A family friendly talk for Mother’s Day

Our Mother’s Day service was a family service and our sermon was interactive. I printed out each letter of MOTHERS DAY on individual sheets of paper and 10 volunteers held each one, rearranging the letters to form the words in bold-underlined below.

Today is Mother’s Day – a day we can remember our mums and those who have been like mums to us – our sisters, step mums, aunts, grandparents, godparents, carers, and many others…

Some people’s mums are the best; they smell like sweet soap and make the perfect apple pie and never get mad. They smother you from head to toe in kisses and keep the cupboards always full of chocolate.

But for some people, Mother’s Day is one the hardest day of the year because their mum wasn’t perfect, and life was much more ordinary than that. much more complicated, more muddled, more normal…or maybe something worse

And some of us will find a day like today really sad, because our mum isn’t with us and we miss her because she has died, or lives far away, or we feel sad because we would have loved to have been a mama and we aren’t one.

Today’s bible readings had something to say about all of these things, even though they didn’t mention mums and were written a long, long time before Mother’s Day ever became a thing.

The first reading that Jacques read to us, promised us that we are all God’s children – so God is like our mother, a perfect one. One who loves us always, with all her heart.

And our gospel reading promised that we will not be left on our own. I will not leave you orphaned, Jesus said. That means we will always have a parent, right beside us, all of our days on earth, and we will be safe and loved and cared for.

And wherever we are, whoever is nearby or far away, God – our divine mother – our holy mum – will always be a place of refuge, a home for us to go to, every single day until…

…Someday we will be together, forever, in heaven, face to face. Amen.

And this is all amazingly good news. Because we are loved more than we can ever imagine, and we always have our Heavenly Mama cheering us on and helping us out. So, the only bad thing about all of this is that I can’t get the word hamster into the story… haha!

Fun fact: some other words that could have been included in the talk are…

Smother

Rhyme

Death

Myth

Destroy

Stay

Smart

Dream