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Mothering Sunday - Fourth Sunday of Lent
SERMON – 10.15am, Emmanuel Church, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Sunday 22nd March 2009
Revd. Canon David Pickering
Seek out the mother with the most children.
Ask her to collect my shopping bag from the back of the Church.
Have a chair ready if possible.
Whenever we go to the shops everything comes in some kind of packaging.
Take examples from the bag
The packaging often tells something about the size, weight, quantity of the product.
But what sort of package does love come in.?
Which shop do we go to, to buy a kilo, pound or litre of love?
In fact love comes in one of the most common packages found on the planet. There are about six billion of them. And they are growing in number everyday. In fact a few hundred or thousand will have been produced since we started our worship this morning. But for the moment I want to concentrate on the one package I've got with me at the moment.
That is this wonderful mother sitting at the side of me.
She has ……..children.
Loves them every day.
Work out number of children times 365 times their total ages.
Then there is the love of all the other mothers here this morning.
How many?
Work out totals.
But what about the love of children for their mothers? We have to double the amount we have got already. Then are fathers for children, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sister, wives, husbands and the whole range friends.
We've probably lost count by now of how much love there is just in this building this morning.
Louis Armstrong – hold a hand says, I love you, shake a hand, smile in recognition. So many ways of saying I love you.
There is so much love around.
This morning's reading says some wonderful things about love.
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.
Abide in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.
St Augustine; If we love God we can do what we like – because if all our actions are motivated by love then they will be good, and fulfil the will of God.
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. This is the one commandment that Jesus actually gave us.
This is the bottom line. It's all about love.
In the First Letter of John sums it up, Beloved let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
If God is love, then love is God.
Wherever there is love there is God.
The love we've been thinking about and calculating this morning is just a small part of Love, and so just a small part of God. Yet is means so much to us as we celebrate that small but important aspect that is our mother's love.
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