We’ll start this morning with a pop quiz. This is one I like to give and which I have given before at various times here. There are few words that feel more warm and cuddly than “dogma.” It means core principles or ideas. Our church has just two dogmas. What are they? They are the Trinity, and that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. Those are actually very warm and even cuddly when we think of the ways we are invited and encouraged to build our relationship with the Lord.

The dogma of the Trinity was adopted at the Council of Nicaea in 325AD because the Church was and is resolutely monotheistic, and needed to reconcile that with the Apostles’ bore witness to Jesus as “One with the Father” and had the distinct experience of the Holy Spirit.

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Happy Mother’s Day. I used to think Mother’s Day was invented by the advertising industry to boost sales of greeting cards, flowers and the like. But the truth is happier.

Mother’s Day was conceived by Anna Jarvis to honor her own mother, who had rallied women to promote sanitation and public health in Appalachia in the Civil War era and afterwards. The first official celebration was in 1908 at a Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia. Her campaign to make it a national holiday led to President Woodrow Wilson declaring the 2nd Sunday in May as Mother’s Day in 1914.

We all have Mothers, starting with the woman who brought each of us into the world. That may or may not be the same woman or women who have nurtured, blessed and guided us whether or not they were legally or technically a mother. And while we all have different experiences with our own mothers, adoptive mothers, step-mothers and mothering aunts, grandmothers and guardians, we share a general sense of what motherhood ought to be.

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