So we have reached mid Lent, the fourth Sunday of it, a Sunday we stop and think about the nature of God on our way to the cross and resurrection. The traditional epistle for the fourth Sunday in lent which we aren’t using today states that the heavenly Jerusalem “is the mother of us all” And of course today is Mothering Sunday. It was customary in some places to visit the mother church of one's diocese or chapel on this day. In other places it was customary to visit one's mother on “Mothering Sunday.” Servants were given the day off to go home and they’d take simnel cake with them. Mothering Sunday gives an opportunity to thank God for those have shown us love, given us life and transformed our worlds, usually for the better. These may have been our mothers, our fathers, or other relatives and carers or others who only we know who have nurtured us through the years. Our lives have been enriched and shaped by them, so we thank them and we thank God.
Some services today will be quite twee that everything on earth is wonderful and every relationship is perfect. For the preacher Mothering Sunday is a difficult minefield because it is hard where to pitch it. For some people this day is very painful. We need as well as celebrating where motherly love has been good and life giving, to take time to remember those who haven’t had that in their lives and to also remember those who longed for children but couldn’t have them. So we need to be sensitive today. My thoughts today are on the nurturing love of God. Where did this sermon come into my head? At a bus stop in Pocklington after being with Sarah Caddell at her final probationers committee before ordination. I want to explore nurturing love: the need to be loved, knowing we are loved and celebrating love that conquers all.
The need to be loved. We all want to be loved and valued. When we aren’t loved or feel we aren’t loved we disintegrate.
We yearn for it and call out for it. We live in a climate that yearns for love and calls out for it. We live in a climate that has almost given up because it’s so rubbish out there.
A taxi driver taking me to Pocklington from York station on Thursday – I went by taxi and came back on the bus – well he spent the entire journey telling me the country is broken mate and he gave me a passionate speech on how selfish people are today. We look after ourselves, we don’t love other people.
We live in a climate where we are overwhelmed.
Calling out for love isn’t new. It’s in the Bible. We’ve been on Holy Island this week apart from a day back for Sarah’s committee. One of the joys being there is to share in evening prayer in the church. St Aidan founded a monastery on the island in 635 and since then morning and evening prayer have been said every day. Friday evening was cold and windy so there were only four of us in the church for evening prayer but in the cold I was moved by two passages about this yearning for love. The Psalm was Psalm 116. The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came over me; I was overcome by distress and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord: Lord, save me!” The Lord is gracious and righteous; our God is full of compassion The Lord protects the unwary; when I was brought low, he saved me. Return to your rest, my soul, for the Lord has been good to you.” Then the Old Testament reading was Jeremiah 15. Jeremiah isn’t a happy bunny for most of his prophecy. He’s suffering because he has the weight of delivering God’s message of judgement on his shoulders.
Jeremiah calls on his mother. Alas, my mother, that you gave me birth, a man with whom the whole land strives and contends! I have neither lent nor borrowed, yet everyone curses me. The Lord said “Surely, I will deliver you for a good purpose; surely I will make your enemies plead with you in times of disaster and times of distress.”
Think about good motherly love. Remember when you hurt yourself falling over mum made it better. We see screaming children in cafés. They want love to make it better. Let’s go to the strange Old Testament passage for today from Numbers. “Pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us,” the people say to Moses. They’re impatient and wandering in the wilderness. They are thirsty and hungry. Even if they didn’t like the life they once had in Egypt it was their life. It was familiar and they want to go back to what used to be. They’re grumbling and nothing is right. Life is difficult. This is more than just being unhappy or dissatisfied.
This is how bad it is. They complain that they have no food and then say that they detest the miserable food they don’t have! I don’t think that’s really about what going on around them, but about what’s going on within them. Their stomach may be empty but there’s venom in their hearts and in their lives. They are in a snaky place. And we’ve all been there.
“Pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” How many times have we prayed that? “Just fix it God. Make it stop. Take it away. I don’t want this.”
The poisonous snakes cause the people to pause and reflect. The bronze serpent gives people a physical way to repent and seek healing, a tangible way of putting things right. It has no power of its own, although it is kept as a relic and, sadly, a future generation worships it as if it is a god, and so it has to be destroyed (2 Kings 18). It is simply a focal point for the people to choose to look at it and live; a means of grace, a prompt to turn away from a previous poor choice and live God’s way once again.
The need to be loved.
Then, knowing we are loved.
A 96 year old mother was being interviewed about her long life and how she felt about being a Mother all those years.
‘I feel just wonderful,’ was her reply. ‘For the first time since I became a Mother, I no longer have to worry about my children.’
‘How is that?’
‘They’re both in nursing homes’.”
We have a right to be cared for through all our life. I’d like to urge that today is not just about mothers but everyone who cares.
I go into nursing homes and see the devotion of the staff caring for those who now need others to help them flourish. Knowing we are loved gives us a security and a wellbeing. Knowing we are loved help us see we are worth something. The Bible tells us more than anything else that God is love. Even when that feels mad!
Mother Julian of Norwich lived through two waves of plague, and the violence and unrest that followed. She survived a paralysing illness that nearly killed her. And yet even still, her writings are full of confident hope. She doesn’t even mention the chaos of her context; instead, she focuses on her connection to Christ.
Julian is known as a voice of hope — and also as a proclaimer of the Motherhood of God. In Julian’s visions, Christ appears as “the true Mother of life and of all.” From labouring to bring us into the world, to feeding us with his body in the sacrament of communion, Julian notes all the ways in which Christ does the work of motherhood. And how his work makes our work possible: “The kind, loving mother who is aware and knows the need of her child protects the child most tenderly as the nature and state of motherhood wills….This nurturing of the child with all that is fair and good, our Lord does in the mothers by whom it is done.”
If Jesus is our true Mother, then he truly understands my job. Jesus knows what it is to seek keeping beloved children safe.
As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our mother, and he revealed this in everything, and especially in these sweet words where he says: I am he; that is to say: I am he, the power and the goodness of fatherhood. I am he, the wisdom and the lovingness of motherhood. I am he, the light and grace which is all blessed love. I am he, the Trinity.
As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.
Someone wise wrote this:
“If mothering were only done my mothers, it would be very hard indeed to ensure that everyone received the nurturing, the protection, the love, the sacrifice, the guidance that we need to become the people we are meant to be. As a church community, we are called into a role of mothering that sometimes might need to be just as desperate, fierce, loyal, grieving etc as the mothers in the Bible. If we, as a church, truly love the community in which we are situated, just as God loves it, and if we are to be God’s holy people for God’s needy world, then we will feel the pain of the world’s suffering, and we will be willing to sacrifice something of ourselves in order to bring to birth God’s purposes for the world.”
We need to know we are loved.
Then this…
Celebrating love conquers all
In our Gospel for today, we break into a night-time conversation, a private and important Q & A for the religious leader Nicodemus, who comes to talk to Jesus "by night". Nicodemus recognises Jesus as a teacher, as coming from God, but he is finding it hard, as we might ourselves, to grasp the magnitude of what Jesus is saying about "heavenly things" and why they are important for an earthly life
The text for today starts at verse 14, with John's account of Jesus referring to the passage in Numbers, and explicitly linking the "lifting up" of the Son of Man to show God's love with the lifting up of the bronze serpent before the Israelites in the wilderness as God's saving response to the people's suffering. As we’ve discussed.
In Numbers the people look at the serpent and live, and in John, the people look up to the Son of Man, believe and have eternal life.
Verse 16, one of the most well-known and most quoted verses in the Bible, tells us that "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.". Maybe that verse is the heart of the Gospel. Maybe today we celebrate those who have looked at the world head on and despite its hatred, they’ve offered love to us like there is no one else to love except us. Maybe in your heart today you bring people mothers, fathers, friends, carers, teachers, ministers, people who’ve sacrificed their own well-being to reach out to us who’ve shown us the motherly love of God.
Motherhood is an opportunity to walk in the sandals of Jesus.
Washing the dirty feet of people who don’t recognise the sacrifices you’re making; being unappreciated or disrespected by the very ones you’re serving; trying to teach those who seem uninterested in hearing the amazing truth you’re offering; feeding hungry people who cry for junk food when you have food that will truly satisfy; pouring yourself out for those you love, despite their inability to give anything in return: does this sound familiar? Jesus experienced all of this and far more — to an extent that you and I will never fully experience.
Then we celebrate that love conquers all.
The message of Christianity is that there is nothing that shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing. God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
It seems to me maybe more so than ever we live in a polarised society. Let me illustrate it from two places I’ve reflected on this week while away. The train I was booked on from Berwick upon Tweed to York on Thursday morning was cancelled. The next one was running but the one after was cancelled too. This meant the one I got on was severely overcrowded. I tried to get off at York and people were pushing to get on before I could get off. Me, me and me. My seat. My right. My temper. I love myself more than I love you. That’s where the world is today my friends.On Tuesday afternoon we were in Glasgow and we visited the purple cat café. What do you do when on holiday? Put your own cats in a cattery and visit other cats! Well there were 34 cats in this place. All different, all with needs and quirks, all important, all cared for. 34 cats! Well, that’s what the motherly love of God is like. It cares for us, inexhaustible, eternal and unbounding. It remembers us like a mother at her best. It never gives up. Isn’t that worth celebrating today?
Nicodemus found a deeper relationship with Jesus.
In chapter seven, when others are plotting to arrest Jesus, Nicodemus speaks in his defence, even after several have turned against him. And in chapter 19, Nicodemus even joins Joseph of Arimathea to prepare Jesus’ body for burial after it’s taken down from the cross.
When he helped lay Jesus in the tomb that day, Nicodemus didn’t know what would happen in just two days’ time. We do. We celebrate that love conquers all.
St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century, knew much about love from his mother. He likens God to a mother in his song, and speaks so tenderly of that relationship of love that he can only have learned it at home. Jesus, he says, like a mother you gather your people to you; you are gentle with us as a mother with her children.
Today we celebrate God our Father and our Mother and we pray his love will be seen in the world and it might be shared through us. That way, we will have a very happy and blessed Mother’s Day, renewed and encouraged to be his people, loved for ever.
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