God is love.

God is Love! Says John and today we celebrate a particular aspect of love and nurture that most people experience from their mothers.

Not every woman is or can be a mother but one thing I am sure of is that everybody in this church has a mother.

Fatherhood is important too of course and I believe necessary for the healthy development of a child but motherhood is special and the bond people have with their mothers is often so powerful, and they exert a huge influence on most people’s lives.

And in this service we honour that role and simply say “Thank you”.

Just as Moses was found in that basket, we use this basket to symbolise God’s loving care for us all. This love holds us, just as Moses, as a baby was held.

If you can imagine each strand of this basket that has been woven together,  as one of us, it can show that all of us woven together as the body of Christ can hold people in both our good times and our bad times, just like a mother.

Humanity was made in the image of God and in Genesis it says - “male and female he created them” so both male and female aspects complete the picture of God and indeed of humanity.

Today we concentrate on the mothering, nurturing side of both God and human mothers. The mothering, nurturing side of God is a part of the Godhead (the completeness of God) even though we tend to talk about God in male terms.

Mainly of course we do that because that’s how Jesus referred to God – as Father. And Jesus was God incarnate. But the whole picture of God would be incomplete without these feminine, mothering attributes.

Mothering Sunday is the time where we can remember our own mothers;

We can say thank you to God for our relationship with her.

And even if that relationship was less than perfect, was perhaps difficult and testing, as I’m sure some of us might have experienced it, We can ask forgiveness and healing for our mother’s shortcomings and the part we might have played in sometimes fractious and difficult relationships.

We can say thank you for the protection, the nurture, and the boundaries we learnt from our mothers

We can say thank you most of all for all the love that we received.

And as we started we remember that God is love and that therefore Love is God.