts us and gives us birth, and is so quick to forgive us--a love in other words that has much to teach us about divine love.

So that is why I think it's entirely appropriate for us to focus our attention on this day. I actually find it sort of surprising that preachers are nervous about addressing Mother's Day directly. And you know that they're nervous because, if you read Mother's Day sermons, you'll find that some preachers deal with the challenges the day presents by making light of them and joking about them.

And frankly some of them are pretty funny. Gore Vidal: Never have children; only grandchildren. Bill Cosby - [Ideal] parenting can be learned only be people who have no children. Someone else: You know your children are growing up when they stop asking where they came from and start refusing to tell you where they've been. And my favorite of these of these: An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

I find this method of dealing with the day - making light of it - somewhat surprising because for it's part, the Bible is so very honest about mothers and families and the joys and struggles that come with these institutions.

It's full of stories about women like Sarah and Rachel and Hannah, who either could not have children of their own or waited years to experience the blessing of motherhood. Or Eve, the mother of Cain, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, who lost their children to violent deaths. Or Jochabed, the mother of Moses, who had to give up her baby in order to save his young life.

Scripture, in other words, is full of stories about mothers who find themselves in all sorts of circumstances, women who struggle to deal with all the same challenges modern women do, and who sometimes succeed and sometimes don't. And so we find these pages serving as a mirror into which we look and see ourselves. And maybe understand ourselves and our lives a bit better.

On that point, today's text is an interesting one because it reminds us that, like most of us, Jesus grew up in a family. Then his mother and his brothers came , the text states, plainly. And it hints at the fact there may have been some tensions in his family, just as there are tensions in probably every family everywhere.

One wonders why Jesus' mother and brothers aren't inside with the others, listening to him. Maybe it's not all that hard to understand. Who could blame them if they were tired of all the fuss being made over their son and their brother? Or frankly maybe they were jealous of his growing popularity.

One also wonders what they wanted to tell him, why they seem to have gone out of their way to come to him. It's an intriguing question but the text doesn't give us an answer. What it does tell us, or at least what seems clear from the context, is that Joseph wasn't part of the mix.

Indeed, after the so-called birth narratives (the stories of Christ's birth) in Matthew, Joseph essentially disappears from scripture. That may seem unfair to Joseph, but there may also be a reason for that. When we think of the parental figures in Jesus' life, two things are unmistakable.

One, we know that he was loved, fiercely loved in fact, by his mother Mary. And we also know that he himself, in his own words, was primarily about doing his Father's business.

As we've said before in here, I know some of you don't like that language. And I do understand your objections to limiting the infinite, diving being to one gender. All of us know in our hearts that God does not look like a human male; that God is bigger than that, that God's own being must surely comprehend both genders and even transcend them.

But it is also true that the Bible and the Gospels are unapologetic about ascribing to God this name. That is invariably how Jesus refers to God - Father .

And we see how that relationship worked in Jesus' own life. No doubt Joseph, his adoptive dad, and his mother nurtured and raised him. But it was his Father, his Divine Father, who challenged and inspired him, who gave his vocation and called him to his destiny.

Now, that being said, this same Bible also unapologetically puts those roles back together. In one of Paul's epistles we read that in Christ there is no east or west, no male of female.

Or maybe a better way to say that is that in Christ the male and the female, or at least what we ordinarily think of as the male and the female, come together: the loving and the strong; the nurturing and the protective; the compassionate and the powerful; the creative and the authoritative.

Some 20 centuries later, after our own culture's experiments with feminism and with the men's movement, and maybe even our own experiments with them, we look back at these pages, we look into this mirror we call scripture, and we find that these characteristics needn't be separated. That these different energies, if you will, can be integrated in one person after all.

But still, what about Jesus' wider context? What can we learn from this passage, on this day, about family dynamics?

Jesus seems to be pretty unresponsive to his family here. His tone indicates he might even be annoyed with them. One commentator suggests that he's trying to make a foundational point with his followers: that familial ties and family obligations cannot be set above doing the work of God (Pheme Perkins, The New Interpreter's Bible commentary, Vol. VIII, pg. 567).

Perhaps another way of saying that is that ministry, in effect, is of a higher order, a greater value, that honoring one's family.

Perhaps like you, I think that is a terrible suggestion. And not just because I know a dozen ministers who have burned themselves out and burned their families out by doing just that.

It's because I see this text differently. I think the point here is that for followers of Jesus, doing the will of God is itself a kind of family obligation. Or, even more than that, that doing the will of God is a way of birthing the Divine in the world and expanding God's own family.

That's a radical notion, isn't it? It suggests that by what we do, we ourselves might be mothers of God.

Let me quickly say that if you're uncomfortable with that idea, you're not alone. My roommate in college was a pretty devout church-goer. His daddy was a Baptist preacher, and so "Jeff" [not his real name] had grown up with Evangelical theology in his blood.

So I made a mistake in conversation with him one day. At the time, I was taking some sort of cultural survey course in which I had been introduced to Catholic theology. And I mentioned to Jeff my fascination with the idea that if we assume Christ to be fully human and fully God, then in a sense Mary was the mother of God.

I thought he was going to have an aneurysm! How could a human being, even one as venerable as Mary, give birth to God, he protested. And fair enough. How can a finite being give birth to the infinite? It makes no sense, rationally.

But if we're uncomfortable with that idea, maybe it's not because it's irrational, or because it's wildly inappropriate. Maybe we're uncomfortable with it because it's wildly possible.

It was for Mary. Let it be unto me according to your word , she replies to Gabriel at the annunciation, and thus becomes the literal mother of Jesus.

She's here again today, perhaps history's most famous mom, in this story. And to her and to us, Jesus has this to say on this Mother's Day: " Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."

Amen.

( In preparing this sermon the author gratefully acknowledges the influence of Dr. Jenell Williams Paris, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bethel College in St. Paul, MN, and the work of the Rev. Jan Croucher .)