The Good-Enough Parent: a sermon on Mothering Sunday

I find the parable of the Prodigal Son the most beautiful and the most moving in the gospels, this story of the wayward child in a far country making the long journey home and his father running to meet him. I once wrote a book about the “lost children” of the Bible. I found it hard to get my mind round these painful stories of children who had died, been betrayed, murdered, abused, exiled, neglected - or who had taken themselves off to some distant place like the Prodigal. The faces of my own children kept coming into my mind, and what it would be like to lose them. It would be unbearable. And as we approach Passiontide, we imagine that God must have felt that way as he watched his Son taken away to die. God who is both our father and our mother, as the medieval writer Julian of Norwich said. “Can a mother forget the child she bore?” asks the prophet.

But on this Mothering Sunday, we’re bound to ask a question of our gospel reading.  All these men – the two sons and their father: where is the woman in this story – the wife, the mother, the homemaker?  Is she present but assumed, the silent onlooker to this drama being played out among the men in her life?  Or is she absent – dead maybe, or like the perfect wife in the Book of Proverbs, away on business, or, a darker possibility perhaps, in a far country of her own?

There are so many layers to this story.  It is about the father who waits for his son to return and runs to meet him when he glimpses him far off.  It is about the son who realises that he must begin again, and makes the long, difficult journey towards his waiting father.  It is about the elder son and how he cannot find it in his heart to welcome his wayward brother home.  It is about all these things.  But I want to suggest to you that it is also about the place where all these things happen, the place that is home to all three of the characters in our story, the father and his two sons.  This home is not just the stage-set on which the human drama is acted out.  It is a participant in its own right.  For the story is supremely about homecoming.

Home is where the heart is, says the strap-line: trite, but true, for it is precisely heart calling to heart, a lost man’s heart longing for home that drives him to risk returning to his family hearth.  Heart and hearth – so close in sound, and close in meaning: we all long for somewhere to be welcomed home to, somewhere to belong, feel safe in, somewhere we are held and cherished and loved.  We mustn’t be sentimental about this. Foyer as a picture of home is not just about firesides, armchairs, comfy slippers and sipping cocoa in mugs.  Foyer is a wonderfully humane word.  It means intimacy, connection, sanctuary. It means shelter, warmth, safety, friendship, love.  But it also stands for the tough challenge of living together in community.  It is where we learn about integrity and trust, how to resolve conflict, be reconciled, forgive, how love is a matter not just of words but of will. It is the school where  we learn how to be human.

In his far country, the prodigal was free of all this.  He had no duties, no cares, no-one to please but himself.  Yet in Luke’s picture of this young man’s life, this self-indulgent isolation could never satisfy, for he was oppressed by pleasure and wealth.  He knew emptiness and despair, I think, long before he was spent, began to go hungry and subsisted beside the swine he was paid to feed.  So he began the long climb back, recognising in his heart before he could bring himself to say the words that he must turn round, return to his father, make his way home again.  And home meant re-entering this privileged yet costly place where loving and being loved are the only things that ultimately matter, where he could re-learn the first lesson of childhood, how to be held, embraced and kept safe, how to love and to give and to be happy in the intimacy of the family.

Homecoming and family mean the joy and the cost of human relationships and our life together. In the parable, the loving father proved himself to be a mother to his wayward child – not just a “good enough” parent but an excellent one. Today we remember and give thanks for those who have mothered us and loved us into life, and continue to surround us with wholesome care that far exceeds whatever we see as our duty. It’s a happy thing when our biological mothers have loved us in this way, though today can be difficult for people who know all too well the misery of conflicted family life, where a parent is not to be trusted and home is not the safe place we need it to be and where the God-given gifts of intimacy, trust and mutual service can flourish. Today is a day to give thanks for all that is lovely in family life, but also to feel for those who find themselves, even behind their own front doors, in a far country, alone, uncertain, lost.

I believe it’s the task of us all in our churches and communities as well as our families to create this sense of welcome and homecoming. Durham Cathedral, where I used to be Dean, was a Benedictine foundation in the middle ages. I learned a lot about St Benedict’s Rule for Monks, written fifteen hundred years ago but still an inspiration for all who want to be better disciples in our own times. In the Rule, it says that welcome, hospitality and care are a sacred duty.  The brothers and sisters were told to receive the stranger ‘as if they were Christ himself’, to honour and serve him in everyone who looked for a place in which to find a home in which to be cared for. So foyer isn’t an end in itself.  It is a sign of how God welcomes us home, comes running to meet us, embraces us in Christ, accepts us in love, invites us to feast at his table.  It’s a picture of how we become fully human as we learn that
we are loved.

This is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, the good news that God loves us unreservedly in Jesus, whoever we are, whatever the far country we have come from, and however we got there.  To be a disciple means being a living, walking sign of this welcoming love and care that God has for us all.  Sometimes love has to be tough, more often, perhaps, gentle.  Sometimes the foyer we create can seem almost luminous with God’s presence, sometimes we wonder if he is to be found there at all. But as ancient Greek wisdom put it in words Carl Justav Jung had inscribed over the mantel of his front door, “Whether he is called upon or not, God is present”.

And this is what we celebrate on Mothering Sunday. In every expression of good mothering, whether the biological parenthood that brought us into the world, or the intimacy of loving relationships where we give and receive the care that sustains us, or the professional care that models what it is to respect and reverence each human person, “mothering” is at the heart of life. Today at this eucharist we give thanks to the God who is our father and our mother, in whom we live and move and have our being, whose heart of love reaches out to all his creatures, every human soul, each one of us.  He invites us to feel after him and find him, and in finding him, to find our true home, and in finding our true home, learn to be God’s people once again.

St Nicholas Collegiate Church, Galway, Mothering Sunday 2019