A Tale of Two Mothers
A sermon preached by the Revd Canon Dr Alison Joyce
on Mothering Sunday, 14th March 2010
One of the things that I love about our congregation here is that we are such a gloriously diverse bunch of people - in terms of our ages, our backgrounds, our family circumstances, the jobs we do (or have done), the views we hold, and our individual journeys of faith. And that is undoubtedly one of our greatest strengths.
Because it is a far more difficult and challenging task to grow a church such as ours, with real diversity in its membership, than it is to build up a congregation where everyone looks pretty much like everyone else, and everybody agrees on just about everything. After all, the Kingdom of God is by its very nature inclusive: it is a place where all will find a welcome; it is a place of diversity, not of uniformity. And so it seems to me that our congregations, too, should properly strive to reflect that complexity in their membership and to use the opportunity that such diversity provides to learn how to live together and worship together, rejoicing in our differences, rather than being divided by them.
But having said that, there are, nevertheless, at least two things that all of us here this morning have in common, regardless of who we are, and where we have come from.
The first of these, at the risk of stating the glaringly obvious, is that every single one of us has had a mother. Now our mother may still be with us, or she may have died many years ago; she may have been the model of a loving, caring, nurturing parent; or she may have been someone with whom we had a very difficult relationship; someone who was neglectful, hard-hearted, possibly even cruel. Or perhaps, like Moses in our first reading this morning, we were brought up in the home of someone who was not our biological mother, who may have been someone we never really knew. I myself lived with another family for a time when I was growing up because I was unable to live with my own parents. But, nevertheless, whatever kind of person our mother may have been; whatever kind of relationship we may have had with her, we are united in all having had one.
The second thing that we all have in common, interestingly enough, is another kind of mother altogether: and that, too, is a relationship that will have been very different for every single one of us. I am speaking of our mother the Church. There will be some of you here today who grew up within the Church: for whom it has always been a place where you felt you belonged. There will be others among you who have had a much more complicated relationship with the Church over the years. It may have been a place that you deliberately turned your back on in earlier days, as I myself did, but perhaps, like me, you have since rediscovered it in a new and life-giving way. Or perhaps it is still a place that you only really go to under sufferance, or out of a sense of duty – a bit like visiting a grumpy old maiden aunt whom you feel obliged to go and see a couple of times a year, because it is expected of you.
But, nevertheless, regardless of the relationship we have with her, the Church is our mother. She may be flawed and frustrating sometimes. We may find ourselves too busy to see her as often as we feel we ought to – but she is ours, nevertheless. And she is there for each one of us.
There are, of course, some very obvious differences between the two kinds of mother of which I have been speaking: our biological mother, and our mother, the Church. Because a human mother, however wonderful, however tireless in her love for us, cannot be with us for ever. Whereas the Church is always there. Whether we feel we need her or not, she will be there, waiting quietly behind the scenes, always ready to welcome us home when the day comes when suddenly we discover that perhaps we do need her to be there after all.
And the second difference is this. Ultimately it is we who help to make the Church the kind of mother that people experience her to be. Because a church can only be a warm, welcoming, loving and forgiving place, if we, the people within it, make it so. And I have to say that that, too, is one of the gifts of our congregation here: you have a wonderful ministry of welcome, which frequently touches the lives of those who come. And that is why ours is now a living, and a growing, and a flourishing community. We don’t get it right all the time – of course we don’t; but it is starting to happen in a very significant way – it really is.
Sadly, of course, for the Church in general, throughout its history, it has not always been like that. Sometimes those inside the Church, those who shape it from within, have got it very badly wrong. It is nothing short of a tragedy, and a travesty of the Christian Gospel, that the Church has so often been experienced by those who come to it as a desiccated, arid, and joyless place.
I recently had reason to revisit some famous lines by the poet and artist, William Blake, who was born in 1757 – who was himself a bitter critic of the life-denying aspects of organised religion in his own era. He wrote this:
I went to the garden of love
And I saw what I never had seen
A chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green.
And the doors of the chapel were shut
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door
So I turned to the garden of love
That so many sweet flowers bore
And I saw it was filled with graves
And tomb-stones where flowers should be
And priests in black gounds were walking their rounds
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
Blake was absolutely right – the wrong kind of religion does not provide us with the acceptance, and nurture, and encouragement and sense of wonder that should properly be ours – the gift of a church that is truly our mother – but instead seems to do its best to destroy all scope for human flourishing altogether – binding with briars our joys and desires. And how sad is that.
I am always very conscious of the fact that there has been a church on this site for over 700 years. It was founded in the 1270s, during the reign of Edward I, the great English law-maker. So there was a church standing here when the Black Death ravaged the English countryside and decimated the population of Europe during the 1340s. The first vicar of Edgbaston whose name is known to us, William Hide, was appointed here in 1519, during the reign of Henry VIII. So this church witnessed all the turbulence of the Reformation era, when England became first a Protestant, then a Catholic, and then a Protestant nation once again.
During the Civil War this church was ransacked by the Roundheads, and used by the local Cromwellian leader, Colonel Tinker Fox, as stabling for his horses. It was subsequently left derelict for ten years, until eventually it was rebuilt, thanks to the steadfast determination of the local people, and some generous benefactors. As Edgbaston prospered during the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian era our church became recognisably the building that we see today, as it was extended and exquisitely furnished and adorned during that time. It survived bomb damage during the Second World War, when several of the fine Victorian stained glass windows were destroyed. During the past twelve months alone it has survived dry rot, blocked drains, vandalism, flooding, and a plague of rats. And yet, it is still here today.
And throughout all this time this church has stood at the very heart of this community; it has been the place where people have celebrated all the most significant events of their lives: the joyful ones: the marriage services of rich and poor alike, and the celebration of new life at baptism. And also the tragedies: the funerals that have taken place here. Buried in our churchyard are people from every walk of life, from titled peers to wandering vagrants. And looking back through the records, I find myself very moved by some of the entries.
On 24th October 1654, Joan, the wife of Thomas Turner, was buried here on the same day that Mary, the daughter of Thomas Turner was baptised. The mother evidently died in childbirth; the child survived. And both services happened on the same day. We find precisely the same thing happening on 21st November 1739, when Mary, wife of Samuel Broughton, was buried here on the same day that Mary, daughter of Samuel Broughton, was baptised.
This church has seen it all; it has seen moments of sublime joy and wonder; it has held in its arms its sorrowing children; it has survived violence, and desecration of its own. And it is still here. And it is still here for us, and for the people of Edgbaston.
Mothering Sunday is a very important occasion in the Church’s year; because motherhood is something that is of crucial importance to our well-being, both as individuals, and as a society. And so it is right that we celebrate all that is good about it. And I am all in favour of us keeping a special day on which we are nice to our mums (and not just because I happen to be one myself.) And that is why, in a few moments time, I shall invite any children who are here, who have brought their mums with them, to take them some flowers.
But it is important, too, to remember that, in origin, Mothering Sunday was in fact a celebration of Mother Church. And that this church, in particular, has stood at the very heart of this community for centuries. The prayers of the faithful have sanctified it; it has echoed with the sounds of their celebration; and it has soaked up the tears of those who have come here to weep. But it has always been here for them; just as it is always here for you. And that is the reason why there are also enough flowers here for everyone, the chaps as well as the ladies: because they are a gift to you from your mother, the Church.
Our gospel reading this morning is unusually brief. The crucified Jesus looks down at his tormented mother, standing at the foot of the cross beneath him, a woman who is about to witness the death of her son; and he looks down at the Disciple whom he loved, who is about to witness the death of the one to whom he had committed his life. And in words as simple as they are beautiful, one of the final acts of our crucified Lord is to entrust them to each other in their loss: ‘Woman, here is your son’; ‘here is your mother.’ And that is his charge to us, as well; perhaps we are motherless; perhaps we are childless; and yet that is the reason why he entrusts us one to another. Because we are members of one family. And the Church is our mother.
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’
And thanks be to God, for that.
Amen