Sermon at St. Mary’s Parish Church, West Dean - Mothering Sunday – Morning Worship – Sunday 10 March 2013 (Sermon 21 adapted)
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.
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, if not thousands,
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, Moses’s mother 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. C. S.
Lewis describes in his book “Surprised by
Joy” his relationship with joy Gresham and recounts her words to him during
their wonderful day out to the Golden Valley which I think ring so true: – “The pain
then (in the future), 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
