The Third Most Important Religious Holiday in America. . .

. . . and it’s part of every faith.

Are you ready for Mother’s Day?

On this day, all mothers are elevated to sainthood.

The sacrifices they make are recalled in detail. Mothers tend to put family before self and career. It took most of recorded history to notice.

How did mothers attain this revered status?

Most people don’t give the theology of Mother’s Day worship much thought. A recognition of the role of a mother’s love in our faith formation makes sense to most. Mothers are a key part of God’s gift of family.

Love is the central message of Christianity. Mothers are the universal representation of love.

On Sunday morning, we can contemplate the love of Jesus, his sacrificial caring for all of God’s creation, his heart open and his arms outstretched to every child of God regardless of race, age, gender, status, intellect or infirmity.

What we know about love comes to us through that first bond with others in God’s creation — our mothers.

A mother’s love is tangible. It isn’t embedded in our stained glass windows or abstractly retold in scripture. For some of us our mother is still sitting next to us in the church pew. For others she is a cherished memory.

Some Christians reference frequently Christ’s mother, Mary. But the references to a mother’s love is obscure in much of Christianity. In centuries of hymnody, mentions of motherlove are rare outside of the Christmas carols.

It is indeed odd that in just the last century or so, the status of mothers became so elevated that, on this one day of the year, it is an unofficial part of the American religious calendar.