Well today is Mothering Sunday.
We would normally be expecting a larger than average congregation in this church.
We were expecting the junior choir to be here and other children to come.
The Mothers’ Union were expecting to prepare daffodils to give to everybody and they had prepared some prayers to say.
It was going to be a very special Mothering Sunday because we were going to baptise a girl called Harriet. Harriet had chosen some of the hymns we were going to sing.
Because of the hymns she had chosen we were going to have the Gospel passage where Jesus tells the short parable of the man who built his house upon the rock and the man who built his house upon the sand. You can read it in Matthew 7: 24-27. We were going to talk about how Harriet was going to build her life upon the rock of faith. We were going to give thanks for the love of mothers and all those who show us mothering love and talk about Harriet building her life on the rock of love her mother has for her and all of us who love her and welcome her into the church, the rock of love on which we build our lives.
We were going to talk about the love of God – the solid rock – using mothering love as a way for us to understand how that love that God has for us feels like when we open ourselves fully to it.
But today is a very different sort of Mothering Sunday.
Physically, I am alone in church today, although I am joined by people watching on Facebook and people who will watch the video of our service later.
Many of us are separated from our mothers today. Many of us are prevented from seeing our mothers and from seeing our children. Even if we weren’t going to see our mothers and our children, today feels different because we couldn’t go and see them even if we wanted to.
So we have a heightened feeling of separation which we need to address. And we address it by reminding ourselves that although we might feel separated, actually we are still connected.
If you are watching this broadcast on your own, you are not separated; you are connected, with me and with everybody else who watches the broadcast. And you can emphasise this connection by leaving a simple comment underneath the video.
And if you are watching this broadcast with somebody else you can turn to them now and say ‘we may feel separated, but in fact we are connected.’
Let’s take a moment to let people do that.
The challenge for churches on Mothering Sunday, even on a normal Mothering Sunday, is that not everybody has a mother to visit. We don’t all live the lives that are like the ones depicted in ladybird books.
There are the mothers whom we have lost, the mothers we have fallen out with, the mothers we never knew. Then there are the mothers we wanted to be but never were. The mothers we would like to be but cannot be because we are estranged from our children or because we have lost our children.
This is why I have turned to this powerful text from the Old Testament. Let me explain the story so far.
Naomi is a Jewish woman who married a man from a neighbouring country, a Moabite, and went to live with him in Moab. But now her husband has died and so she is a widow and both her sons have also died. So she resolves to return home to be with her people but what should she do with her daughters-in-law who have also lost their husbands? They are not Jewish, they are from Moab; Moabites like Naomi’s husband.
So she tells them to stay in their own country and leave her to return to Israel alone. But one of them, Ruth, refuses and says she will go with her and always be with her. In the end Naomi relents and allows Ruth to accompany her.
In our passage we hear the words of commitment that Ruth speaks:
Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!’
And the story of Ruth continues. She does indeed accompany Naomi back to Israel. She then marries a Jewish man called Boaz who shows kindness to a foreigner and they have children. In fact, Ruth is an ancestor of David, the great King of Israel.
So this is a story that can be told every time people become too obsessed with a desire not to mingle their blood with foreigners.
It is a story of how it came to be that a national hero had a foreign ancestor, somebody who was not ‘one of us’.
And because Ruth is an ancestor of David she is also therefore an ancestor of Joseph the husband of Mary the mother of Jesus Christ.
All because of the commitment she made. To stay with her widowed mother-in-law. Through this commitment she became part of the commitment that God makes to all humanity. The commitment expressed in Jesus Christ, our Emmanuel, God with us.
A commitment we see most clearly on the cross; the cross where Jesus died for the sins of the whole world; the cross from where Jesus said to his mother, ‘woman, this is your son’ meaning his disciple and said to his disciple, ‘here is your mother’ meaning his mother.
God is committed to us. He remains committed to us. He shows his commitment most clearly in the sacrifice of his Son on the cross.
And, from the cross, Jesus asks us to remain committed to each other.
This is our message today. God is committed to us. We can commit to each other.
If you are watching this film on your own, please know that God is committed to you. Reflect on your response to this commitment. How can you commit to him and therefore to others?
If you are watching this with somebody else turn to them now and say.
God is committed to us and we are committed to each other.
Now we may be separated from our own mothers but we can care for other people’s mothers and allow them to care for us.
We may be separated from our own children but we can care for other people’s children and allow them to care for us.
We are reaching out to each other on the telephone and over the internet.
We are telephoning our neighbour and asking if they are OK and if there is anything we can do for them.
In our church porch the yellow bin we have there to collect supplies for the foodbank is filling up every day.
Offers of help from all sorts of people, people we know and people we are going to get to know a lot better over the next few days and weeks, these offers of help are streaming into the church.
God is committed to us and we are showing commitment to each other.
Many of us are taking precautions, quite rightly, self-isolating, following the guidelines we receive from doctors and health care workers.
There is no need however for you to self-isolate yourself from the love of God and from the many channels of his love that are all around you.
Reach out.
Help and support each other, accept help and support from each other.
You are not alone so don’t act like you are alone.
Let us commit to each other as our loving God has committed to us. Amen