Sermon Mothering Sunday 2026 – Exodus 2:1-10 and Luke 2:33-35

What do we think God is like? How do we imagine Him?

It is so tempting to project on God as just being a bigger, stronger, more important version of ourselves.

And secretly, I suspect, many of us including myself, have an image of God that is surprisingly similar to the image we may have of whoever happens to be the president of the United States of America.

Why does God not just smite the evildoers? Why does he not destroy them? Why does he not just intervene? Why does he not just sort everything out with some missiles, rockets or lightning and thunder?

What’s been going on in the Middle East for many years, and especially recently, might suggest some reasons to us to be thankful that God doesn’t operate like that. 

But it’s a very understandable mistake all of us make all the time. And we end up making our own god, an idol. We often worship the God as we feel He should be. The God we would be if we could. Not God as he actually is.

And who God is, he shows us in the Bible, and especially in Jesus – and it turns always out to be more than we could think up or imagine.

So, on this Mothering Sunday, it is especially appropriate to stop and reflect on how God is not only described as Father, Almighty, Creator, but also in Scripture as Mother. And how mothers in a special way reflect something about what God is like and how he works in our world. 

It is no coincidence that mothers play a very big role in the big moments of salvation history, the story of God and us.

Our first reading tells us about Israel, suffering in Egypt. Oppressed. Enslaved. And there is a genocide going on, Pharaoh orders for every newborn Hebrew boy to be thrown into the Nile.

So what does God do? How does he respond to the prayers of his people?

A woman becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son.

It’s madness. What difference would a baby make? Besides, there was no greater risk than having a baby boy, because remember, Pharaoh wanted to kill all those! Yet, it’s how God decides to bring liberation to his people. Through a pregnant, waiting mother, giving birth to a little boy. Through the sacrificial and nurturing love of a mother, God will make things right.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s a very powerful parallel with Mary giving birth to Jesus.

God works in a messy, awful, broken world bringing healing, salvation, and liberation through a mother giving birth to a baby.

And then, after about three months, little Moses becomes too big and too loud to hide. Mother Jochebed has to do an even more difficult thing.

It is perhaps only those who have suffered from not being able to have children, or losing children through miscarriages, or who have lost their children later on, or who suffered many anxieties for their children, who understand what Jochebed might have felt like, as she put her three month old baby in a basket of reeds, and leaves him in the Nile.

A feeling that’s described in our Gospel reading as a sword piercing through her soul.

Notice how, maybe with the special genius of a mother, Jochebed does exactly what she is asked to do, but with a clever twist. Pharaoh wants to throw all the children in the Nile. She literally throws her son in the Nile. Protected by a little basket.

It’s an act of faith and trust that few of us can imagine.

Her faith is rewarded by her son being saved by no one less than Pharaoh’s daughter – again, pure madness to have the daughter of the oppressor be the instrument of Moses’ and in the long term, Israel’s saving.

Israel’s faith and prayers are answered when Moses grows up in Pharaoh’s palace, and becoming the one through whom God liberates the enslaved, frees Israel from Egypt, and leads them through the desert to the promised land.

That whole story starts with a faithful mother. And in it we see something about who God is and how He works. We see it in so many other mothers, in the example of so many saints – ask Claire later about Perpetua and Felicity, two early Christian mothers who died for their faith – and in so many of our own mothers and mothering figures. We can see something of God’s love and care in them.

It’s perhaps the reason why Mothering Sunday originally wasn’t about our own mothers – though it’s always good to celebrate them – but about Mother Church. The Church is especially called to reflect something of God sacrificial and nurturing and faithful love and care.

Mothering Sunday used to be an opportunity to go back to the church in which you were baptised, reflecting the role of Mother Church in the new birth, our rebirth into a new life, in our baptism.

Again, it is worth remembering that only God is perfect, and we, our mothers, the church, at our best reflect something of what He is like, but are always flawed – and sometimes we can just be so hurt by the flaws of those who are called to mother us.

And it’s why it’s so good and so important for us to spent time with God, the source of that self-sacrificial, nurturing and liberating love. To get to know Him by spending time with Him. To come to church. To read the Bible. On our own and with others. To pray on our own and with others. To be with the mother and father figures in this church who help us in our faith. To eat with our brothers and sisters in church, inside this church building as we are fed by God in the sacrament of communion, and outside – at the Parish Breakfast and the Lent Lunches, and when we invite them over to the house.

To experience in Mother Church, in those who mother us, and in our own mothering, something of the self-sacrificial love of God.

And this Mothering Sunday we can also be inspired by the example of Jochebed, and maybe there are things, people or feelings that are very precious to us – maybe our children, maybe our mothers, maybe our relationships with them – that we need to carefully put in a little basket and entrust in God’s hands.

Amen.