‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’ John 3:16

Mothering Sunday, a friend used to call it the Hallmark festival.  People would buy cards for mothers and grandmothers and feel that they had fulfilled the obligations of the day.

In the years in ministry, it often seemed a sad day.  There were those whose lives did not correspond to the ideal, those who had no children or grandchildren to send them cards, those whose loved ones had died, those who had never married.  There were many people for whom Mothering Sunday must have brought pain, not that they would ever have expressed such sentiments.

On a day when churches can be inadvertently exclusive, there is encouragement in remembering that faith is not about human love or relationships, but that it is about God’s relationship with us. We need to talk about God’s love for people personally, about relationships with him that are unaffected by human traditions.

John Chapter 3 Verse 16 is a bible verse that is so familiar that we probably no longer think about what it means.  It would be one of the best known verses from the Bible, some writers have described it as the Christian Gospel expressed in one sentence.

If we think about just one word at the heart of it, ‘whoever’, it can help us think about faith on a day when we think about parenthood and love.

This one single word, ‘whoever’: it tells us much about God and it tells us much about ourselves.

‘Whoever’ says that God will relate to any of us directly, whether at home, whether alone, whether isolated from family.  ‘Whoever” is a statement that this is an accessible God, that this is an approachable God. ‘Whoever” is a statement that whoever responds to God, God will respond to them. The story of Jesus is the story of God being present to anyone who chose to listen to him, ‘whoever believes’ has God alongside them, whatever the present circumstances.

‘Whoever’ tells us about God.

‘Whoever’ tells us about ourselves. A friend in the North once said to me that there were two sorts of people in the world, there were sinners saved by grace and there were sinners.  ‘Whoever’ tells us that we are saved by grace.

Because being a Christian is not about belonging to a church. Being a Christian is about our own personal faith in this God who takes on our flesh and walks among us and dies and rises again. ‘Whoever’ does not refer to the church, ‘whoever’ refers to individual people. Using the word ‘whoever’ Jesus tells people they are responsible for their own decisions, they can choose to be sinners saved by grace, or they can choose to remain just sinners.

When we talk about faith, let’s talk about what we believe, not what the church says because the church seems to have spent most of its history excluding people. The churches are cutting clergy numbers, closing buildings. At such a time it is important to recover Jesus’ words to his disciples. ‘Whoever’ is a challenging word to us, but it is also a reassuring word.

Jesus looked for people who took their own decisions, who responded to him and who  going through the most difficult and the most turbulent of times. They were people who knew the pain of missing loved ones.

However we might feel on the Mothering Sunday, ‘whoever” is a statement that God is like a parent who cares for us, that God loves us regardless of how far we have gone from him. ‘Whoever’ says that God recognises our dignity as individual people. ‘Whoever’ is a sign that God respects our right to make our own decisions. ‘Whoever’ is Jesus saying that you matter

When we talk about faith, ‘whoever’ is a word to remember; it means we can talk about faith, that no matter how far away we may feel, we are still loved.

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.’