Mother's Day Sermon

Before we start, I want to say something to some of you. This is a difficult morning to be in church.

Some of you wanted to be mothers and are not. Some of you have buried a child, or a mother, this year or thirty years ago. Some of you are estranged from a mother who is still alive. And some of you had a mother who was not safe, and have spent this week bracing for a service that tells you to honour her.

You are not on the edge of this service. If today is hard, you can sit and say nothing and that is a perfectly good way to be here.

[pause - then move on without dwelling, which would be its own kind of pressure]

[read 1 Samuel 1:1-20, or Isaiah 66:12-13]

Hannah is a strong choice because the passage is about wanting a child and not having one, prayed in a temple by a woman a priest assumes is drunk. It honours mothers without excluding the people in the room who are not.

Scripture treats mothering far more often as something done than something someone is. It is done by aunts, by neighbours, by older women in a congregation, by men, and by God, who is repeatedly described in maternal terms that most sermons quietly skip.

[your material, 500 words - and name real people in your congregation who have mothered others, with permission]

Then honour mothers plainly and specifically, without turning it into a list of virtues that half the room fails. The work is unglamorous, largely unwitnessed, and mostly done while tired.

[close by returning, once and briefly, to the people you addressed in the first three minutes - then stop]