Sermon. Mothering Sunday and the Family of the Church

Sermon. 26 March 2017. St Vedast-alias-Foster, London

Mothering Sunday

John 19.25-27

It was the end of a clergy conference. I was waving off a friend. I said: “The Mother of Gd be with you!”. I happened to know that “The Mother of Gd be with you” is a standard Greek farewell. I had a Greek dentist then. He said that when he was a child, he literally couldn't leave the house without his own mother calling out: “the Mother of Gd be with you”. “I Panagia mazi sou!” However, the other clergy friend, to the right of me, looked at me with some alarm. I knew him to be of a Protestant disposition. He asked tentatively: “Do you... pray to Mary?” I said I most certainly did.* To his credit, he didn't walk off, or damn me to hell. Rather, he suggested we talked about it.

I rambled on and on (if you can imagine such a thing). I don't think I mentioned today's gospel passage, although I might have done. There is a school of thought which says that the Beloved Disciple in John stands for all of us. So when Jesus says to him: “Behold your mother”, he is actually saying that Mary is the Mother of the whole Church, from that moment on, and for evermore. Any way, after saying what I had to say, he replied: “So really your argument is that it is like Jesus saying that Gd is the Gd of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and is the Gd of the living and not of the dead. The saints are alive, and as such we can have access to them.” I was overwhelmed. He added: “When I was in training – at Oak Hill Theological College, mind – I was always taught 'Do not resent the Bible verses which speak against your own views'.” I was the more overwhelmed.

The Mother of Gd be with you.

I am not going to say that that clerical colleague began a devotion to our Lady. I don't think he did. But I did and do. And I add that, of all the things Protestant-minded people can pick up Catholic-minded people, I find quite high on the list is the matter of prayers addressed to the saints. And I have to say I am constitutionally unable to see any problem with it.

There would of course be a huge problem, if Catholics thought it necessary to pray to saints, instead of praying to Gd, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, because Gd as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is (allegedly) too distant, or too angry, or too judgemental (or whatever). That would be as wrong as anything. But of course that is not what Catholics do. Catholics as much as any Christian can make their own the statement:

“Anyone can pray to Gd at any time, in any place, about anything, in any way.”

And/but/and Catholics add that it makes our life richer, and helps us and others to be good disciples, if we also ask our friends to pray for us. We ask our friends to pray for us in this life, and we benefit from that, even if logically our own prayers to Gd should 'do'. And we can ask our friends to pray for us in eternity. The saints in eternity are our friends.

In other words, heaven is full. As well as Gd, there are also our friends, and that is to our Gd. Whater heaven is, it is not like this: not like a prison chapel I know of. Within Lincoln castle there used to be a working prison, now a prison museum. The chapel is distinctive. It was designed with boards which flap around each prisoner (who had to stand throughout). This meant each prisoner could only see the preacher. They were literally boxed in. No! The truer idea is that heaven is full and heaven is a social place, a place to spend time with your friends, and indeed a heaven that can begin now, when we ask our friends (wheresoever they be) to pray for us.

The Mother of Gd be with you.

I find that my theme for this Mothering Sunday is actually friendship. I further find I have no problem with that. For various reasons. Firstly, because the question of whether the theme for today is mothers and motherhood is – well, let us just say it is contested. Secondly, because I must have things to say to those of us who are not mothers, and also for those for whom the whole issue is fraught with discomfort or pain. And thirdly – although I am not a parent myself – I think I know enough about parenting to see what a great joy it can be when a parent and a child recognise that they are not only relatives but also friends. And fourthly, because I happen to agree with Timothy Radcliffe, former Master of the Dominicans, who says that a good summary for the whole of the gospel is: “We are being made capable of friendship”.

Today's interactions between Jesus and his own mother are brief. You might say: How could it be otherwise? Jesus is speaking from the cross; he is being tortured to death. But actually brevity is typical of Jesus' encounters with his mother. Think about Mary's first appearance in this gospel, the Gospel of John, at the wedding at Cana. “Women, what to you and to me?” is one literal translation of what he says there, which is, I think you'll agree, about as blunt as you can be. Personally I am rather glad about this. I mean: Can you imagine what Christian liturgy would be like if we had a string of texts in which Jesus says: “I do love you mother. You have loved me into being the person I am. Without your loving touch, I could not be who I am called to be” and Mary replying “I love you so much, son, knowing from the moment of conception how special you are. Loving you has never been a chore” - and so on. How mawkish would our hymns and texts then be!

It is good to be reminded that we do not really know how Mary and Jesus interacted - I mean: whether or not they would meet our own expectations of what it is to be 'loving'. Perhaps they would not. And yet love each other they did. For if the Church's claims about Christ are true, then is is the case, must be the case that Jesus could fulfil his vocation only if he had a mother who did love him, teaching him human love.

You know, there is a case for saying that today's gospel reading is the very least fitting one if your theme is the standard for “Mother's Day”, that is: if we feel led to think of our biological mothers or those who brought us up. For today's reading can be interpreted as being about the formation of the Church. Jesus, from the Cross, brings the Church into being. Its first two members are Mary and the Beloved Disciple (with the other women presumably joining soon afterwards). The point is that Mary and the Beloved Disciple are not relatives – kith and kin is precisely what they are not. Nor are they brought together because they are alike, sharing gender or thinking the same, feeling the same. What they have in common – all they have in common – is that they are here. They stick with Jesus even to the cross and its agonies. What they have in common is their faithfulness. That is the Church. That is the in-the-literal-sense un-natural family we are invited to join. A family on earth and a family in heaven. The invitation is yours, is ours, now.

The Mother of Gd be with you.

Amen.

* A member of the congregation reminded me of the helpful distinction between praying through the saints, rather than to the saints, which is indeed the standard form of prayers addressed to saints. E.g. "Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners"; "Through the prayers of the Mother of God, Saviour, save us". However, some Protestants say even to address ourselves (our words/petitions) to departed saints is to cross a line and may take us away from prayers to Gd.

Sermon. Lent 3: Kierkegaard &co

Sermon. St Vedast-alias-Foster, City of London. 28.02.16

Third Sunday of Lent (Year 3)

Isaiah 55.1-9

1 Corinthians 10.1-13

Luke 13.1-9

Genuinely a privilege and pleasure to be with you again. And I assure you of my ongoing prayers for you in your communal discernment process, hoping the diocese is helping energetically! When I was last here, much comment was made on the high standard of the sermons from visiting preachers. And, further, you were kind enough to be kind about my own effort. This of course means there might be for me, in my preparations and right now, the pressure of meeting great expectations. Imagine my delight, then, when I came upon these words from Soren Kierkegaard [1813-1855]:

'People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.'

A wonderfully incisive Kierkegaardian insight.

A different but related point is this: my Jewish friends do not tire of telling me that the Hebrew verb 'to pray' is a reflexive form of the verb 'to judge'. To pray is to judge oneself. But (let me stress) not in the sense of 'to condemn' but rather 'to discern the truth' about oneself. You know, even without this linguistic prompt, we know this is right. If we pray - and pay attention (that is: we don't simply enjoy someone's cadences, or hope for gossip on Mrs Brown's bunions...) - if we pray and pay attention to our praying, we will soon notice what moves us, what does not move us, how much resistance to prayer there is inside us (there will be some), what draws us in, and what, if we are honest, we are not drawn to pray for at all. We will be discerning truths about ourselves.

And here we are, and it is Lent. Lent: the season in the church calendar when the call to be self-discerning is at its clearest and most insistent.

Today's readings bring this home to us. First, from the prophecy of Isaiah, a question which resonates through the centuries: 'Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?' Indeed, why do we? Surey there has never been such a wasteful generation and culture as ours?

If we were asked in the abstract what our greatest sin was, we might say 'selfishness'. But this question challenges that. A range of Christian thinkers insist that our root problem is actually that we are not selfish enough. We do not sufficiently will our own happiness. We do not seek to be unhappy - true. But we are willing to postpone or marginalise our happiness and act out of fear, habit, compulsion, pride (keeping up appearances), and so on. Naturally, marketing and advertising departments are acutely aware of this, and manipulate us to buy more, though it nourishes us not.

This is a good place to return to, again and again, in Lent. How can I be more selfish? More truly selfish. We know that being purely pleasure-seeking promises happiness but does not deliver. (If you don't know, give it try, and get back to us.) We stand a better chance of sustaining proper, authentic selfishness (as it were) if we order our lives to fit with our sense of our own unique vocation, our call from Gd. And if you don't yet know yours, or have lost confidence about it, don't panic.

Isaiah again: 'Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.' This means not that Gd is about to disappear. Rather it means it is always good to have a sense of urgency in our search for Gd. The claim is that by seeking Gd (in the very seeking), we become more ourselves, the more free to feed on what really feeds us, to receive what really benefits us.

Our second reading, from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, however, warns us that it will not be that simple. Yes, there is a form of wrong desiring, from which Gd can deliver us. But however 'healed' we are, there is a proper form of testing, of temptation, which will abide, which is ours to deal with. Even the saints – one may well say especially the saints - experience this. But this testing is to renew our conscious reliance on Gd, who alone brings the way out of such testing.

About today's gospel there is an ambiguity. It refers to calamities which have fallen on some people in Jesus' day (though if you want to know more about Pilate's Galilean blood or the falling tower of Siloam, I cannot help you; there just is no evidence outside the gospels). Jesus relates these to other tragedies in his people's past. But the question is: does he mean

• that all disasters, including untimely deaths, are random, and the main thing is to live fully, not ever putting off the repentance you need?
• Or is the main point that life is about to become more and more disaster-laden, as the end - the final cataclysm – approaches?

Unfortunately, the following parable of the fig tree can itself be interpreted in either way.

Now, part of Jesus' message was that the world is about to end – so-called apocayptic. I suspect that if we deny that outright, it may come back to bite us. But we can fairly add that in the history of the Church, too much insistence that 'the end of the world is nigh' has not made for a happy story. On the other hand, wisdom surely involves a profound if painful acceptance that life throws random events at us, both good and bad, both life-giving-and-preserving, and life-denying and deathly, and the main lesson to learn from these is to live as well as you can, in each day. In each moment.

And so back to Kierkegaard: you are the actors, the do-ers; I am your prompt. I am, then, prompting us to remember

• to seek out our own ways of being better at being selfish,
• to act towards fulfilling our own calling (which is how we get to right selfishness), and
• always to remain urgent in our underlying search for Gd, both when life is broad and pleasant, and when it is narrow and in-human-terms impossible.

I want to end on a different note. Kierkegaardian challenge is always good. But it is not everything. It may need tempering by some warmth from the East. St John Chrysostomos of Antioch [fourth century] said: 'The Church is not a courtroom but a hospital for our souls.'

So, yes, when we worship, we have a task to do, a task of self-reflection. And, yes indeed, we worship in order to equip ourselves for the greater task, of being Christians in the world. But! But alongside the tasks, there is also the sheer abandonment to Gd. Like patients in hospital, we are patiently to trust in the process of being made well by Gd.

At the heart of all our overcoming of temptation lies – not some great project of self-improvement (though that might have a place from time to time) – lies rather our willingess to stop, stand, and gaze on Gd in Christ and the saints.

Or, to put it slightly differently: yesterday we Anglicans had occasion to commemorate our own George Herbert [1593-1633]. So my final reference is one you will I am sure know, but which bears repeating:

Love bids us welcome...

We must sit down, and taste his meat.

Alongside all our testings, that too is Lent.

Alongside all our tasks, that too is Church.

Amen.