Sermon for Mothering Sunday – 18th March 2023: 1 SAMUEL 1:20-28, 2 CORINTHIANS 1:3-7, JOHN 19:25b-27
Deacon Chris Saccali – St Paul’s Athens
Cast your minds back, if you can, to the first film you saw at the cinema as a child. I remember my mother taking me to see Mary Poppins and the following year the Sound of Music at the cinema in Worcester- mid sixties the age I now am – in the Midlands, central England, where I am from. These films and the whole occasion of it made a huge impression on me. Also, it was a happy event and in my teens my mother’s health declined so that I became the main carer and housekeeper until we lost her when I was aged seventeen.
So I do understand the mixed feelings we may have or bring with us surrounding the feast of Mothering Sunday or the more commercial Mother’s Day. Some of us may have lost mothers over the past year or a parent who cared for us.
Let’s look at the origins of the feast. Traditionally, the fourth Sunday of Lent was kept as light relief in the austere Lenten fast. For this reason it is also known as Refreshment Sunday, fasting rules were slightly relaxed and even weddings were permitted to cheer the congregation and encourage them in their fast.
Inevitably the return to the ‘mother’ church became an occasion for family reunions when children as young as ten years old who were working away, in service maybe- think Downton Abbey or as apprentices learning a trade, returned home on a Sunday off.
