SERMON 21 - SUNDAY 10 MARCH 2013

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 2:33-35

May 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