Mothering Sunday: Abundant Consolation

 2 Corinthians 1.3-7, Luke 2. 33-35

I was listening to someone last week who had come to talk to me – as part of my ministry in retirement I give support to others in lay or ordained roles in the church. Her husband has been living with cancer for quite a while, but now, although he is still fairly well in himself, the treatment options have been exhausted. After all the ups and downs, all the hoping that something might work, they know it is just a matter of time and, eventually, palliative care. And yet, she was remarkably calm. “We don’t know exactly what this journey will involve” she said, “but we do know that there are so many people praying for us, and that God is with us.” She and her husband had found great consolation through the prayers and support of those around her.

I reflected with her that her words had reminded me of one of the readings set for today’s services, and she gave me permission to quote her words. 

In the short passage we heard from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, again and again Paul uses the word “consolation” or consoled, or some variation on it. Ten times in the space of 4 verses. It’s a translation of the Greek word parakaleo, and in some ways it’s not a very good translation. The Greek word literally means to “come alongside when someone calls”. That’s the essence of the consolation Paul is talking about – someone who comes alongside us, who travels with us. The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the Paraclete – God beside us and within us day by day, but a paraclete, a consoler, can be human too. Not someone who fixes things for us, but someone who simply shares the journey.

Paul was much in need of consolation at this point. The verses around those we read tell us that he’d been in Asia – modern day Turkey – and had been through tough times there. “We were so utterly, unbearably crushed,” he says, “that we despaired of life itself”. 

And he knows things have been hard for the Corinthians too – they endure the same sufferings he does.

Paul often faced persecution, attack and arrest because of his preaching. The only way he could avoid it would be by abandoning his faith, but that’s not an option for him. It matters too much to him to give it up. He chose to walk a hard and dangerous road. The Corinthian Christians faced the same challenges as they tried to live out the Gospel message, facing “the same sufferings that we are also suffering”, Paul says.

How will Paul cope? How will the Corinthians cope? How will any of us cope with troubles that come upon us, the things that we have no way of avoiding? 

This Lent, as you know, we are following a theme of healing in our Sunday services – physical healing, healing of relationships and of the spirit, healing of our world. Today, Mothering Sunday, was, I think, meant to be a break from that theme, but it seems to me that the readings set for today do have a link with the question of healing, and it’s a very important link. What do we do, these readings ask us, about situations in which there’s no prospect of healing, in any physical sense? What do we do when there’s no way around suffering, when we have to go through it? That might be the suffering of persecution as it was for Paul. And, in our Gospel reading, Simeon warns Mary, that she will suffer because of her son’s ministry. He is only a baby at this point, but his ministry will bring the wrath of the powerful down on him and she will have to watch him be crucified. “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” Says Simeon. Or it might be the far more familiar suffering that the lady who was talking to me faced, of watching a loved one endure an illness that can’t be cured.

One of the hardest parts of mothering, or fathering, or caring for anyone we love is knowing that we can’t prevent their suffering, that we haven’t got the magic wand we long for. The price of love is grief, people sometimes say – we can’t love others without opening ourselves up to sorrow. But Paul’s words remind us that what we can do is to recognise that we, and they, don’t make the journey alone, that we are accompanied by a great crowd of paracletes, those who are alongside us. Suffering may be abundant, as Paul says, but consolation is abundant too if we are open to it.

Chief among these paracletes, of course, is God himself – the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation.” He is the one who comes alongside us in Jesus, who lived among us, died alongside two criminals, and who is present through the Spirit alongside us day by day. It is his consolation, his “alongsiding” which gives us the strength to be alongside others, and which helps us to see those who are alongside us and accept their help as we make those journeys that otherwise seem impossible. 

So on this Mothering Sunday we give thanks for all who have been alongside us through our lives, and we pray, as the words of our collect reminded us, “that in joy and in sorrow we may know the power of God’s presence,” which is alongside us always.

Amen

Lent 3

 Lent 3 2026

Psalm 42, John 3.1-15

I expect quite a few of you, like me, come from the generation that was expected at school to memorise all sorts of things – from mathematical formulae to large chunks of poetry. Most of the maths has evaporated from my mind, alas, but I can still, with a following wind, recite Portia’s speech from the Merchant of Venice – the quality of mercy is not strained etc.. Hymns and songs often etch themselves into our memories too. I have often found, when taking services in care homes, that residents who don’t remember much else can are word perfect on their favourite hymns.  

It’s not just words that we learn “by heart” though. How many skills have we picked up over the years which seemed hard when we first did them, but eventually became second nature to us? It may be plastering a wall, knitting, playing a musical instrument or operating a computer – it will be different for each of us – but there are some things we may not even have to think about anymore, which we do by muscle memory. We’ve learned them by heart. 

“By heart” is an interesting phrase. It implies that these things have, in a sense, become part of us. We can’t forget them, even if we try; they have become woven into our being.

In our readings today, we meet people who are thinking about what they have “learned by heart” and what they might still need to learn.

The Psalmist writes of his longing for God. We don’t know what has happened, but it’s clear that things aren’t going well for him. He feels oppressed by his enemy; and he feels as if God has forgotten him. And yet, at the same time, he can’t leave behind the habit of prayer, the memory of God’s love, the times when he has found hope and joy in God before. These are the things that are in his spiritual “muscle memory”. He may feel abandoned, but he has taken deep into himself over the years, learned by heart, the knowledge that God isn’t like that; he doesn’t abandon people. “My soul is cast down within me” he says, “therefore I remember you – that’s God… “Hope in God,” he tells himself, “for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” 

The Psalm doesn’t deny or soft-pedal the reality of tough times, which come to all of us. We feel how we feel, and we don’t need to pretend to be happy when we’re not. But it reminds us that the God who we felt close to in the good times is the same God now, and still loves us, even if we feel as if he’s far away. “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life”. 

The very fact that the Psalmist cries out to God, thirsts for him, reminds him – and us - that God is still real and still matters to him. He is the God of his life. The things he has learned “by heart” about God hold him when the events he is going through threaten to overwhelm him. 

In the Gospel reading, we meet a man who has also learned things “by heart”, but now he is having to re-evaluate them completely – sometimes we have learned by heart things that don’t turn out to be helpful, negative messages about ourselves, prejudices about others. He comes to Jesus “in the dark”. That doesn’t just tell us about the time of day, but that this is a man who doesn’t want to be seen, who feels confused and doesn’t want to admit it. The world he thought he knew, the assumptions he has made about life and about faith, don’t seem to make sense to him anymore and that is hard for him to acknowledge. 

He, Nicodemus, is a respected religious expert, someone who is supposed to know what’s what, and who thought he did. Jesus is a carpenter from the backwater village of Nazareth, with no qualifications to his name, no training, no background. And yet Nicodemus sees something in him that he can’t deny is of God. He calls Jesus “teacher”; he knows there is something he needs to learn from him, but perhaps doesn’t realise how radical that will be. Jesus tells him that he needs to start again, to be born “from above” or born anew, depending on your translation, to open himself to a new vision of the world, to learn “by heart” a new understanding of God. Unless he does that, says Jesus, he won’t be able to “see the kingdom of God”. Jesus isn’t talking about Nicodemus getting a ticket to heaven when he dies; seeing the kingdom of God is about being aware of what God is doing right there, right then in Jesus.

Nicodemus knows he is missing something, like the deer that thirsts for the flowing waters in the Psalm, but finding it will take time. There will be a journey to make. Being born takes time. Learning something by heart takes time. Getting to that point where something new is second nature isn’t an instant business. 

At the end of his encounter with Jesus, Nicodemus goes away without having made any commitment. But we will meet him again, first in chapter 7 of John’s Gospel when other Pharisees are plotting against Jesus. Nicodemus challenges them, saying that Jesus should at least be given a fair hearing. And then, after Jesus dies, Nicodemus finally comes out of the shadows, bringing spices and ointment to anoint Jesus’s body, assisting at his burial. It’s taken him several years, but Nicodemus has made his choice; he has let his heart be changed by the Spirit of God. The fact that the Gospel writer names him suggests that the change was permanent, that he did, in time “learn by heart” the way of Christ and become a member of the Christian community, valued by them, his story told, his name known. 

In our Lenten series of sermons on healing, today’s theme is the healing of the spirit. It’s a healing that starts when we acknowledge our thirst for God, like the deer that longs for the flowing streams, but it needs to continue from that point, allowing that thirst to take us on a journey, learning by heart a new way as we go, which will leads us to the water that never fails. 

Amen 

Lent 1: Healing at Bethesda

 

Lent 1 2026

2 Cor 12.1-10, John 5.1-15

 

Throughout the benefice during Lent the decision has been made to have a theme of healing running through sermons, readings and the various Lent groups that are meeting.

 

So, expect to hear healing explored from all sorts of angles, from whoever is standing here over the next five weeks or so. Healing is a very appropriate theme for Lent. This is a time when we are encouraged to reflect on ourselves and our world. We don’t get very far in doing that without seeing that there are all sorts of things in us and around us which need to be healed. It may be physical healing we long for, for ourselves or someone else, but it might equally be healing in our hearts or our spirits, in our relationships, in our society, in creation itself. All of these are places where we know things aren’t right, where we often see dis-ease of some sort or another.

 

But healing isn’t a straightforward issue – that’s pretty obvious too. We may pray earnestly for someone to be physically healed, and yet it doesn’t happen. Christian leaders or churches which promise miracles usually come to grief in the end. Some are exposed as cynical frauds. Others may be entirely sincere in their beliefs, but are so heavily invested in those miracles happening because their own worth, their own faith, their own ego depends on it that when people aren’t healed they blame the victim for not having enough faith, or not praying right, or they tell them that they must be sinful in some way or have deserved their illness, or are being punished. Or they simply increase the spiritual pressure- pray louder, pray longer -  until prayer itself becomes abusive. It sounds a bit strange to say that healing needs to come with a health warning, but sadly it does.

 

It seems to me that there are two factors that are often involved when healing ministry goes awry. The first is that we forget that we aren’t God. It ought to be obvious, but it isn’t. We like to think we are in control – life feels safer that way. Of course, there are things we can do to help ourselves and others to be healthy. Diet, exercise, sleep, access to health care, clean water, vaccinations, a pollution free environment. But even if we get all of that right, we can’t guarantee that we won’t fall ill, or be injured, and (spoiler alert) all of us will one day die. We’re not in control. We’re not God. And that means that when we pray for healing, we can’t make promises. All we can do is put ourselves and those we pray for into the hands of the one who is God. Our prayers for healing need to be rooted not in our own ego, or our anxious need to feel that we can pull the strings that will make God act, but in our trust that, whatever happens, we, and those we pray for are held in his hands and loved eternally. That’s a far more precious gift to receive, a far more vital lesson to learn.

 

The second factor that often leads to problems with healing ministry is that we don’t read the Bible enough – or rather that we don’t read enough of the Bible. We light upon one healing story, and we think that if healing came to that person that way, then all healing happens like that. All we have to do is follow the pattern it gives us. But the reality is that healing comes to people in the Bible in many different ways.   And the two readings we’ve heard today are a perfect example of that.

 

If all we had was today’s Gospel reading, what might we conclude about sickness and healing? The man who was lying by the pool at Bethzatha had been ill for 38 years, we are told. Do you only get healed if you have that much patience, if you wait that long? And yet in other stories people are healed quickly. Jesus asks this man by the poolside, “Do you want to be made well?” We might conclude that if someone isn’t healed it’s because they don’t want to be, not deep down, not really. And yet, in other stories, there’s no conversation at all. Jesus heals the unconscious, maybe even dead, daughter of a synagogue leader called Jairus. He heals a centurion’s servant who isn’t even present. Sometimes he heals with a touch, sometimes with a word, sometimes even with spit mixed with mud – I’d rather give that one a miss thanks! Sometimes he casts out demons, sometimes not.

 

A really problematic part of the story we heard today comes at the end, when Jesus tells the man not “to sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you”. Does that mean that disease is the result of sin? That can play into some really dark and damaging beliefs around healing – or might it just be that this particular man’s paralysis is the result of something he did that he shouldn’t have done. Just a few chapters later, Jesus explicitly challenges his disciples when they ask whether the blindness of a man he is about to heal is his fault or his parents – it’s no one’s fault, says Jesus.  We generalise at our peril.

 

And our first reading underlines that. St Paul writes to the Church in Corinth. He talks about the wonderful things that have happened to him, the visions he’s had, the calling he received from God on the road to Damascus, and the assurance that gave him of God’s love.  “I know a person in Christ” is just a roundabout way of referring to himself. And yet, he says, that doesn’t mean that everything in his life is easy. He has a “thorn in the flesh”. We don’t know whether that’s a physical ailment, a problematic relationship, or something spiritual, but whatever it is, despite his prayers, despite his faith, despite his close relationship with God, it hasn’t been taken away. Yet, he says, he’s come to see that through it he has learned to look for and to find God’s strength “made perfect in weakness” and that, in turn, has helped him face the “weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities” that come to him as a result of his ministry.

 

So where does this all leave us as we start our Lenten exploration of healing? In one sense, we might be feeling that it’s all more complicated than we thought. But in another sense, perhaps it’s actually simpler. Healing, whether it’s physical, spiritual, relational, societal, cosmic, doesn’t depend on us following this ritual or that ritual, using these words or those words, or no words at all. It is found – in whatever form it takes - simply by realising that we are in the presence of God, who is closer to us than our own heartbeat, who doesn’t expect us to heal ourselves, or to heal others – because we can’t – but who invites us to find our rest in him as we pray, and place others for whom we pray into that rest as well, so that, as our collect today put it, “as you know our weakness, may  we know your power to save.”

Amen