I’ve been a pastor for nineteen Mother’s Days—for eighteen of them, I have also been a mother. I’ve done my share of carefully choosing and crafting liturgies and prayers to honor the emotions parishioners bring with them into the sanctuary on this one of several non-liturgical-yet-very-real holidays. Oddly, in May of 2010 as a mother of two, I completely forgot about Mother’s Day in my sermon planning. I realized a few days before Sunday that my sermon, titled “The Circumcision of Christ,” might have been better preached on a less already-complicated day!

Mother’s Days in 2008 and 2012 were particularly significant. On both these days, I preached at churches interviewing me to be their pastor. On Mother’s Day in 2008, I was 8 months pregnant and more than filled the pulpit of a congregation in Holland, Michigan. In 2012, my husband, Tim, and I left three little girls at home in Holland with my mom to preach in Kingston, Ontario. Neither Harderwyk CRC nor Westside Fellowship CRC had had a female pastor before. Both ended up calling me – a Reverend Mother of sorts – after first hearing me preach the gospel on a Mother’s Day.

Though only a small sliver of Christian churches have experienced the shepherding of a female pastor, the church herself is often compared to a woman. The church is the bride of Christ, of course. But she is also a mother. As St. Cyprian, a bishop of the church in the 3^rd century, once said: “No one can have God as Father who does not have the church as Mother.”

One meaning I take from Cyprian is that being a part of a community of believers is a deeply important part of what it means to believe in God. We need both the parent of our personal relationship to God and the parent of our relationship to the community of believers. Our growth and sanctification get played out hardest and best and deepest and widest when we are invested in a church community.

I hear this and, in many ways, I can affirm it. 

And here is what I am also present to: there are many of us who have been forsaken or have felt forsaken by God as Father and Church as Mother. When we experience these realities and emotions we are, of course, in good company with Jesus, who himself was rejected by the religious authorities and who himself asked God why God had forsaken him.

We are also in sad and good company with many people through the ages, for the church has not always been a great parent to their kids. Not at all. We see it in the news and down the street and within our very own walls and hearts. The church hurts people and forsakes them.

My favorite psalm is Psalm 27. I memorized it as a very young girl because I was so often afraid, particularly that my parents would die. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?” I recited with my mom at the lunch table. I especially clung to the words of verse 10: “Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.” When I was little, my heart made this meaning: even if something should happen to my parents, God would be with me.

When I was 43, I read Psalm 27:10 anew. Something had happened to my mom – she had died. My mom could no longer receive me. In so many ways, she had been the receiver – the receptacle – for my life. She wanted to know it all – all my stories and adventures. She had been the vessel that held me in the womb and then she spent her life receiving me and my siblings. Now with her gone, I felt like water slipping through fingers. She was no longer there to hold my life.

Friends, our earthly parents leave us in a variety of ways, and the parent of the church sometimes forsakes us. But God receives us. God is the always-and-forever receptacle of our life. Nothing can separate us from God’s love.

And praise God that even though specific manifestations of the church at certain times and in certain places will fail us and drop us, the body of Christ at fresh times and new places, moved by the Spirit who keeps empowering the church, will meet us where we’re at and find us and receive us. This reception has been the case for me and for my family in our current church home – a small and thriving congregation called Next Church. They have received us and mothered us in this liminal chapter of our lives. In this photo, I am leading them in an embodied prayer the day after a difficult loss in our community. (With thanks to the photographer and to those whose full faces are in the photo for permission to share this moment.)

This past Mother’s Day was another significant one for me. After being released from ministry by the Christian Reformed Church of North America, Tim and I were both received by another manifestation of the church. We were ordained by a denomination in Canada called the Clergy Support Memorial Church. This denomination was formed in the 1990s as a landing place – a receptacle – for pastors who had been abused or disenfranchised by their churches or denominations. Pastors ordained by the CSMC can bring with them the creeds and confessions that have formed them, while also experiencing the fellowship and accountability of a gathering of clergy people committed quite simply to loving God and neighbor.

The CSMC considers itself a “church without walls.” Their clergy are challenged to follow the command of Jesus to go and make disciples, to baptize and teach – not primarily by inviting people to walk through the doors of the church, but by seeking out those who need the love of Christ and by loving them wherever they are. The presider over our ordination said, “this ordination officializes and consecrates a life dedicated to ministry in service of all, but especially those who are on the fringes of society: the poor, marginalized, the oppressed, the vulnerable and forgotten.”

At the end of my initial conversation with the CSMC, my interviewer said, “I’ve gotten to know you a bit through this conversation and through reading your blogs, so I think I know the answer to this question, but I need to ask it anyway: are you comfortable ministering to and with those in the LGBTQ+ community?” Through the quick tears that sprung to my eyes, I answered in the affirmative.

I close this post by sharing the creed and statement of faith of the CSMC – the denomination through which I have been received, re-reverended and re-mothered by the church. I have shared these words with so many in the last few months. They have been a soothing balm and a firm anchor, a guiding compass and an expansive receptacle – like many of the best words are.

Our Statement of Faith

God is Holy Mystery,
beyond complete knowledge,
above perfect description.

Yet,
in love,
the one eternal God seeks relationship.

So God creates the universe
and with it the possibility of being and relating.
God tends the universe,
mending the broken and reconciling the estranged.
God enlivens the universe,
guiding all things toward harmony with their Source.

Grateful for God’s loving action,
We cannot keep from singing.

With the Church through the ages,
we speak of God as one and triune:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
We also speak of God as
Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer
God, Christ, and Spirit
Mother, Friend, and Comforter
Source of Life, Living Word, and Bond of Love,
and in other ways that speak faithfully of
the One on whom our hearts rely,
the fully shared life at the heart of the universe.

We witness to Holy Mystery that is Wholly Love…

Our Creed

We are not alone,
we live in God’s world.

We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in Jesus,
the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others
by the Spirit.

We trust in God.

We are called to be the Church:
to celebrate God’s presence,
to live with respect in Creation,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
…

In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us.
We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.