Christ Our Mother (John 17:6-21)

"Jesus as a Mother Hen" © Maryanne Christiano-Mistretta

This sermon was originally preached on May 12, 2024 (Mother's Day) at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The livestream of our service may be viewed here (with the excerpted sermon at the end of this entry). Today's Gospel text is John 17:6-12 .

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“Feminine face of the Holy One, you are known by many names, but all of them mean Mother.”✧ Hold us now in your tender care.

Good morning, Gethsemane, and blessed Mothers Day to all of you here, whether you come in celebration or sadness, closeness or estrangement, grief or joy in relation to your own mother or to motherhood. I know that as often as this day is full of joy and gratitude for the mothers among us, it can also be fraught with much complexity, heartache, and loss. And so I offer that opening invocation from Mirabai Starr, even as I honor all the ways you enter worship on this particular day, and invite you into the comforting warmth of the Great Mother, Birther of All Creation, from whose eternal womb all that is has its being, in whose care all find comfort, and who comes to us this day in the prayer and passion of Jesus the Christ.

I offer all this as one in need of it, because, in truth, I am tired, overwhelmed, and depleted of energy by deep grief over the escalating genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; by my profound joy over my son who just entered teenagehood (God bless me); and by general exhaustion from the busyness of life within a capitalist economy that says our worth is not intrinsic, but depends on how hard we work and for how many hours and dollars we do it -- which puts stay at home moms in an undervalued, unappreciated category, and those of us who work in the center of the particular tension between whatever it means to be a good, unpaid mom, or a paid-but-not-present-enough one. It’s difficult not to feel strained and depleted in an economy that worships and depends on labor for its own sake, and views rest as laziness. 

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