The Sabbath

Waikato Times, Volume 103, Issue 17367, 31 March 1928, Page 18 (Supplement)

The Sabbath

AN INSPIRING SERMON.

TO MOTHERS’ UNION,

In connection with the Feast of the Annunciation Rev. E. Lionel Harvie, Vicar of Cambridge, addressed a Mothers’ Union service at St. George’s Church, Frankton, on Monday night. He took as his theme “Mary the Mother of Jesus.”

“On the threshold of the new dawn,” said Mr Harvie, “there stands a familiar figure which has been the admiration and veneration of succeeding years—Mary the Mother of Jesus, the Virgin Mother, the Mater Dolorosa, Mary the Magnificent, Madonna, Mj Lady. And to-day we keep the Festival of the Annunciation —Lady Day—• and it is fitting, talking to a congregation of women, that ohr thoughts should turn to her —the woman who mothered Jesus. First of all, I wa.it you to realise the yeai-s they spent together before He went out to do His work in the world. Mary had a work to do, and all mothers after her must do it, too. for their sons, and that was the guidance of the physical nature of her wonderful boy, seeing that the casket which holds the jewel is kept strong. So absorbed was the boy Jesus about His Father’s business that He would easily have forgotten Himself. The inner fires were consuming Him; and Mary’s mission—every mother’s mission—is to train a body that can, in health and fulness of purpose, provide a covering for the burning soul of her child. To do just this —to hold your boy fast and then let him go. And that is the secret of those hidden years of which the Gospels tell us nothing. All those years Mary was training hej’ Son.

“And all the hidden years in your life are given to that —to take that boy and hold him to your life, to make him subject unto you, until the time must come for him to go out in your strength and in the strength of God, to do the work for which he is called. It is not easy. Mary found it hard to let this wonderful Son go. It will be hard for you. For now you train him that he may not get older than his years; you mould the plastic material, and what you are your son will he. If you arc devout and full of the beauty of worship and religion your son and your daughter will have something of it, something that will stand by them in after hours of stress and storm. And school days pass, and the boy grows lo manhood, and we must let him go. Ah, dear women! you would one day build Mary’s Son a big temple made of little ‘temples that are the work of His hands and yours. That temple may become —nay, is already—a reality. East, west; north, south, it spreads and widens and towers. It is built of boys, cleanlimbed,' clean-minded, self-respecting fellows, scorning vices, eager for service, sensitive in honour, chivalrous, patriotic, keen for truth and right. What a leaven is working througn these boys, potential fathers of sons in the ripeness of time for the ultimate regeneration of a degenerate world. And these young Christs are yours; your boys trained in the hoi fc in the spirit of loving, Christ-like service, your boys, whom you send out, and will send out, to work for God in His great world. When Mary heard the words. ‘Behold, My Mother and My brethren,” she surely knew then that one part of her mission was ended. She must let her Son go.

Dream Dreams and See Vfhions.

“And I would say to you mothers: Hold your children fast while they are not yet matured. You simply cannot hold them when maturity blooms. Hold that boy as long as you can to the commonplace blessings (Sr home, but when the boy is a man pray for eyes to see it, and let him go—go in the care and love of God, go with your

mark upon him. Sometimes we are permitted to dream dreams and sec visions, and I dream of a day when the spirit of the gentle Mother and her Son rests upon the world in all its fullness. When that spirit is abroad in our homes and in our daily lives, why, then I see our fair land filled with happy Homes, with firesides of content; I see a world of peace adorned in every form of beauty, while lips are rich with words of love and truth —a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world where labour reaps its full reward, where work and worth go hand in hand. ' I see a world without the beggar's outstretched palm, the piteous wail of want, the cruel eyes of scorn. I see a race without disease of flesh or brain, shapely and fair; and as I look life lengthens, joy deepens, love canopies the earth, and over all, in the great dome, shines the Eternal Star of human hope. I want to throw over you to-night the royal mantle of the woman who mothered Jesus. 1 want you to have the spirit of that gentle maiden, that you, too. may take your share in the realisatio'n of the vision which shall one day be the glory and the beauty of the earth.

A Mother’s Loneliness. “But there is another side, personal, perhaps, to you, as we gaze on this perfect Woman. I want you to see now her loneliness. Joseph'died when Jesus was a boy, and Mary was left utterly alone to love and to ponder and be brokenhearted. So because Jesus was so untterably wonderful Mary was unutterably lonely; and she was lonely because she loved Him so. Other sons loving their mothers would address them in fond names of endearment. Her Son at the marriage feast said: ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ Other sons witli such a peerless mother would have called her the sweetest mother in the world; but her son, waving His hand across the crowd, said, as I have just shown you: ‘Behold My Mother, my brothers, and sisters.’ Every mother knows something of that loneliness as childhood reaches to manhood and to womanhood. There comes a day when the most perfect mother has to make room for others in her daughter’s heart. Sooner or later in this shadowed world a loving mother is a lonely mother. And it is when you remember Mary’s love for a Son who was as mysterious as God that you come to think of her in all her glory as perhaps the loneliest woman in the world. And there arc to-day many sisters of that lonely Mother, though perhaps not to the same extent. There is a woman left with a family of young children, the bread-dinner taken, the father and friend and helpmeet gone, and alore she has to’battle. Everything is kept sacred in her heart, and she goes steadily on, trying with Christian patience to train her children as he would have helped to train them had he lived. Friends there are, neighbours there are, good, loving souls there are who help and cheer, but when the day is done and dusk has fallen to dark and all is still and the world sleeps, there is the mother pondering in her loneliness, thinking how she can carry on, thinking how she can train this child or that; and in the silent hours she communes with God and learns the lesson that as her days so shall her strength be. I canno* imagine any women trying atone, without Christ, to live the life of service to her children and her home. And I do believe in the silent hours that she can talk to Him as friend to friend, and ' feel that Mary’s Son understands and j through all the longing and the lonel - | ness there is peace. For a great love j must be lonely and a great love must J suffer. | Gladness in First-born. “Go back across the ages. LonzJ

years ago some of you mothers have gathered your first-born child into your arms, and there was such gladness in these eyes of yours that every neighbour saw your life illuminated. And now, as you look back upon it all, and think of all that has come and gone since then, you know the sorrows that have followed love. What sleepless nights, what hours of weary watching; what struggle to do that which was hard'to do when wills were rebellious and lips untruthful. AJt this has followed the illumination that came w;hen the love ol' motherhood was born, and all this leads to loneli - ness, and from loneliness to the path of peace that leads to Christ. Always remember that love (whether it be mother-love or any great love) that love has its triumphs, but it has its tortures; love has its Paradise, but it has its Purgatory. Love has its Mountain of Transfiguration, and it has its olive gardens where the sweat is blood. Love is the secret of the sweetest song that ever was uttered by human lips, and love is the secret of the keenest suffering that ever pierced the heart. And as I cast over you the royal mantle of the woman who mothered Jesus I would have her spirit within you that you may find peace in that loneliness, and know you are very near and very dear to the heart of God.

A Last Thought. . “And one more thought to you whom I would have become reflections of the gentle Jewish maiden with the wistful eyes, I want to say this: Women in the world to-day have a hard and bitter fight at times. Life is not easy to many, and I feel sometimes that women are far more cruel to other women than they ever are to men. We live in an age when no woman's reputation is safe from lying lips, and so often the hurt comes from those hard-faced, hard-hearted women, all piety and no charity, whose lips tighten with saintly, uncharitable purpose. Sometimes the hurt comes from charming and amiable people, but people whose minds are cruel. And, do you know, lots of charming and amiable people have cruel minds. But over you is the mantle of the sweet and gracious maiden, and with her spirit of womanly sweetness and tenderness you can never hurt another soul. There is much even in this town against which you can set your face —much evil in rumour and gossip that will hurt perhaps another woman’s soul. That is all I would say. To-night we have gazed on the Mother, and we glance down on her lap and we see the Son. and He holds out His babV hands to you, and His fingers play about your face. From henceforth you belong to the Mother and the Child, and no harmful thoughts of others shall soil your soul. Life is so short. It is very glad, hut often it is very sad; so let the word of rumour that you would speak die where it is. For why? Why? Listen — i

A whisper broke the air, A sol t light tone and low, Yet barbed with shame and woe, Now might It only perish there Nor further go. Ah. me ! A cjuiet and eager ear Caught up the little meaning sound Another voice has breathed it clear. And so it wandered round From ear to lip. from lip to ear, Until it reached a genUe hearu Ami that —F broke.