St. Mary the Virgin, 2016
Isaiah 7:10-15, Psalm 132:6-10, 13, 14; Galatians 4:4-7, Luke 2:1-7
I would not normally take time on holidays looking for an internet cafe to check emails, but we needed to rearrange travel plans to attend my brother-in-law’s funeral and get in touch with a few people. So there we were, in a classic Viennese coffee shop, complete with polished silverware and snow-white table cloths, surreptitiously scrolling through messages. Stifling a naughty word, I broke a fingernail jabbing the delete button to trash the first message that read: Christmas is coming–it’s just around the corner! Book your dream Christmas holiday now. Fast forward a few weeks… we had just arrived home and during that zombie-like jet-lagged state when all you feel good for is haphazardly throwing laundry into the washing machine and half-heartedly sifting through the mail—there, on top of the pile was a colourful flyer that read:Santa’s Summer Family Dinner, August 24th. Bring the whole family and join Santa on holidays with a tropical Christmas… Children young and old will enjoy this non-traditional Hawaiian-themed Christmas spread including entertainment, crafts and a visit from Santa! Guess where that got filed?
They say things come in threes, so when I looked at the readings for today I finally said OK, I give up—I can take a hint, and hit the books, checking what we are actually supposed to be celebrating on this feast of St. Mary the Virgin and what message it might hold for us. It didn’t take much digging to discover that today we join the vast majority of Christians in celebrating one of the great mysteries of our faith and holiest of saints that Anglicans clung to even in the face of rabid Reformers who purged anything that smacked of practices and teachings that could not be found in the Bible or the very earliest Christian traditions.
Preserved in the calendar of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (which Canadian Anglicans inherited), is the Holy Day of 15th August on which ancient tradition says that Mary was taken up in glory as soon as she died, or simply Fell Asleep as the BCP puts it. Since we have no Biblical account this event, only artists’ impressions and the magnificent music it inspired, we have to remember her life and contribution to God’s plan, as we might at a funeral.
Sadly, it’s often in reading obituaries or listening to eulogies that we learn things about people we wished we’d known earlier. At my brother-in-law’s funeral we heard wonderful stories even his wife had never heard before, as a variety of his old friends and associates filled in the gaps. Maybe it was the same with Mary. While she played a crucial role in the life of Christ, we know relatively little about her from the Bible besides the strange stories surrounding his birth, how she courageously stood near the cross witnessing his death, and later joined the disciples in the Upper Room waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit. The only other mentions she has are meeting Simeon and Anna when the baby Jesus was presented at the Temple, next when he was about twelve and worried his parents by staying at the Temple without telling anyone instead of joining the return caravan from Jerusalem, lastly at a wedding in Cana when she asked him to help solve a shortage of wine at the banquet. Mary stuck by Jesus to the end, following him on his final journey to Jerusalem, even when it must have broken her heart to see him suffer, and accepting the protection of the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’, but after Pentecost Biblical record stops.
Depending who the disciple Jesus loved was, she may have stayed near Jerusalem, or moved with him to what is now Syria, Turkey, Spain or France, although scholars tend to favour Turkey. All we do know is that Christians grew increasing devoted to her and her memory. During the few hundred years it took for the Bible we have today to be compiled, there were also other stories about Jesus, his friends and his family circulating amongst the faithful, transmitted orally or written down and preserved that way. From them, it appears that very early on Mary was held in the highest esteem—firstly as the perfect mother, then officially proclaimed as Theotokos, (the God-bearer or Mother of God) by the ecumenical council of Ephesus. While theologians considered her role central to the mystery of salvation since she bore the Christ-child Emmanuel—God With us, the Church insisted she was not to be worshipped, but honoured for her spotless character, obedience to God’s call even though it could have cost Mary her life, and for her belief in Jesus so following him no matter what. In brief, Mary was seen as a model disciple as well as the mother of Jesus. Fancy titles aside, maybe ordinary folk related to Mary’s humility, and maybe found in her a comforting mother figure, as well as a role-model.
It was only when Mary’s popularity and importance to Christians appeared to cross the fine line from veneration to worship, as more stories about her accumulated over the centuries, official Church opinions began to differ, some trying to diminish or suppress her influence by dismissing some of the stories about her as pious folk-tales. However, in Britain, except for about ten years at the height of the Reformation, on every August 15th the Church of England continued to celebrate the story of Mary Falling Asleep and being taken up in glory—however we choose to interpret that. That’s the genius of Anglicanism— its insistence on our freedom to figure out the meaning of such mysteries ourselves, whether we regard them as symbolic of what is true of everyone when we die, or literal.
Ambiguity drives some folk nuts because they just want answers, and with the magic of the internet at our fingertips we are used to instant answers. But what about true mysteries and questions we don’t have absolute answers for like the mysteries of faith? In most jobs, people are expected to develop all kinds of competencies, but in the companies I worked for the most highly-valued yet hardest skill to acquire was how to deal with ambiguity, especially for engineers like me, trained to produce answers. However, Mary seemed to have the wisdom and natural ability to handle mysteries, because the Bible tells us that whenever she was presented with strange information or events we’re told she treasured and pondered them in her heart. It takes time and patience ponder mysteries and miracles properly—sometimes a lifetime.
Downloading hundreds of photos I took on my recent tour of village churches and great European cathedrals and abbeys, Mary appears time and again in paintings, sculptures and stained glass windows—sometimes depicted as a poor country girl, sometimes as the noble queen of heaven with a golden crown, often as a beautiful young mum bouncing her baby, sometimes as a grief-stricken matron cradling her dead son. Studying the spectrum of images, it’s easy to see how Mary has come to represent everywoman, in fact every man and woman who is faced with the joys and sorrows of this life, but faced them with courage, fortitude and hope born of faith—faith in God and Jesus that breeds hope for a better world and future pregnant with possibilities knowing God is with us—hope that comes from pondering the great mysteries of life and death, delving deep within ourselves and discovering God there, as God is everywhere. That’s when we can find joy in the everyday and like artists we see wonders hidden in something ordinary and great beauty in ordinary people. Hope, born of faith can transform life (or the way we view it) and turn things upside-down as Mary foretold, so that we can even see death as the door to new life. OK, I know it’s not Christmas, but (adapting the words of a carol), may the faith of Mary and the love of Christ be born in us this day.