Mothering Sunday Reimagined

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Sunday 14 March 2021 by Revd Sally Hitchiner.

It is another strange Mothering Sunday. Last year this was the first Sunday we were not able to meet in our building and we live streamed this service with closed doors. This year too, though we are able to open our doors and worship with you in our building as well as online, Mothering Sunday remains strange. For many families they have had to reimagine Mothers Day rituals.

Mothering Sunday has been reimagined down the years many times from the days when servant girls in the large stately homes were permitted one Sunday a year to walk back to their mother church and see their families, to what we have now as a celebration of individual mothers and grandmothers. Mothering too has been reimagined.

If you were to have heard a Mothering Sunday sermon any time from the 1850s to the 1950s or 60s you would have heard an ode to an ideal of mothering: a woman who is always at home waiting for her loved ones to need her, always gentle and thoughtful, distant from her own drives and passions in order to be the ultimate source of safety and nurture. Her only fault was that she worries for us. The angel of the house. The imagination of what a mother was – what the ideal of womanhood was – was narrow.

Mothering has also changed dramatically within most of our lifetimes. In the 1970s pioneer middle class women stayed in their professions even after having children so began to expand the imagination of what is possible in terms of female vocation. By the 1980s and 90s this had become the norm and even of those who stayed at home, very few mothers felt being a mother was their ONLY vocation.

We lost a few stereotypes as the presence of more female journalists and media heads meant that more stories from women about their experience were told. Women spoke about miscarriage and the pain of longing to have a child when biologically this was not happening. The pain of losing a child or a mother or having a mother who is not what they hope for. Women spoke of their challenges with the constantly self-sacrificing expectation of motherhood. Society heard different stories of women with their varying passions and gifts who approached mothering in very different ways. And from women who did not want to be mothers.

Fathers became routinely involved with childrearing and popular images of masculine men feeding a baby or rocking one to sleep expanded the possibilities for women further.

And in all of these ways you would have thought we would have ended up with a broader definition of motherhood.

However what we found was just a new series of narrow ideals that often contradicted each other.

Mothers were expected to be always unambitious and at home but also aspirational, educated career woman. Women were expected to be glamorous with perfect bodies at the same time as getting little more than a few hours sleep with a crying baby.

What we found was a narrowing of the imagination with plenty of contradictory expectations to the point of impossibility for real women. Mothers, all mothers, constantly felt guilty that they weren’t good enough.

However Mothering Sunday sermons did become more nuanced, recognising that the cliche does not work for every woman. Including concern for those for whom Mothering Sunday is the worst day of the year, the only Sunday they choose to miss church because they just do not fit the imagination.

In 1994, 27 years and 2 days ago in fact, we ordained our first woman priests and the possibility emerged that the vicar of the church, the person preaching the mother’s day sermon itself could be a real live mother.

So we heard Mother’s Day sermons that says mothers are important but were mostly clichés and we heard Mother’s Day sermons that were mostly criticism. Both were necessary stages. We can’t go back to the cliché, but neither can we simply keep repeating the criticism now we’ve heard that. So what can we say in church on Mothering Sunday now?

The thing we do know about all of us gathered here, whether we are in this building or joining from our homes is that we are gathered around Jesus. So what does Jesus, have to say to mothers and to us all about mothering? Let’s look at our gospel reading.

The first thing we see is that Jesus notices his mother. Even in the most painful, most challenging moment of his life. Even in that moment when he is supposedly doing the most important act in the whole of the universe, he notices her. It would have been particularly hard for Jesus to speak due to the suffocating nature of the crucifixion pulling the body out of shape and you can hear that by how brief Jesus’ sentences are. He squeezes out the last things he wants to say, the things that are too important to leave unsaid before he dies.

And he uses some of those phrases to notice and address his mother.

Surely this is every mother’s worst nightmare. Standing helpless to intervene as your firstborn is dying alone and in agony. The connection of someone you have carried in your body, carried in your heart, now experiencing everything Jesus is experiencing must be almost too much to bear. A figurative sword is piercing her heart as she witnesses her son dying even as a literal sword will shortly pierce Jesus’ heart. But she has refused to leave him and he refuses to leave her.

Jesus is present to her. He sees her, he acknowledges her, he listens. This doesn’t take the pain all away but the sharing of pain makes it more bearable. Doesn’t it? When it’s understood we realise we are not alone. Even in his moment of deepest agony Jesus reaches out to stay connected to Mary. You could even say Jesus is maternal towards her. Mary represents the Jewish people in John’s Gospel and here we see Jesus fulfilling his own prophesy. Jesus in his most abandoned is also most maternal as he gathers her up like a hen gathers her chicks.

And what Jesus does with this conversation with his mother, at the turning point of all history starts something fundamentally new.

Motherhood is always a miracle of newness. In some sense every child born or raised is a virgin birth. No parent can deliver all the components to make another human life. One of the common experiences when a new born baby is placed in the arms of it’s parents, is that of wonder and awe and gratitude. This is something we could not have made on our own. And that feeling is right. Every child is a gift from God. Every child has needed the spark of God to make the cells and DNA of two people become a new human being with their own thoughts and ways of engaging with the world.

But now Jesus is doing a new miracle. Mary finds that Jesus is with her and then she finds that there are others with her too. A seemingly random collection of friends and family. Perhaps not people she would have chosen but often in times of crisis this is the case. Jesus turns to her and says “Woman here is your son” indicating not to himself but to John, the beloved disciple. And he turns to the disciple and says “Behold your mother.”

While most of the disciples had scattered, like a mother hen, Jesus gathers those he loves together, under his wings.

This is more than a kind provision for his broken-hearted mother and friend. Jesus here is starting something that reimagines what mothering, what family is all about.

There is a lot of debate about when the church started. We mostly celebrate it at Pentecost when the male disciples had regathered but there’s a strong case to say that the start of the understanding of Church, perhaps even the thing that they gathered around was Mary and John and these women.

Jesus outlines a new way to think of family. In Jesus’ imagination family is not merely about biology. Our understanding about blood relations becomes something different. Now Mary and John are joined in a covenanted, committed relationship through Jesus.

The church sometimes lives up to this. I have spoken to many people in our congregation who have travelled the world, turned up in a church in a city in a totally different culture and found a community who have treated them like family. Entry to this family of Christ is now not by biology but by the blood of Christ.

My parents live in inner-city Liverpool and are part of a small Anglican church. They were short of youth leaders so the curate asked my mother if she would consider it. My mother has a lot more to her than she looks but she does not look like a youth leader. She is a five foot granny. There was a particular member of the youth group who was always pushing boundaries who didn’t really know what to make of her. She was so difficult. But when it came to her birthday my mum did what she always does for people on their birthday and she made her a cake, she iced it, wrote the teenager’s name and surrounded it in candles. Then the entire youth group sang Happy Birthday. Well, this teenager had never had anyone buy her a birthday cake let alone make her one. Well, there was no question of anyone cutting it, she wouldn’t let anyone near it, she took it home and kept it in her bedroom. And after this she was always at my mum’s side, anyone who gave her any trouble had this young woman to answer to.

If you are feeling lack of connection to your mother or your children today Jesus is reaching out to you. If Jesus reached out to Mary from the cross, how much more is he reaching out to you, who are now his family too, today as he sits in glory. Share your sorrows with Jesus today.

Are you feeling at an end of yourself today? Come to Christ, the mother who gathers and who creates new life. Who is near to you today who Jesus might be inviting you to become family to? Is there a mother on your street? Could there be a beloved child near you who you could reach out to with the love of Jesus?

Most fundamentally, Jesus calls us, mothers, all of us, to reimagine with him what motherhood, what family could be. To turn on our imaginations to the possibilities that the women, the people of all genders, in our lives might more than we thought they are… and to hold that same wonder as we encounter them as we do when we hold a new-born in our arms… that each person is a unique and mysterious gift from God. But then to imagine with Jesus a wider concept of family, a family that has a place for all. And we are recognised in this family not by birth but by baptism.

Happy Mothering Sunday, Happy Mothers Day is now not a platitude but a declaration. Happy… Blessed are you Mothers, you women, you people. Blessed are you. Not for our ideas of who you are but for God’s invitation to be seen by Jesus, to be gathered by Jesus to discover others who will be family with you, and to be held with the same wonder with which we hold a brand-new baby. Not for what it can do for us but for the sheer wonder of who she is.

Happy Mother’s Day!