What
day is it today? Mothers’ Day – is the wrong answer! At
least, it might be Mothers’ Day out in the world, but here in
Church it’s Mothering Sunday, and that, in fact, is only
tangentially about human mothers!
Today is the fourth Sunday in
Lent, and it’s long been known as Laetare Sunday, or
Refreshment Sunday – it’s half-way through Lent, and in
days when people kept it rather more strictly than they do now, it
was a day when you could relax the rules a little. And the tradition
grew up that on that day, you went to the mother church in your area
– often the cathedral, but it might have just been the largest
church in your area.
Families went together, and then it became
traditional for servants to have time off to go home and see their
families on that day, if they lived near enough.
I don’t
know if any of you have been watching “Lark
Rise to Candleford”
on a Sunday evening, as we have I bought the book to read on
holiday, as they had reprinted it. In that, the author writes that
girls of ten or eleven were sent into service, because their families
were too poor to keep them at home. It sounds harsh, but often, when
they went to their first place, they had never really known what it
was to have a full tummy, and if they were lucky, they’d get
given food parcels to take home when they went. Although gradually
they got more regular time off, when it first started, knowing that
at least on Mothering Sunday you would get home must have been really
comforting for these kids.
It also has echoes of Holy Mother
Church – not a concept we’re familiar with, but one that
is meaningful to many Christians.
And is also a day for
remembering God’s love for us. We’re having the readings
for the Fourth Sunday in Lent today, but if we’d had the
traditional Mothering Sunday readings, we would have heard Jesus
weeping over Jerusalem:
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Your people
have killed the prophets and have stoned the messengers who were sent
to you. I have often wanted to gather your people, as a hen gathers
her chicks under her wings. But you wouldn't let me.”
The
image of Jesus as a mother hen! What we remember on Mothering Sunday
isn’t just our mothers, although that, too, but the home we
have in the Church and, above all, the wonderful love of God.
So
we’re going to sing “He’s got the whole wide world
in his hands”, to remind us of that love!
(Words
to that effect, anyway – I didn’t stick to my script!)