One of the traditional names for this Sunday, the fourth in Lent, is Refreshment Sunday. On this Sunday you were allowed to take a break from your Lenten discipline, and, I suppose, let your hair down a bit. The name 'Refreshment Sunday' reminds me too that we all need a bit of refreshment in our lives, and that every Sunday and not just this one should be refreshing. Modern Sundays may be entertaining and even exciting, but for me they’re often too busy and frenetic to be all that refreshing. A lot of people are so worn out by the end of the weekend that they’re almost relieved to be back in work on Monday morning. But in all the mix and muddle of a modern Sunday, churches perhaps can still offer the chance of refreshment.
Worship is more than a fill-up visit to the spiritual petrol pump before we drive off into the working week, but we should be refreshed and recharged by what Sunday worship provides. When we review how we do worship, as I’m sure we should from time to time, one of the questions to ask should be, “Is our worship spiritually refreshing, and fulfilling? Or does it take more out of us than it puts in?
Today is of course Mothering Sunday as well as Refreshment Sunday; household servants would be released today to visit their families, which is one reason for the name, but it also became a day when we celebrate our Mother Church. So perhaps we can reflect on what that phrase 'Mother Church' actually means. We could of course also reflect on the motherliness of God, but perhaps we’ll leave that for another time. But in what sense can we think of the Church as a mother?
Mothering is in part about providing refreshment; childhood memories for me include Mum providing endless cups of squash on the hot summer days we always seemed to have in those days. As we kids came rushing in from playing outside or down the fields, all hot and tired, there’d always be a jug waiting.
But of course, there's more to refreshment than that. Lots of things get described as 'refreshing' in our everyday speech. Drinks are refreshing, but so are flavours, mint for example, flavours with a sharp and clear impact on our taste buds. Water taken externally is refreshing, too, so we’re refreshed and relaxed after a bath or a shower. But people can say refreshing things too: think of a refreshing truth, or a refreshing idea. “It’s refreshing to hear someone saying such things,” people may say. Just the other day, someone said to me, “What a refreshing change!” To be honest, I don’t recall what that refreshing change actually was - but it's true that a change can be refreshing.
There’s a real link between refreshment and healing. Refreshment aids the process of recovery. That’s true when we’re healing bodies, and it’s also true when we’re healing minds and souls, and for that matter situations and communities. Healing can begin or be enabled by refreshing things: the truth being spoken, a new perspective or vision being shared, or just a caring hug being given.
But I can think of another place where I personally see the word 'refresh' quite a lot: on my computer screen. I often need to press the refresh button when things on the web get fouled or frozen up, or when the page I want doesn’t load as it should. When I press 'refresh' things should and often do start working again as they should. I’ve spent much of the past week trying to persuade my computer to work as it should; and sometimes my own life needs just as much work.
There are times when our Christian lives get fouled up and frozen, times when ministry and witness and prayer get stale. When our lives as Christians get tangled and deformed, Sunday and Mother Church should be refreshing us and kickstarting us, putting things right, sorting out the glitches, showing the way forward.
If it's doing that, then great, halleluia, praise God. If it isn’t, then that’s something to look into. Question: Do we step out of church on a Sunday with a spring in our step, or does what we do here feel like hard work? Does worship inform and inspire us, or is it more likely to patronise and bore us? As a minister I might not enjoy the answer to a question like that, but it’s still an important question to ask. There are times when church itself is in need of refreshment.
Church provides refreshment when it channels the refreshing power of God. So if a churches fails to refresh, then perhaps its connection to God isn’t properly tuned. We can sometimes be too churchy to be Godly - too involved in doing our own thing to be as plugged in as we should be to what God is wanting to do.
The alternative greeting at the start of the communion prayer (the one not printed in the books we use) is this: The Lord is here, his Spirit is with us. That’s the promise that began this thing called church, on the first Christian Day of Pentecost. God's Spirit is the Spirit of fellowship, if you recall the words of the Grace, and fellowship and refreshment are closely linked. God’s Spirit is given for our refreshment. The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace; well, a long list of things in fact, but the list begins with these three. How well do we do love and peace, and more importantly perhaps, how well do we do joy?
Christian joy is actually quite a deep and even (in a way) serious thing. All Sundays, even in Lent, should be joyful. And what motivates our joy is that we delight in our Lord, our living and reigning Lord, whose new life we share. One of the prefaces we use at Easter speaks about the long reign of sin being ended, a broken world being renewed, and we once again made whole.
It’s all right to quote from the Easter service because every Sunday, even in Lent, is in fact a celebration of our risen Lord, and so a time of joyful praise, as we praise God for his love, for the love which saves us, calls us and sends us.
And joy and refreshment closely connect together. A truly joyful church will be constantly refreshing and enthusing and enlivening those who worship as part of it. We're sent out from this service with joy, sent to take the good news of Jesus out into the world that so desperately needs to know about his saving love. At the close of this worship we are sent from Mother Church to share and continue the holy task of mothering, refreshing, healing, loving, in the places where we live and work, and in the name of Jesus Christ. Our world needs so much to be refreshed by what only his gracious hand can bring.
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