Guilsborough: Evensong 2 March ( mothering Sunday) 2008
May the words of my mouth and the meditations in all our hearts be always acceptable to you O Lord, Our strength and our redeemer.
It’s hard to believe,  in these politically correct days  that at one point in my career I gloried in the title of   “United Kingdom Alternate Representative on the United Nations’ Status of Women Commission”.  It was part of my first job in London when I was the Human Rights Desk Officer at the Foreign Office.  I had made a sound start to the job by outlawing genocide in British dependent territories.   I  now was into anti-slavery, forced marriage, people trafficking  and bride prices.  I worried about the Bushmen of the Kalhari Desert ( not much change there in 40 years);   and I complained about Aborigines in Australia being deprived of their hunting  by a supply of canned kangaroo meat.   And then I was sent to Geneva to battle for Women’s rights.  I accept, in case you were wondering, that does not, as a man and a father, give me much right to say anything very profound about Mother’s Day in 2008.    
To be frank, I was more of a minder in Geneva than a crusader.  I had to  “look after”  a splendid, spirited,  lady, Guinevere Tilney, who was the first Chair of the Women’s National Commission, the wife of a Conservative MP.   She later became Margaret Thatcher’s lifestyle adviser and was made a dame.  Mrs Tilney was a keen smoker with an interest in moral re-armament kindled by a former tennis champion who lived next door. 
We had a wonderful time for two weeks seated at the end of the table in alphabetical order next to the USA and the USSR.  We were in the front line of  Cold War confrontation.  I wrote speeches for Mrs T in the evening at our hotel, with her bedroom door judiciously  propped open with a chair, so to afford a view of our seriousness purpose to any passing snoopers.  
Back in plenary next day she & I banged away happily about human rights,  or the lack of them, in the USSR, whilst the Russians and their allies attacked us for pandering to racism in Rhodesia and suppressing the rights of  millions suffering under the yoke of  British colonialism   I bought a copy of a  prominent Russian dissident’s book   “ Can the Soviet Union Survive Till 1984?”  and provocatively displayed it on my desk.  You get the picture: a lot of sound and fury not amounting to very much.      
Not until that is I a heard a delegate from Uruguay, a lovely motherly women in her sixties, talk about the plight of mothers and children in Latin America.  So much abuse,  poverty and violence.  40, 000 children either disappeared or were killed every year she claimed in South America. Then I came down with a bump from the point scoring of a debating society to the reality of life for so many  - nasty brutish and short. It was one of those moments in life that you always remember. 
Which brings me to Mothering Sunday.  Is it now, I fear, largely a Hallmark Holiday, of cards, chocolates and lunches out for the kids.    
But one of the good things about having to say a few words in church is that it encourages a bit of homework in various ways.   So on this occasion I’ve had an interesting time pursuing various leads, and themes and traditions and thinking about mothers in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  
Most of us don’t have domestic servants these days,  to allow to visit their mothers on this day.  But that was how it started, I’m told.   Has anyone, I wonder, eaten a bit of  Simnel Cake, the traditional fare for Mothering Sunday?   I had forgotten – if I ever knew – that this is a fruit cake sandwiching marzipan and with a topping of the same applied once the cake baked. Then the whole thing is lightly grilled.  It does not sound quite the thing in these diet conscious days, decorated  - as it should be - with a further eleven balls of marzipan representing the 11 disciples ( no Judas of course) and eleven violets.  
Well, there was no Simnel Cake in  Hollowell this morning, but something better:  under Catti’s  firm leadership, we had a enjoyable service during which the children thanked their mothers with posies of daffodils  So we fulfilled part of that important  Fifth Commandment: Honour thy mother  Mothering Sunday is surely mostly about thanks- even if you don’t observe it in church. 
Although that injunction from God to us via Moses is among the oldest texts of the Bible, and in this day as it was then, is very necessary one, I can’t help noticing that some women, especially in the in the Old Testament, do not, to put it mildly, create a good impression: scheming two faced and ruthless are the epithets you could use.   True: some of the men they had to deal with were pretty dreadful  and  probably deserved what they got.   
But it was Eve after all who succumbed to the temptation of the serpent, took a bite out of the apple and gave some to her less than perceptive mate, poor old Adam.  Looking at some of the other less than attractive women in the Bible story there is Rahab, the harlot of Jericho who let in the Israelite spies and hid them, leading to the fall of the city and the slaughter of everyone in it., except those in Rahab’s house.   Then there is Rebekah pushing the claims of Jacob, via goatskin and a mess of pottage, over Esau  to get the blind Isaac’s blessing.     Move on to Delilah, betraying Samson; Jezebel doing all kinds of bad things to Elijah and other; then Jael who drove a nail into Sisera’s head when he was asleep and Bathseheba betraying her husband , the trusting Uriah in favour of King David’s charms.  Then there is Judith cutting off the head of the drunken Assyrian general Holofernes after seducing him, an original honey trap that, and Salome demanding the Head of John the Baptist from Herod.
All of these women feature in painting throughout the ages and are vividly imprinted in our memories as a result.  Nice girls finish last, as the Americans would say so we don’t have such a vivid picture of  Sarah or Ruth or Esther, or others who are often simply known as so-and-so’s wife.
That said, no woman in the Bible has been so revered, so portrayed, so much prayed to as Mary the Mother of our Lord.  In her are all the virtues of motherhood gathered and the words of the Magnificat have been reiterated over the ages : all generations have called her blessed.    We know very little about Jesus’s relationship with his mother ( still less of that with his father) but it is clear that he had the highest regard for her commending, on the cross, the disciple whom he loved to his mother and her to him in that famous passage in St. John’s gospel .
So let us now praise famous mothers and those, the majority who have no memorial who have done and still do their motherly duties, and still do without fuss or fanfare. And those who struggle like the mothers of Darfur, to survive against the odds. Murderers, outcasts and alcoholics, we must remembe, all had mothers who bore them and loved them. It is mothers who pass on the milk of human kindness to their children, and who mould their first steps in life.  Usually children interact  with mothers in a different way to fathers throughout their lives.  Whether its James ,James Morrison Morrison  Wetherby George Dupree ( before he lost his mother).  Or if it’s the drunken son  calling out “I have no pain dear mother now”…………
When your alarm goes off to-morrow morning, why not give an alarm clock alleluiah and borrowing the words of the psalmist and say to your self “ This is the day The Lord has given .  Let us rejoice and be glad and thank God for what our mothers did for us. 
