Sermon at St. Mary’s Parish Church,
West Dean - Mothering Sunday – Morning Worship – Sunday 10 March 2013
Exodus
2:1-10; Colossians 3:12-17; Luke 2:33-35May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
When I was asked to take this Mothering Day service and I first looked at today’s readings, I was in quite a quandary as to how to start off my sermon or talk. The Lectionary gives the preacher a choice of texts to follow and on Monday I was just one of a group of several trainees meeting in Sarum College who had been tasked with delivering a sermon today - and we all expressed apprehension and exchanged some quite different ideas.
Since Monday, I have seen literally hundreds of
advertisements from commercial organisations as to how best to celebrate
“Mothers’ Day” as it is more commonly known in the secular world – from cards,
flowers and meals to some quite bizarre
and exotic gifts – cruises, weekends in Paris and so on. This
got me into thinking about what the origins of this festival were and
how did it develop into the secular celebration we often see today.
Mothering Sunday is clearly set out as a festival within the
Church’s Lectionary and indeed, when putting together this service, there were
plenty of both on-line and good old fashioned off-line resources to help me –
not least from the Church of England itself.
Unlike Fathers’ Day, which started in 1910 in the United States to show
equality of honouring fathers with mothers, Mothering Sunday goes much further
back and its origin, whilst steeped in ecclesiology, was not quite what we see
today and I thought that I would share my research with you.
Mothering Sunday always falls on the fourth Sunday in Lent
and as such has no connection with the American celebration of Mothers’
Day. Traditionally, it was the day when
children, mainly daughters who had gone to work in domestic service, were given
the day off to visit their mother and family.
As we know, now it is the day when children give cards, flowers and
presents to their mother.
Churchgoers, generally, worshipped in the church nearest to
where they were living – although this is not always the case today – known as
their “daughter church” – and in the sixteenth century it was felt important
that people returned to their home or “mother church” at least once a year.
So each year, in the middle of Lent, everyone would visit
their “mother church” – the main church or cathedral of the area.
Inevitably, the return to the “mother” church became an
occasion for family re-unions when children who were working away returned home
(it was quite common in those days for children as young as ten to leave
home and find work away).
Most historians think that it was the return to the
“Mother Church” which led to the tradition of children, particularly those
working as domestic servants, or as apprentices, being given the day off to
visit their mother and family.
How lovely it would be if our modern day employers
allowed their staff a long weekend off to visit their mothers and go to their
mother’s local parish church once a year)!
Unfortunately, I cannot see that happening. In today’s modern age many children are
separated from their parents by many hundreds of miles – often across
continents.
As they walked along the country lanes, children
would pick wild flowers or violets to take to church or give to their mother as
a small gift – hence the tradition of giving flowers to the mums. The term given to these visits was to go
“a-mothering”.
Another explanation is that Mothering Sunday
derived from the original Epistle scriptural text for the Fourth Sunday in Lent
as set out in the Book of Common Prayer before the modern Lectionary came into
being – Galatians 4:26 – which reads
“.. Jerusalem
that is above is free and she is our mother”.
Paul, writing to the church of Galatia, was wanting
to explain to the Christian community there what their relationship as
Christians was to the Jewish law which the Galatians were being told, by
others, they were breaking by following Paul’s teachings.
In the full passage (Galatians 4:21-31), the two
children born by Hagar and Sarah to Abraham are seen as symbolising two
promises from God:
One is the Torah
which is restraining and earthly. The
other is the Gospel, which is
spiritual and liberating. The Galatians
are told to regard themselves as the children of the Gospel.
“Mothering Sunday” has also been called Refreshment Sunday
amongst other names. It stands right in
the middle of Lent and traditionally it has been seen as the one day when the
rules of fasting can be relaxed. You can eat chocolate and drink wine
today! I rather like that idea. In some
Church of England churches, even today, it was also seen as the one and only
day during the period of Lent when a couple could get married.
Finally, it was also a day when the congregation engaged in
a tradition known as “clipping the church” – when everyone would encircle the
church holding hands – a bit difficult with the size of our modern
congregations and embrace the building.
I don’t expect anyone to do that today!
Enough of Church history! Neither our modern Lectionary nor
Book of Common Prayer has the Galatians reading assigned for today – but they
do have the readings which we heard – and how much more they are relevant
too. Both the Old Testament reading from
Exodus – part of the Torah - and Luke (one of the Gospels) are well known
stories which often appear in the junior bible stories – the first where a
mother abandons her child out of the deepest love and emotion she can have – to
protect him for a certain death. What a
wrench, though, it must be for any
mother to be separated from her child.
In the passage immediately before the one we had read to us,
Pharaoh has given commands to ethnically cleanse his country by culling the
number of Israelites in his country - killing every male child immediately
after he is born by throwing him in the Nile.
In a bid to save her new-born child, she hides him in the rushes by the
side of the Nile where he is shortly picked up by the daughter of the very same
Pharaoh who has decreed he should die.
In a twist of providence, the child’s mother is later employed to act as
his nurse.
So many parallels with the Gospel story – the slaughter of
the innocence and the hiding of the child to avoid capture – ironically in the
case of Jesus by taking him to the very country where the kinsmen of Moses were
being enslaved and persecuted. It must have been a wonderful re-union for the
mother of Moses but, in its way, must have been quite painful to know that the
child being cared for by the Egyptian princess is the very child you went
through labour and birthing pains for.
He was, after all, her flesh and blood.
In our Gospel story, Mary and Joseph have taken the baby
Jesus to the Temple to present him to the Lord and give praise and thanksgiving
for his birth. There they meet Simeon
and Anna, two devout old worshippers. We
read that Simeon had the Holy Spirit on him and that he immediately recognized
whom the baby was. After taking Jesus in
his arms he gave praise in the words of the Nunc
Dimittis (which we say at Evening Prayer) and Mary and Joseph marvelled at
these words.
But, in the next breath, Simeon says something to Mary which
must have sent a cold shiver down her spine – “This child is destined to cause a falling and rising of many in Israel
and to be a sign that will be spoken against so that the thoughts of many
hearts will be revealed. A sword will
pierce your own soul too”.
Prophetic words indeed – Mary, 33 years later was to witness
the cruellest of deaths of the child which she had just borne and whose tiny
hands clenching in her arms, would one day be nailed to a crude instrument of
execution. One wonders what she must
have thought.
All parents have only the best thoughts and intentions for
their children. Both the mother of Moses
and the mother of Jesus could not have known, in those early days, how life
would pan out for their first born sons. But of one thing that is certain, both
mothers lavished so much love on them and formed them into the people they
became and Mary’s love for her son clearly lasted beyond his crucifixion and
resurrection.
Mothers bear many strains and anguish. The joy of having children bears with it physical
pain and suffering too. Recently we have
been reading in our Lent Groups about the relationship that C. S. Lewis had
with Joy Gresham and her words to Jack during their wonderful day out to the
Golden Valley ring so true: – "The pain then, is part of the happiness now. That's the deal." In other words,
whenever there is much happiness there is likely to be pain at some time in the
future – and the happier the experience or relationship now, the greater the
pain is likely to be in the future.
Our mothers are, or have been, cooks, nurses, storytellers,
waitresses, bottle washers, shoppers, designers, taxi drivers, preachers,
teachers, and much much more.
Human mothers have a bond with their children which is
probably the strongest in nature.
The reading which I did not choose today is the piece of
scripture when Jesus from the Cross says to his mother Mary who is standing
next to the disciple John,
“Dear
woman, here is your son”, and to John, “Here is your mother. From that time on, this disciple took her into
his home”.
Even in the middle of his own agony on the Cross, Jesus
realised also the pain which both mother and disciple were going through – a
mother needed a son and the disciple a mother.
We all need our mothers, whether our natural mother or our
mother church. For those who have lost
their mothers today can be the painful part of the happiness you have had as
described by Joy Lewis. As we later
give and receive flowers as a token of the love which exists between mother and
child, let’s not forget that such love comes from God himself and is a sample
of the love that he has in amazing abundance for all of us. Like the Levi woman, the mother of Moses, and
Mary, mother of Jesus, they sacrificed up their sons for the greater glory of
God.
Amen
