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The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
Almighty God, who hast given thy only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always most thankfully receive that his inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavor ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through the same Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 15)
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The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 1:46-55
A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
on
Luke 1:46-55
✛
There Is No Rose of Such Virture
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In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin, Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, was added to the Book of Common Prayer in 1979. The addition was made not only because of Mary’s great importance as an agent of the Incarnation of Christ and her personification of life-long faithfulness, but also because of ecumenical convergence on Mary among the churches of the West, notably Anglicans and the Roman Catholic Church. Our own Canon Professor Robert Wright, a great ecumenist and scholar of the early (and fairly undivided) Church of the first millennium, had a hand in a book-length common statement by Anglicans and Romans on the person and role of the Virgin Mary in our churches’ life and devotion. [1] We have kept Mary’s feast at Saint Thomas on a Sunday for many years.
August 15, the actual day, is called the Assumption of Mary by the Roman Church. The Eastern Orthodox call the same mystery the Dormition, or Falling Asleep, of Mary at the end of her earthly life. Here is what the official teaching of the Roman Church says about the Assumption: “The Most Blessed Virgin Mary, when the course of her earthly life was completed, was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven, where she already shares in the glory of her Son’s Resurrection, anticipating the resurrection of all members of his Body.”[2] The Eastern Orthodox Churches did not take part in defining this doctrine, but their devotional writing about the Dormition of Mary is similar and has been for well over a millennium. [3]
The Assumption of Mary is not Anglican doctrine, because it cannot be established by proof of Holy Scripture. And yet something very like the Assumption of Mary can be attested in much of our High Anglican devotional poetry and hymnody. For example, the seventeenth century Bishop Thomas Ken, the author of the Doxology (“Praise God from whom all blessings flow”), has a hymn, “Her Virgin Eyes Saw God Incarnate Born,” which concludes as follows: “Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced, /Next to his throne her Son his Mother placed; /And here below, now she’s of heaven possest, /All generations are to call her blest.”[4]
More recently, Austin Farrer, an Oxford don and perhaps the greatest Anglo-Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, wrote these words for meditation entitled “Taking Up”: “The bond of the Incarnation in unbreakable, and Mary, dying, is united to her Son. He came from her womb, she goes into his mystical body; once she was home for him, now he is home to her. She surrenders to him the flesh from which he had his own. He takes up the pieces where she lays them down and remakes her life in the stuff of glory. He cherishes the dear familiar body, entirely her own in every part, and entirely the work of his hands.”[5] We sang words to this effect today in the last stanza of Hymn 278.
What is said here about Mary is nothing other than the inheritance promised to us all in the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting, as we attest in the Apostles’ Creed. Furthermore, it is worth pointing out that assumptions (or “translations”) of God’s special servants into glory are not unknown in the Bible. In Genesis, Enoch, the father of old Methuselah, walked with God after Methuselah’s birth for three hundred years and then “he was not, for God took him.” We are more familiar with the story of the death and disappearance of Moses on Mount Nebo after the Lord showed him the Promised Land; and also the Assumption of the Prophet Elijah in the whirlwind and chariot of fire.[6] It strikes me that these stories may have influenced George Lucas, the author of Star Wars, when the great Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi allowed Darth Vader to kill him and then, like Enoch, “was not,” and yet on the other side of death became more powerful than ever. [Lucas is a Methodist.] It’s an old biblical story, and it is not a long stretch, nor is it an illegitimate development, to imagine our Lady Saint Mary as part of that mystery within the Body of Christ her Son.[7]
So where are we in all this? Well, one of our favorite hymns, “Ye watchers and ye holy ones,” which we sing on such days as All Saints, places us firmly in this tradition celebrating Mary’s high place in heaven. Here is the stanza about our Lady, who is spoken of as the Agent of our salvation by Christ: “O higher than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim, lead their praises, Alleluia! Thou Bearer of the eternal Word, most gracious, magnify the Lord, Alleluia!”
In today’s Gospel, Mary sings the Magnificat, the great canticle used at Evensong. She says, “For behold from henceforth all generations shall me blessed; for he that is mighty hath magnified me, and holy is his name.” That was at the very beginning, when Mary was pregnant with Christ. Now let’s go to the end of the Gospel, where Mary and the Beloved Disciple John are at the foot of the cross. Jesus, in one of his last words, commends them to each other. “Woman,” he says to Mary, “behold thy Son.” There is a double meaning, referring not only to himself but to the Beloved Disciple as her son. Then to John he says, “Behold thy Mother.” And from that hour, that disciple took Mary into his own home. Very early tradition beyond Scripture says that John took Mary with him to Ephesus and that they both died natural deaths, young John living to the end of the first century and witnessing Mary’s departure some time before. We can do what John did. The word of Jesus from the cross is intended as a word to all his beloved disciples. This generation can call her blessed, and we can take Mary into our own homes, in as many ways as there are Christian homes. In our home, we often added the Hail Mary to the night prayers of the children. And I’m touched that our children do the same thing for theirs. “Now I lay me down to sleep…Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death.”
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
[1] The Episcopal Church’s Prayer Book Collect for the Day (BCP, p. 192) is adapted from the traditional Collect for the Assumption of Mary. The Anglican-Roman ecumenical book about Mary is available in the Saint Thomas bookstore.
[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church, (1994), p. 254.
[3] On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies (St. Vladimir’s Press, 1998), especially see the writings of St. John of Damascus and St. Andrew of Crete in this volume.
[4] The English Hymnal (1933), Hymn 217.
[5] Meditations for the Rosary in “The Heaven-sent Aid” in Lord, I believe, by Austin Farrer and printed in Saint Thomas’s Devotions to our Lady and Stations of the Cross (Our Lady of Fifth Avenue Ward, Society of Mary), p. 71. This book is available in our bookstore.
[6] Genesis 5:21-24; Deuteronomy 34:1-8; II Kings 2:1-12.
[7] The Continental Protestant leaders of the Sixteenth Century, Calvin, Luther and Zwingli, were not averse to using some high words about Mary. Zwingli used the Hail Mary in the public devotions of Zurich.
