Bible reading: John 19:25-27.

Message.

There are several church services or celebrations which seem to have been around for ever, but in fact haven’t been. Take Harvest Festivals, for example: although celebrations to mark the end of harvest go back to the Middle Ages or earlier, they were secular and rowdy affairs. It was only in 1843 that Robert Hawker, the Vicar of Morwenstow in Cornwall, held the first modern Harvest Thanksgiving service in church. Life on the farms back then was tough and unpredictable, but that year’s harvest was exceptionally good. As the villagers were getting ready for their usual drunken party Hawker stepped in and asked, “So who do you think gave you the harvest?” He then led a service thanking God for harvest blessings. The idea soon caught on (I suspect that Victorian romanticism in face of the Industrial Revolution had something to do with that) and churches have celebrated harvest ever since.

Think, too, about Christmas carol services, usually modelled (more or less) on the format of Nine Lessons and Carols. It may surprise you to learn that the churches tended to turn up their noses at carols, which were very much the songs of the people, sung outdoors or in pubs. But in 1880 Edward Benson, the first Bishop of Truro (yes, we’re still in Cornwall) decided that to hold a popular service which, he hoped, would people out of the public houses. Truro Cathedral was still under construction so the service took place in a temporary wooden building: 400 people came along. The famous King’s College service, based on Bishop Benson’s, only began in 1918. It of course became hugely popular and influential after the BBC began broadcasting it in 1928.

And what about Remembrance Sunday? I was surprised to find that this only dates from 1939, the first year of World War 2. Until then remembrance commemorations had taken place on Armistice Day, November 11^th. However the Government wanted to avoid disrupting the production of vital war materials, so moved them to the previous Sunday. This continued throughout the War and, once it ended, there was debate as to what should happen, as some felt that reverting to Armistice Day kept the focus too firmly on the dead of the World War 1 and downplayed more recent events. The Catholic Archbishop of Westminster proposed that the second Sunday in November should be named “Remembrance Sunday” in commemoration of both World Wars and, in June 1946, the prime minister, Clement Attlee, told Parliament in “the Government felt that this view would commend itself to all quarters of the country” and that it had been approved by The King”. In recent years, of course, Armistice Day has crept back onto the scene which, I feel, has created duplication and confusion.

And so we come to Mothering Sunday (I dare not call it “Mothers’ Day”: not just because I have an ongoing argument over the placing of the apostrophe, but because my own mother would be turning in her grave if she heard me say that; she always insisted on receiving a card with the correct wording on it). Although Mothering Sunday, with its thoughts of asking people to return to their “Mother Church” that day (or, more prosaically, giving servant children a day off so they could go home to their mothers) had existed since at least the 16^th century, it wasn’t really being observed in Britain by the beginning of the 20^th. This bothered a Buckinghamshire lady, Constance Penswick-Smith. Inspired by the campaign to introduce a Mothers’ Day in America, she approached the Mothers Union with the suggestion that a Christian version be re-introduced into England. They liked the idea but felt that the custom had been dead for so long that revival was impossible.

Constance was undeterred. She set to collecting information about the day and its traditional observation, this included research into traditions such as the making of simnel and wafer cakes. She designed Mothering Sunday cards, collected hymns and prayers, and persuaded her four brothers, all Anglican vicars, to hold services in their churches. In 1913 she published a play, “In Praise of Mother: A story of Mothering Sunday”. This was followed two years later by a booklet, “A Short History of Mothering Sunday”. Finally in 1921 her most influential booklet, “The Revival of Mothering Sunday” appeared. Slowly Constance ideas became accepted by the clergy and by the time of her death in 1938 it’s said that the day was being observed in every parish in Britain, and every country in the British Empire. Strangely enough Penswick-Smith never married nor had children; she lived with another woman for 40 years so we may wish to draw our own conclusions!

Although Mothering Sunday today is all about human motherhood, Penswick Smith had a broader vision in mind as she also wanted people to think about Mother Nature, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Mother Church. I haven’t been able to read any of her writings but I suspect she was presenting a rather rose-tinted picture of the past in her desire to revive the tradition. For instance in around 1200 the Bishop of Lincoln wrote: “You should strictly prohibit one parish from fighting with another over whose banners should come first in the  processions at the time of the annual visitation and veneration of the mother church [in other words, the cathedral]. Those who dishonour their spiritual mother should not escape punishment, when those who dishonour their fleshly mothers are, in accordance with God’s law, cursed and punished with death”. All I can say to that is, “Wow”!

I’d like to reflect a bit more on the idea of the Church – not a cathedral but the whole Church of God – as a spiritual Mother. This goes back to Cyprian, who was Bishop of Carthage in what’s now Tunisia, in the first half of the third century. He wrote: “The spouse of Christ cannot commit adultery. She is uncorrupted and pure. She keeps us for God. She appoints the children whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church is separated from the promises of the Church. No-one who forsakes the Church of Christ can receive the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. No-one can have God for his Father, who does not have the Church for his mother. It was as possible to escape outside Noah’s Ark as it is to escape outside of the Church”. Cyprian’s language is flowery but his message is clear: it’s unthinkable that anyone can be a Christian yet not be part of the Church. Or, as someone has written, “Spiritual life without the Church is as incomprehensible and impossible as biological life without a mother”. One’s very salvation would be in question.

Someone who rather surprisingly took up this theme, more familiar to our Catholic friends, was the famous Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon. In a sermon of 1860 he said that every Christian is a child of God; taken all together, we make up the mother, the Church. He expanded his thinking by saying that the Church is a mother because it is God’s chosen means for bringing people to faith; it is a mother because it has the responsibility of feeding these spiritual babies with “the unadulterated milk of the Word” through its ministries; it is a mother because it must nurture and train up her children; it is a mother because it will he always ready to nurse its members when they become sick, not only in body but also in spirit. Spurgeon concluded, “Never does the Church appear so truly a mother as she does to these”.

Although I doubt if she’s ever heard of him, Spurgeon’s words are echoed by Pamela Mandela Idenya, a Catholic lecturer at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. She writes: “We have all been called to collaborate for the birth of new Christians in the faith. We have a role to play as educators in the faith, proclaiming the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. We must each find something to share with others in the Christian life. We must become generous in our faith and freely share it. We cannot hoard the faith in the name of keeping it personal. I cannot say I love the Church when I do not participate in her mission”. This picture of the Church is challenging: how good are we at bringing people to faith in Christ, teaching and nurturing them, caring for them when they are finding life hard? If we are functioning properly as members of Mother Church, these duties will fall on us all.

So the Church can be called our Mother, But might we even dare to use the same title for God? The 14^th century nun and mystic Julian of Norwich famously did just that. She called Jesus our “true Mother” from whom we receive our beginning, our true being, protection, and love, and went on: “God, by the foreseeing endless counsel of all the blessed Trinity, willed that the second Person should become our Mother, our Brother, and our Saviour. Whereof it follows that, as truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. Our Father wills, our Mother works, the Holy Ghost confirms. Therefore it belongs to us to love our God, for in these three is all our life”. These are astonishing words – yet the Bible itself, although briefly, suggests the motherhood of God. For Isaiah quotes God as saying, “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you”. As I said last week, we usually call God our Father and we do tend to think of him as male. But, as spirit, he is beyond gender. That is a human characteristic, not a divine one.

This may not have been the message you were expecting to hear on Mothering Sunday. It may have been too heavy, too theological, too challenging or simply too dull for you to take in. But, you see, I don’t think today should be the excuse for a gushing display of sentiment for, although we’ve obviously all had mothers, it’s a day which so many folk find difficult. Some have had bad experiences of their mothers or as mothers themselves, others have recently lost their mothers or never knew them, still others desperately long to be mothers but cannot conceive, or are being pressurised to have children when they’d prefer not to … the list goes on. Even those who are happy in their families may resent the slushy commercialisation of the day – something with which Constance Penswick Smith would wholeheartedly agree.

So I hope it’s been worth digging deeper into what Mothering Sunday can mean – whether that’s about the Church or God himself. Perhaps the best thought is that, although no human mother is faultless, no personal relationship is perfect; and although every church has its defects and flaws, that’s not true of God. He is the eternal, caring, loving Father and Mother of us all. It is in him – or in her! – that we put our trust.