Sunday 30th March 2025
Mothering Sunday
When our girls were younger, Mothering Sunday was a complication of cards. There were cards for Natalie, cards for their Godmothers, cards for Nanny, cards for Nanny Joyce, and the cards for Grandma. And Grandma was insistent that it was Mothering Sunday not Mother’s Day! You’ve no idea how difficult it is to find ‘To Grandma on Mothering Sunday’ cards on the High Street.
Mothering Sunday, the day in the year when children in service would return to their home village, to their family, to their ‘mother’ church. And on the way they would pick wild flowers. The word ‘Mother’ can be a noun or a verb. As a verb, ‘to mother’ is defined as:
to treat someone with kindness and affection and try to protect that person from danger or difficult
So there is the sense of a Mother church, the church in which we were brought up, but there is also the sense of the church ‘mothering’ us. There are three characteristics which show the way in which the church ‘mothers’ us.
Like a mother, church is , or should be, unconditionally on your side. As church we are there for one another, caring, supporting, ready to go the extra mile; we are there for the homeless, the refugee, the disadvantaged.
Like a mother, church sees your potential. We are each made in God’s image, there is something of God in each of us. Church encourages us to be the very best version of ourselves because that’s how God sees us.
Mothers are always ready to forgive. At the core of our message as church is the fact that we are forgiven people, and we so we should be ready to forgive. And we recall that forgiveness came at a great cost, the Cross on Calvary. It was on the Cross that Jesus stretched out His arms to say, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’, to reconcile us to God. And we, as church, are called to this ministry of reconciliation:
God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us (2 Corinthians 5: 19-20)
Rev Phil
Happy Mothering Sunday Mum/Grandma xx
