Sermon: Mothering Sunday 2013

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 10th March 2013

Service:

Eucharist

Readings:

Exodus 2:1-10

Luke 2:33-35

Today is an opportunity for thanksgiving as we welcome two children, Kimberley and James, into the fellowship of Christ’s Church.  To mark the beginning of their journey in faith on this Mothering Sunday transforms the commercial and social pressures around “Mother’s Day”.  We embrace a richer more dynamic and corporate vision around “mothering”. We do this not be referring to an abstract notion of “Mother Church”; but by using our gifts in nurturing one another.  

For weeks now card shops have been swathed in wall to wall pinkness: of cards for mum, and mummy and mother.  We have as individuals, and as a society, a complex relationship to mothers and motherhood.  Our own experience of motherhood and mothers means that today we bring thanks, sadness, worries, guilt, confusion and grief.  In the media mothers are categorised as working, single, older: each facing criticism and encouragement by turn.  We stereotype the yummy mummy as the latte drinking epitome of ambitious parenting; and so equate motherhood with womanhood that the childless feel pilloried too. 

A piece in yesterday’s Guardian subverted these criticisms and the romanticisation of motherhood with personal reflections of a grieving daughter becoming a mother, a married woman discovering she’ll be childless, a divorcee wrestling with an estranged child.  Beyond that, the “Children’s Society” and our Bishops and Archbishops have drawn attention to the impact of austerity and what politicians describe as “tough and necessary changes” to the benefits system on children and child poverty.

We know that the reality is complex: it’s a complexity reflected in Malcolm Guite’s sonnet written with today in mind. We do, in his words, give thanks for those who loved and laboured for so long, who brought us, through that labour, to fruition to the place where we belong. He is also mindful of those single mothers forced onto the edge whose work the world has overlooked, neglected, invisible to wealth and privilege, but in whose lives the kingdom is reflected. He also goes on to challenge us, as member of the body of Christ, to work for that Kingdom as we embrace young and old regardless of marital or parental status:  Now into Christ our mother church we bring them, who shares with them the birth-pangs of His Kingdom.

In response our biblical texts paints an honest and complex picture – not just of being a mum, but of the joy and cost of love, and of the purpose and potential of our own lives.  They reflect the gift of new life and the challenge of letting go.  It’s all a very long way from the overwhelming pinkness of the card industry; it presents a challenge to how we live together in community, in fellowship. Today’s readings lead us into thinking about love that is committed and passionate, that calls us into unexpected relationships, that is resilient and altruistic, that faces risk and uncertainty, that is consistent in bearing joys and pain.

Exodus presents a tableaux of realistic and resourceful females.  The bonds between mother and child, child and sister, lead to bold and imaginative action. There is a moment of letting go in order to preserve his life.  Human sympathy is evoked by a helpless baby. 

When the pharaoh’s daughter discovers the child, she deliberately overlooks the facts both that he is ‘foreign’ and that helping the child would involve disobeying her father’s decree.  Moses' sister has watched and waited; she negotiates a continuation of maternal nurturing in a palace removed from the child’s home. There is risk on both sides; there is longing that this child should grow and flourish. God works through the emotions and determined and resourceful actions of women.  Moses is let go – and found and raised in a context far removed from his own roots; yet he becomes the leader and liberator of his people.  For all his temperamental flaws, God is able to work through him; just as God works through us, in our vulnerabilities, gifts and relationships.

Today we are also confronted by a poignant and moving moment in Luke’s gospel narrative. It is one which reveals Mary the suffering mother who is forever alongside her son.  His death is implicitly yet cryptically foretold from the start by Simeon, and her involvement at the end and afterwards is foreshadowed in these ominous words.  These few lines are the source and inspiration of the pieta – the grieving mother cradling her child.  Not only does that resonate painfully with our experience of loving and letting go, but it also reflects the depth of God’s love for us.  Simeon has uttered words of universal salvation – and also the cost of this for mother and son.  It is sobering reading for Mothering Sunday.  It foreshadows Jesus' suffering and death; it expresses the cost of love which liberates us from our pride, selfishness and human tendency to get things wrong. Jesus bears the cost and restores our dignity that we may share his risen life.

James and Kimberly enter into a new community and a new pattern of life.  We pray for God’s love and grace to be poured out on them in the power of the Spirit.  Although their parents and siblings will shape them with – family traits, particular gifts, a given set of relationships; there is also a letting go to explore and become who they are. Sometimes that will bring surprise and disappointment – the photographer Rankin, who brought us the image of the Queen smiling, was all set to become an accountant (as his parents hoped).  He decided that the arts students had more fun. So he embraced a very different career than the one he’d been prepared for.

Yesterday, the girl choristers and I spent time together thinking about media perceptions of success – and also our own passions.  We talked about growing through disappointments and failures, of pursuing passions and of God’s purposes for us.  We hope for life in all its fullness; we pray for the fruits of the Spirit – in love, joy, patience, gentleness, generosity and self-control. Whatever we personally long for, give thanks for, or mourn the loss of, today is saying something profound to each one of us. 

We, like James and Kimberley, to be baptised come to new birth in the household of God; to flourish we need the loving attention and encouragement and witness of every person here.  To be mindful therefore of how we relate to one another – what we say, how we say it; what we are prepared to stand up for – or pass by. Together we learn, love and let go.  Together we are freed from guilt and pain of our “if onlys”; together we delight in human flourishing and tenderness; together we bear heartache and joy. 

Together we face our isolation.   To speak of  “Mother Church” is a mothering Church; “Mother Church” means each one of us living as disciples with and for one another.

Jesus was God with us: in birth, in life and in death. His mother too will bear the suffering and pain in an intensely intimate way.  Yet it is in his death on the cross, that love is most fully shown in selflessness and self-giving.  Only that generosity can bring forgiveness and healing and renewed hope. Indeed, there springs up for us new life.

Today James and Kimberly are baptised into Christ’s death and resurrection.  In this act they become members of the whole body of Christ; so rather than narrowing responsibility for growth in faith and love, we all share that responsibility.  We are, in our differences, members of one community – a place of mutual accountability; where our human capacity to forgive, to exercise patience, to show compassion are stretched by God’s grace.   Jesus was able to show love without limits; his mother witnessed the cost of that. 

We are to demonstrate to the world the breadth and depth of that love.  Moses brought the commandments down from the lofty place of mountain top encounter and called the people to live by them – commandments about honouring one another and loving God.  Jesus embodies that love and calls us to show that love to every person we encounter.

Reaching potential; facing disappointment; showing compassion; offering encouragement; sharing wisdom: as parents and godparents and worshippers to children, friends and strangers. Today is a day of promise – the oil of gladness and blessing, water of refreshment and forgiveness, light to guide and illumine. Today is a day of encounter – in bread and wine, that the Spirit may nurture in us those gifts we so crave, and our world so longs for.  We are a community defined by and shaped by those gifts: sharing with one another the burdens of care and nurture, the joys and pressures of life. That is the essence of “mothering”.

Today is a day, whatever our experience of mothers, whatever our disappointments and hopes for motherhood, to be embraced once more by the love and grace of God.  In the words of Scripture, in the sharing of peace, in the gifts of the Eucharist we catch a glimpse of God’s generous and transforming love.  Through us, that same love pours out into the world.  We share the burdens, heart breaks, joys and hopes for transformation in all that we do and are. As individuals, and as a community, we all share the birth pangs of God’s Kingdom.