Thank you mum.

Once upon a time there were two festivals. One was called mothering Sunday and the other more modern one was called mothers day. Although the surface reason for both of them was different – the original one was about going to visit your mother church, and the later one was to celebrate motherhood – the underlying reason was exactly the same – and that was gratitude.

Nowadays the two festivals have merged into one and it is the second reason that we are all here today.

This celebration gives us all the opportunity to express grateful thanks to our mothers. Not all women become mothers,  that is perfectly true, but we all of us, both men and women had or have a mother, and in our formative years especially it was the closest relationship we had with any other human being.

This is as it should be. We were all attached physically to our mothers. They carried us for the first nine months of our lives and then gave birth to us into the world. They fed us, nurtured us and in the majority of cases brought us up.

So common and normal is this closeness that we can actually take this love and care for granted.

How many people take the time or if your mum has passed away, how many times did we take the opportunity to simply say thank you.

Thank you for being my mum. Thank you for giving me life, for loving me, for standing by me through thick and thin, for sacrificing yourself for me. Thank you for being there for me.

Today is such a time for saying thank you to our mothers. And if your mother is no longer with us, today is still an opportunity to say thank you to your mother in prayer.  Perhaps to light a candle for her. To acknowledge the debt of gratitude we all owe, yet was probably seldom expressed.

Your prayer is valid and true because it was prayed our of a sense of  Love.

 Romans 8:38-39

New International Version (NIV)

³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^[a] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In Spirit we are joined with all that is so your prayer, prayed out of love and gratitude will be heard.

So to all mothers, our mothers, to mothers here in this church we say Thank you.