Accepted, Nourished and Rested

Holy God, Speaker, Word and Breath, may you breathe life into my words this morning. Amen.

I was quite upset a few years ago when my manager said to myself and my fellow sisters that we were not to “Mother” the newly qualified staff nurses. They’re adults and should be treated like adults. I was upset because I knew the comment was indirectly aimed at me.

I started in the department as a newly qualified 22-year-old who’d gone straight from school to university and was now undertaking the job that, yes, I’d trained 4 years for, but also was the most terrifying thing I’d ever done, until I started to stand up here that is. I felt completely out of my depth.

The leap from student to staff nurse is huge, any other medical professionals in the room will I’m sure agree. They’re support programs in place, but nothing beats care and nurture by a person who takes you by the hand, understands what you’re going through and walks beside you through it.

Enter Caroline. Caroline is one of the best nurses I’ve ever worked with: highly skilled clinically, compassionate but firm, completely professional, and one of life’s natural nurturers. She’s not that much older than me, but she was the work mum I needed, and as I grew in my career, she was the template for how I myself wished to nurture future new nurses.

We still work together now, though her role has changed and she works in a different department. Whenever we see each other there’s a hug and a catch up, she always makes me feel seen and cared for with the added dynamic of us now being equals in our roles. Even if we didn’t still see each other, I will never forget how her care helped form the practitioner I’ve become.

Fast forward to being told my providing this nurture to other staff was’nt OK. Last year we had about 15 new nurses join our team, the majority of who are newly qualified, 21–22-year-olds, straight out of uni. I know how they feel, and I want to support them in the way that feels most natural to me.

The good news is the management team now value our individual styles of supporting the team, whether it’s the feistier sisters who fiercely advocate for them, my male colleagues who have a more big-brotherly approach, or my gentle mothering and guiding.

Mothering comes in all guises and in many different areas of our lives. We may have an amazing relationship with our own mothers and yet still have other maternal figures – or we might have a tense or fractured relationship and have found that nurture elsewhere. 

 We might be a mother who mothers beyond our own family – my kids have a lot of LGBT and neurodivergent friends, they know they’ll always be accepted, fed, and given a bed at our house.

We might be a mother who has difficult relationships with our children, but have found we provide that parental role to someone else in our life.

You may have found maternal nurture from your father or another male role model, you may be a man who, like God, has been both father and mother when needed. Mothering Sunday can be joyful and it can be painful.

In today’s readings there's a mixture of blood families and found families. I’ve often wondered how Eli coped having a toddler left on his doorstep; he had to be mother, father and teacher to Samuel, and though Samuel maintained a relationship with Hannah it was Eli that was there day to day.

Paul is writing to a community who he has a difficult parental relationship with. In his previous letter he accused them of being children still fed on milk, not ready for solid food. Bridget Nichols writes that "in this 2nd letter Paul’s tone is maternal, echoing the voice that comforts the hurt and disappointed child, in consoling the children who have not grown up much since he admonished them in his earlier letter."

And then we have the achingly painful gospel reading. A few weeks ago, we heard Simeon’s prophetic words at Candlemas, which now come to fruition. He told Mary a sword will pierce your own heart, and here, with other women from her community, and the Beloved Disciple, she’s watching Jesus die, unable to do anything to stop it.

Jesus, enduring the pain of crucifixion, has the added agony of watching his mother watch his suffering. It’s so brutal, even with the knowledge of what follows on Easter Day, to read and reflect upon this. Mary is losing her son, which a few different choices could’ve prevented, but they both know it must be this way.

Amid his suffering Jesus provides consolation for his mother and his friend, telling them they’re now mother and son, a new family is being formed and emerging from all this pain. The literal translation is the beloved disciple received Mary "into his inner life-setting."

The gospel models for us a mother-child relationship borne out of circumstance and trauma, I’ve seen this in my professional life. Patients become friends, patient’s families become friends, and sometimes, in the circumstances where a patient dies, support comes from the only people who could possibly understand each other’s loss and pain.

The best churches, I think, are built upon relationship and I think it’s an amazing strength of our congregation. There’s an array of inter-generational friendships, some with that parent-child dynamic, right here among us. I’ve felt held, loved, and encouraged in a beautifully maternal way by so many of you. I hope as I grow in age and wisdom that others feel this care from me.

I would even say that inter-generational friendships are one of the biggest strengths of the church as a whole. As with the family-like communities which were built in the aftermath of the events of that first Easter, we hopefully continue to build communities where we actively ensure that each generation is nurtured, valued and encouraged to be an active participant in the life of the whole.

We know this isn’t always the case, it’s easy to make someone feel unwelcome or pushed away, yet it can take the smallest of kindnesses to make someone feel welcome, included and valued.

I also believe that healthy inter-generational relationships build empathy. Church congregations bring together people from so many different backgrounds and form friendships that encourage us to look at difference differently, an amazing thing in a world where the over-arching message is one of division.

What we’ve got right here is counter-cultural, it’s rebellious, it rejects the message that we should conform to particular ways of thinking and living. It’s proof that the best way of spreading the gospel message of rebellious hope, beyond these walls, is through building relationships which model our values in the wider world.

The message we have to share is that the mother church is just that, a mother, which sees the whole person, accepts the whole person, respects the dignity of each child of God and actively seeks ways to nurture them, and to walk with them through all life’s chances and changes.

So, as we recall today those who’ve mothered us and those we’ve mothered, let’s remember this community, this mother church is also mother to our whole parish family, those who walk through the doors and those who don’t. Let’s continue to spread the message that in this family they always be accepted, nourished, and find a place to rest. Amen.

Becoming Ourselves

Won't get the chance to preach this today as I'm isolating at home with Covid, but as it was written I thought I'd share it.

Well, today’s readings take us on quite a journey, and perhaps take us to places we’re not entirely comfortable with. 

In Deuteronomy we have a prophet promised, a text we might interpret as referring to Jesus, and then some uncomfortable reading about the fate of false-prophets. 

From Revelation we have mystical, mysterious and mythical verses. John’s writing in this book can never be taken at face value, but again our interpretation would be that this poetic birth refers to Jesus.

And then in the Gospel we have Jesus beginning his ministry, he’s been baptised, spent his time in the wilderness and now he’s ready to go public. Mark’s account of this, as we heard this morning, includes a demonic possession and exorcism, and whilst our contemporary interpretations with our modern, scientific minds would try and interpret demonic possession as something more worldly, we do a disservice to the gospel when we don’t acknowledge that the world we’re shown here is one that does believe in demons, there’s 4 exorcisms in Mark even though it's the shortest of the gospels. This probably leaves us, like those present in the synagogue, asking “what is this”.

But I’m not, you’ll hopefully be glad to hear, planning on analysing the nature of biblical possession this morning. I must admit when I read the texts for today I was thinking, like the synagogue congregation, “what is this” and more pressingly, what does this say to us today, on this final Sunday of Epiphany as we come to the end of the Christmas season? 

The mystery and joy of the Incarnation and of the Christmas story are intimately woven through these readings. We have Moses promising a prophet from amongst God’s own people, our very human Messiah, but then we have John’s poetic, mystical retelling of God being born of a human woman, a child who escapes evil and returns to God.

The Gospel reading brings these two things together and shows us the reality of what the incarnation means as Jesus stands up to publicly declare his ministry has begun, and is immediately confronted with something we’d interpret as evil. An evil which immediately identifies who Jesus is, and an evil which Jesus immediately overcomes.

The possessed man is restored to who he was or who he should be, which is what I think a relationship with Jesus, the incarnate God, does for us. We each have a concept of God the Father, or the creator, whichever language you find the most helpful, and for me that aspect of God is awesome and endless and everywhere, so vast and entwined in everything, for all time, that it can be hard to comprehend.

In Jesus God becomes knowable, relatable, and we have a person with whom it becomes more comprehendible that we can have relationship with them, a relationship God wants to have with us, the ultimate goal of which is for God to delight in us and for us to delight in God. It’s a relationship of healing and restoration where, as it deepens, we get closer to seeing ourselves as God sees us, and move closer to fulfilling our potential as the people the creator created us to be.

Jesus restored a demon-possessed man to his true self.  Our demons might not be quite so literal but this is God’s deepest desire and yearning for our lives. Whilst we might not believe in evil as it’s presented to us in today’s gospel there’s many things in the world and in our lives we would perhaps call evil.

There’s the big things like war in the Middle East, child soldiers, institutional racism and misogyny, human trafficking and climate destruction, all huge evils in our world, but what I’m reflecting upon today is more personal, more everyday. Things which touch us personally. What are the evils in our everyday life that interfere with our relationship with God? 

Each of us have to deal with things which can prevent us from fully leaning into our relationship with God. Things that are preventing us from being the “us” God knows we can become. Some are bigger than others, such as addiction or illness, chronic pain or mental health concerns. But there’s also the more mundane, the things we think are a barrier between us and God, and because we believe they are a barrier, they are.

Short tempers, bad parenting choices, bad financial choices, sexual shame. The evil in these things can be how our less than ideal choices make us feel about ourselves, or how we judge others we see exhibiting them. A bad choice doesn’t make us a bad person, but we can convince ourselves that we are, and that makes the barrier between us and God.

One of the things Huw wanted to instil in us when he arrived is that it’s ok to be vulnerable and it’s ok to make mistakes. It’s all part of being human, and in many cases it’s how we grow and learn. I can’t help thinking about how in today’s gospel Jesus expels evil from within a congregation, a community which probably had complexities, relationships and came together in ways not too dissimilar to our own.

The life Jesus models for us – the life the Trinity models for us – is one of community. We’re not just called to be vulnerable and break down the walls between ourselves and God, but also with each other. To grow as God intends is to grow personally but also communally. 

Growing together is how we work towards a world where those bigger evils simply cannot exist, to model a way of living and being in the world that rejects evil by accepting each other, with our flaws and idiosyncrasies, knowing that with Jesus as our companion through life we’re standing with the source of all love and all power, we stand with a God who chose to come and stand here, with us, and share our lives, to live as we live.

As these last few days of the Christmas season pass by and we head so quickly this year into Lent, we go from Jesus standing by us in our wilderness, negotiating day-to-day life, to us standing by him in his wilderness, along with all the evil he was confronted by. This is what it means to be in relationship, to journey together, to share the highs, lows, sadness and celebrations, and as we live and grow, with Jesus and each other, we move ever closer to that revelation of hopefully seeing ourselves, and each other, as God sees us, fully ourselves, fully loved by God and knowing there is no evil that in that relationship, the eternal dance of love, cannot be silenced and cast out.