Mother’s Day and the Empire

Good friend Evan Curry made a provacative statement on his Twitter the other day: "Is Mother’s Day "empire"? Should churches celebrate it? I wonder if most churches even ask those questions."

The short answer: Yes churches should celebrate it, but it is always secondary and should be tied into worship and the biblical narrative and church calendar.

Case Study #1:Mother’s Day as Empire—In 2008 Mother’s Day fell on the same Sunday as Pentecost.  Carnations handed out to every woman at church, check.  Flowers given to moms when their children’s names are drawn out of a hat, check.  Motherhood mentioned incessantly,check.  Holy Spirit mentioned on Pentecost, (insert sound of crickets). On a day such as Pentecost, when Mother’s Day should take a back seat to the largest celebration of the Holy Spirit in the church calendar, Empire clearly won out. Greeting cards, gifts, and cakes trumped a celebration of an integral part of the Church’s message: the falling of the Holy Spirit.

Case Study #2: Mother’s Day as Cultural Entity—This year Mother’s Day did not fall on any holy day.  There is long precidence for the church to take holy days from the broader culture and subvert them with the gospel: Christmas and Easter are good examples.  Those were holidays that, while rooted in Jewish holidays, were far more recognizable as pagan holy days.  There are two ways of looking at this, the most prominent being a woeful puritan disdain for the holy days’ pagan origins.  While continuing pagan practice is certainly a big problem for the church, Christmas and Easter in their grafting into the church calendar are subverting the powers of the world, subverting the Empire, and putting on display Christ’s victory over all.  The Word, the true Story, has triumphed over all other stories.  Our narrative wins.  

The triumph our narrative, the church year, our living in the drama of God’s story, is the key here.  This Mother’s Day, was your church focused on maternal things or eternal things?  The power of Mom or the power of God?  The answer to these questions determines if the Empire has usurped your local church’s message or if your local church has let the good news subvert the message of the Empire.

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I commented on this briefly in my post last November "Fixing the Preludes to Advent."