Mothering Sunday 2026 | 'A sword will pierce your own soul too'
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Preacher
Revd Kathryn Fleming
The sermon preached by the Canon Precentor on Sunday 15 March 2026
Just picture the scene.
A crowded place of worship: people of all ages coming and going, gazing about, admiring the building, pointing out distinctive features; others with heads bent in prayer. It might be Southwark Cathedral on a busy Saturday, were it not for the background noise of bleating—sheep and goats. In fact, this is the Temple in Jerusalem some two millennia past.
Amid the hurly-burly, one little knot of people—a family group, perhaps—stands strangely still.
Grandparents, parents, a babe in arms. Nothing unusual in that. People have been bringing their children to God in gratitude, to seek a blessing, or to make a commitment for many, many centuries.
But there’s something other than pride and joy on the mother’s face as she leans in to listen to the old man. His words fall heavily, like stones into a pool of water:
“This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed, so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
Imagine their impact on the young couple.
Is this the bad fairy at the christening, sowing seeds of unhappiness to blight the baby’s future? Or simply a reminder to us all that to love deeply is to run the risk, always, of the deepest hurt? Because, of course, that’s nothing less than the truth. Grief is an almost inevitable by-product of love.
Today, the world of Hallmark greeting cards would like us to believe that there is only one model of family life—and that it is reliably warm and happy. If that is your experience, I rejoice with you and beg you never, ever to take it for granted. Life has a habit of turning on a sixpence, you see.
Thirty years ago, I preached for the first time in my village church. It was Mothering Sunday then, too, and my vicar had decided that I—with three small children—should take the opportunity for my debut with an engaging, interactive, all-age address. Even then, I was conscious of the gulf between the impossible fantasy of perfect motherhood beloved by the media and the stumbling reality which my friends and I inhabited. I wanted to shift the focus from mothers to mothering—that loving care and nurture that has nothing to do with gender or with nuclear families—the kind of care that the Church has always aspired to offer to all comers. I’ve no idea how those words might have landed because, of course, thirty years ago was the year of the Dunblane massacre.
Suddenly, mothering was all about fear and pain and deep, deep grief.
“A sword will pierce your own soul too.”
Oh yes—so many would recognise that feeling.
The mothers who miscarried the babies for whom they had such hopes, such dreams.
Every mother, every parent, who feels they’ve failed to keep their children safe—even when there is nothing at all they could possibly have done differently.
Those spending agonised, anxious hours surrounded by the life-saving but terrifying technology of SCBU, or watching at bedsides in hospice or hospital, hoping beyond hope.
Those in Aberfan, Dunblane, Sandy Hook, Minab, who waved their children off to school as usual, but never welcomed them home.
Those who still entrust their children to tiny boats in rough seas, in the hope that they will find a better life when they arrive on the far side.
Those closer to us here whose children are victims of knife crime.
Those whose children have gone off the rails, who are sure it is all their fault.
Those who have lost touch with their children, who didn’t know how to love them well enough, who don’t understand what went wrong—and the children who grow up feeling that they are somehow not good enough, unlovable, unacceptable.
And those who never became parents at all, whether by choice or by chance.
Those who feel absolutely alone in life, with nobody to confide in, nobody to delight in joys or share in sorrows.
All those who won’t risk coming to worship today because it’s just too painful.
So many swords. So many wounded souls.
Why am I saying all this today?
I’d love to simply preach consolation, to wrap the sword in cotton wool so that it can’t do that much damage (do revisit our epistle if you need a reminder that God is the God of all consolation), but reality keeps forcing its way in.
Last week, as some of us gathered to reflect on the ministry of intercession and what it means to carry on praying in the face of a world that seems increasingly dark and cold, we agreed that with God, as with one another, honesty is the best policy. There is no point in trying to hide our feelings from the one who is closer to us than our very breath. God is not fooled by our efforts to paint over the cracks in our bruised and broken hearts, or in our bruised and broken world.
If what today inspires is a cry of pain, then offer that as your prayer.
Because we need to make our churches real—places where all feelings can safely be named, where no grief, no disappointment, no anger at self or God is unacceptable.
None of us gets through life without a few swords through the soul.
Our wounds may not always seem to be of the same order as Mary’s, but that in no way diminishes their power to knock us off course and leave us bruised and grieving. So—let’s admit it.
The last time I preached on this passage, I was working at Coventry Cathedral, a place whose very fabric preserves our wounded reality in the broken stone and heat-warped iron of the bombed medieval cathedral. It’s a place which understands grief. Torn apart itself, it offers space for those whose lives have been torn apart in different ways.
And beside it, though the new cathedral may appear all triumphant transformation, beneath the overwhelming presence of Christ enthroned in glory, inextricably connected to it is the figure of Christ crucified, drawing the whole world to himself. And there, unlovely in her grief but constant in her love, is the statue of his mother.
Mary—the representative of all the wounded, loving souls who can only stand at the place of suffering and hope that new life may yet begin, even there.
This building may not, perhaps, do the heavy lifting for us in quite the same way, but nonetheless it has stood for nine centuries as somewhere for people to gather, wounded or rejoicing—a place to try to be real.
You see, if we as Mother Church can do nothing else, we can surely offer a sanctuary: a place to come as we are, with no need to pretend—where we form a community of love with room for the weakest, the saddest, those most damaged by their journey through life. Here, we can listen with open hearts to each other’s stories, can dry one another’s tears, bear one another’s burdens. Here, we can set aside the need to be successful, and can simply be.
This is the kind of family your parents have sought out for you. We are a long, long way from perfect, but we do believe that God’s love changes everything, and have staked our all on that belief.
The American theologian James Finley suggests that God’s love protects us from nothing but sustains us in everything. Souls will be pierced—but souls will be healed too. I pray that this may always be a place where God’s love is made real, as we learn to see Christ in one another and meet him at the family table in a fragment of bread and a sip of wine.