Sermons
2nd March 2008 - Fourth Sunday in Lent (Mothering Sund)
(Week Four of the Stewardship campaign: Working together)
(Also the baptism of Miles Cooper and Mothering Sunday)
In the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ, there is a moment when Jesus is carrying his cross on his grim way to crucifixion surrounded by those who either don’t care what happens to him, or actively seek his destruction, a moment when he stumbles and falls. And as he does so Mary, his mother, watching, has a flashback in her mind to Jesus as a little boy tripping over, and she rushes over to help him. She is as much his mother as he makes his awful journey to the cross, as she was when he first arrived in the world and as he grew up – and on that stumbling journey to his death the sword has indeed pierced her own soul. Mary is seen quite rightly to give us the true model and epitome of motherly love and many of the titles that become hers in church history have this word in them, Mary Mother of God, Mother of the Church, Mother of Priests, etc. We celebrate motherly love today. Motherly love. It has an almost sentimental ring to it that seems to me some way from the lives of most of the mothers I know. And anyway you may be asking yourself what can we mean in this p.c. age by singling out one parent – can’t fatherly love be all that motherly love is? Perhaps not. For motherly love, read tough love. Mothers are called to the hardest practical and emotional job in the world, and in the life of the family they are often called to fulfil many differing roles. It isn’t, I think, that mothers are hard-wired in such a way as to make them better at multi-tasking, but there is something within the relentless routines of child care that instils an ability and desire to be the still centre in the midst of family chaos. Motherly love is constant, a love that continues through all the difficulties and joys of caring for children as they grow up. It is a love that sits through the night with a sick child, a love that waits up endlessly for the partying teenager to return, a love that has its soul pierced with many swords as grown up children enter into the maze of hazards that adult life presents.
But there is also something very physical about being a mother, there is an aspect of parenting involved that fathers will never have emotional access to because they do not have to endure and enjoy the business of nurturing life within one’s own body or undergoing the astonishing pain and joy of childbirth. So we are right to think of Mary when we celebrate Mothering Sunday in church, Mary, closest to Jesus through his life and closest to him now as she raises our prayers to him in Heaven.
But what of that journey to the cross, the journey that we live each year in Lent, the journey that leads through and beyond death? Ponder for a moment the scene depicted on the rood beam above us. Only Mary and the beloved disciple John are pictured at the foot of the cross. All the men apart from the beloved disciple have fled, they have abandoned Jesus. But here stands Mary beneath the cross, like another Eve, a second Eve, standing beneath another tree, but this time promising obedience, accepting her role as the mother of the new family that Jesus is forming, receiving from her dying son the vocation to shield the beloved disciple, the lone representative amongst the disciples who has clung to Jesus, the beloved disciple who symbolizes the life of the new family, the church, a family that is to have Mary as its mother. And we are that family, members of the one body together, children of Mary as she continues to protect and pray for the body of her son in the world, the body she sees scorned by so many in the world.
The church itself is often perceived as sharing characteristics with Mary and with mothers through the ages – the church is always there, always available, her ministry to her sons and daughters is almost perhaps taken for granted, and like mothers you don’t really expect to have to pay for her services, there is something a little bit un-British in putting a price on such a gracious aspect of our lives. So, many people perhaps imagine that the church is supported financially through some sort of divine bankroll, or perhaps through accumulated historic wealth, or perhaps through government money. There is a sense perhaps that we would rather not really know about money and the church, can’t it just be there as it always has been - without us having to know how it all works. Well in short, no. This lovely church of St Andrew’s in which Miles comes to receive the great gift of baptism this morning actually only functions at all because it is supported financially by you and by nobody else. And if the church nationally and in this place is to continue to offer that amazing ministry of being always available, always ready to offer God’s message of love in Jesus, always ready to care for the sick and the dying, to rejoice with those whose lives are full, to listen to those who are lost, to support new ventures and ideas, to reach out to the community around, then it needs to be run as efficiently as any other business. In these first four weeks of Lent we have as a church been trying to consider our responsibilities as individuals to support the exciting and dynamic life of this church financially, so that when Miles passes this way in twenty years time he will still find it to be a flourishing parish church and not a badminton hall. And actually we can only guarantee him that if each of takes up this call from God to assess seriously where we are as a parish in terms of our future stability. As I said last week, in a church where there are so many things happening that the list seems endless, the time has come for us to put our house in order so that we can look forward with confidence. There is no divine financial backstop, we are the body of Christ in this place, we are the people charged with the responsibility to keep alive the Christian message in this place. And what would we feel if Miles passes this way in twenty years time looking for the church where he was baptized and he finds it has disappeared, finds that the people of his parent’s generation failed to take up the call to commit themselves to preserving the one thing that keeps alive the truth that surpasses all others?
Mothering Sunday is a good a time to ponder, to wonder what it can all be about, in a world where many mothers and children go hungry, where people are the agents or victims of cruelty and violence, in a world where even the little children and the unborn are not protected. This is a good moment to ponder with Mary in the midst of the busy world, and to wonder at the great daring of God coming to us as a fragile little baby, dependent on the love of that human Mother. For in the birth of that little baby the whole world is offered the gift of transformation. God enters fully into human life, into the fallen world of violence and despair, the world which will thrust him onto the cross. God enters this world to show us that we are already in his.