Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity

Date:6th September 2009

Preacher: Revd David Carpenter

The Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary

In the Name of God, our wisdom and out truth.

Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of Christ has some disturbing scenes: it’s not for the faint of heart. One scene in particular has stayed with me. Following the vindictive and brutal scourging of Jesus at the pillar, the two Mary’s are seen attempting to wipe the paving clean of spilt blood. It is a silent, powerful and compelling image of hurt and vulnerability of weakness and futility in the face of brutal and unstoppable injustice. Unseen and ignored in the welter of life is this heartrending image of unfathomable love.

‘You see Vicar’, says a parishioner to me, ‘Catholics worship the Virgin May, and we worship God’. There was no point entering into any discussion. You can’t do a great deal when people, who believe they to have the depository of truth, close their minds.

But would you say there’s a smidgen of truth here?

Do you think that Devotion to Mary is a particularly Roman Catholic practice, perhaps one to be eschewed simply on the grounds that it is Roman Catholic and we’re Anglican: as if there is nothing more for us to know or learn?

Would it surprise you to learn that at one time there was a great devotion to Mary in this country?

There is a tradition, commonly held to go back to Edward the Confessor (1042 – 1066), which refers to England as ‘The Dowry of Mary’.

It would seem however, that the first documentary evidence for the title was found in a painting which used to hang in the English College in Rome, which showed Richard II (1377 - 1399) and his consort kneeling before Our Lady and offering England to her. He holds a parchment with a Latin inscription: ‘This is your dowry, O pious Virgin'. Perhaps the painting portrayed the King presenting England to Our Lady as her Dowry in Westminster Abbey in 1381.

Despite Google, I can’t track down any further information about this painting, so if anyone wants to be a detective, I’d like to hear what you discover.

However, in 1399 Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to his suffragan bishops:

"The contemplation of the great mystery of the Incarnation has drawn all Christian nations to venerate her from whom came the first beginnings of our redemption. But we English, being the servants of her special inheritance and her own dowry, as we are commonly called, ought to surpass others in the fervour of our praises and devotions."

There is no doubt about the deep devotion to Mary that existed in medieval England.

This widespread devotion to Mary is not confined to the whole of the Western Church for the greater part of Christian history. She also is at the heart of Eastern Christian spirituality. Known by the title, Theotokos (God bearer), she is inseparable from an understanding of God’s involvement with his creation and its redemption.

As Anglicans we straddle the historic catholic position, and the protestant reformations abandonment of Mary, as they sought to correct what they perceived as the excesses of the period.

We are uneasy with murmuring Hail Mary, but love to sing Henry William Baker’s hymn (1865) ‘Shall we not love thee Mother dear, whom Jesus loves so well’. (Note the tense). We are uncomfortable with bright blue statues, but adorn almost every Mother’s Union banner with her image. Placing a veil on a statue leaves us nervous, but dressing up our child for the Christmas Nativity is a worthy honour. And what would Evensong be without ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord .... Henceforth, all generations shall call me blessed.’

Raniero Cantalamessa, at one time preacher to the papal household, in his book ‘Mary Mirror of the Church’ describes Mary as ‘God’s living letter’. He writes, ‘When the angel greeted Mary, he did not address her by name, but simply called her “full of grace”; he didn’t say, “Hail Mary”, but “Hail, full of grace,” and goes on to show how her life mirrors the life of grace: her experience is ours – either actually, or in potential.

What interests me however, is the notion of Mary as a model for us today, I suspect, to some degree we will all have to break away from the painted plaster image and a misplaced religious notion that if things appear a bit tough, and we need a little extra help to twist God’s arm, then we’ll get Mary to put in a good word for us.

This is not about, as one confused person put it, Father, Mother, and Holy Bird, neither is it Trinity plus one. It’s about rediscovering the sacredness of human life: its dignity, its vulnerability, its need for liberation and redemption.

Mary, a betrothed, but as yet unmarried young woman is pregnant. In this, and in her status as a refugee, she stands alongside all marginalised people in society. In the Gospels she is linked with her son, known disparagingly as ‘The carpenter, the Son of Mary’ (Mark 6:3). He is deemed to be out of his mind, he attracts violent rejection, brutality in all its rawness, and savage death and in this she stands alongside him.

Things do not look good for us men. The doubt, persecution, violence, and betrayal that we find written in the gospels, is for the most part a male thing, it is ameliorated only by the love, devotion, service and witness of women.

Some feminists have not been slow to criticise the alabaster image of Mary as the ideal wife, the perfect mother, obedient in all respects. They see it as a male driven role model to perpetuate the subservience of women, but the idealised, sickly-sweet image of Mary is not one I find in the New Testament, neither is it one I can relate to.

In recent decades, a very different picture of Mary has developed, especially within Roman Catholic liberation theology. This revisionist Catholic view of Mary concentrates on her humble status and her song of praise (Magnificat). From the liberationist perspective Mary is seen as a prototype of the liberation struggle of poor people and especially of poor women against injustice and oppression. In her song of praise, Mary proclaims that God "has brought the powerful down from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty" (Luke 1:52-53). In some versions of the liberationist portrayal of Mary, it appears that Mary's faith makes possible God's entrance into history and that God is therefore dependent on humanity in the ongoing struggle against injustice. Now there’s a thought.

I suppose today, as the church celebrates her birthday, I could single out a particular point I would like to make concerning Mary. I could offer some kind of spiritual insight for you to ponder. Instead, I would like you to ask yourself, perhaps leaving certain preconceptions behind, what you really believe about her. Who is she, and why has she always been so uniquely significant in the Christian story?

It could be that you view her solely as the instrument by which Jesus was born: that done, the focus of attention is shifted never to return. But if you think this, you miss so much of the richness that surrounds the Christian pilgrimage we make with her.

When I was a curate I placed a relatively small statue of Mary on a chest alongside the altar at the daughter church of the parish in which I was serving. A rather formidable Churchwarden (not to suggest that Church Warden’s are formidable of course, just this one) used to, when changing the cloth, bunch up the material around the image, to make the point that it shouldn’t be there, and wasn’t wanted.

In contrast a small bowl appeared containing some delicate primroses from the garden of an old lady who I suspect had shared something of Mary’s sense of loneliness and hurt, so wonderfully captured for us in Gibson’s film.

Which image of Mary do you relate to and why?

There is a great deal of material out there relating to Mary, which just goes to show her chapter is not closed.

In fact protestant theology, having freed itself from a medieval excess is beginning to realize that it’s abandoning of Mary has made itself poorer, and is beginning to discover new ways in which to think and speak about her. ¹

If you would like somewhere to start and don’t want to embark on something as in-depth as Raniero Cantalamessa could I suggest a little book of meditations by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, based around Icons of the Virgin It’s entitled ‘Ponder these things’.

He concludes this wonderful little book by recalling what he refers to as ‘a background story’ circulating barely a hundred years after the crucifixion. Mary, the story goes was brought up in the Temple precincts and was assigned the task of weaving purple and scarlet thread. I’m curtailing the story now, but she is spinning the wool for the sanctuary veil, the curtain that hangs in front of the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of the unbridgeable gulf between sinful humanity and the holy God.

As Mary labours away at this sign of separation, holy fear, she is interrupted at her work; God, you could say, steps through the veil himself. From the sanctuary of heaven, from the terrifying emptiness between the cherubim on the ark, God enters another sanctuary, the holy place of a human body. He parts the curtain of human fear and guilt; and he is able to do this because this human creature, this young peasant woman, is enough of a stranger to fear and guilt to let him in wholeheartedly.

Now when we look at God, we do not see only the terror and darkness, the cloud that brooded over Sinai; we see Jesus, taking his throne on a mother’s lap. This say’s Williams, is the inmost mystery, the holiest of holies; and the mystery and, yes, the fear are not because God is so strange and far away, but because he has come closer to us than we are to own selves.

I offer you today an image of attentiveness to, and a willingness to embrace the will of God in vulnerability. A model and a vision for our own service and discipleship: an image that points us to our own potential and destiny within the love and embrace of God enthroned in the human heart.

In the face of so much squalor and misery for so many in the world today, I suggest that Mary can be a promise of hope that God can lift up the lowly, scatter the mighty and end the injustice by being incarnate in its midst.

Amen.