The Feast of Mary, Mother of Our Lord 2004

Speaking Index

Delivered 16 August 2004, the Saturday service based on the readings for the Feast of Mary, Mother of Our Lord.

We have come here at the close of the day, to gather beside the waters of baptism, to gather at the foot of the cross. We are called here to worship together. It is good that we are here.

Today is the Feast day of Mary, Mother of our Lord, which is why the altar is dressed in white for this one day.

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Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and from his son Jesus the Christ, and from the Holy Spirit. Amen

As many of you probably did, I grew up Lutheran. For me this was back in the ’sixties, when as far as most anyone could tell, being Lutheran mostly meant that you weren’t Catholic. This was particularly driven home to me because I grew up living across the street from Queen of Angels Church. And not just a church, they ran a school through the eighth grade. The girls wore navy skirts, white blouses, and blue sweaters. The boys wore white shirts and salt and pepper cords, and similar blue sweaters. So being Lutheran meant you got to pick your own clothes out.

They went to mass, we just went to church. They carried the rosary, an arrangement of beads that involved saying a few short prayers a whole lot of times, we didn’t repeat much. They worshiped in Latin, we used English.

As time passed, both churches changed. They switched to English, and we came to realize that the service of Holy Communion we use is the Mass, written some 17 centuries ago – we just switched to English sooner and forgot the name.

In fact, you wouldn’t be too far off to say the only differences today are matters of church governance and what has been sneeringly called Maryolotry. The governance differences are probably a wash, their central control is more onerous, but when you compare Chicago and Rome, well, I’d rather visit Rome every time!

But Mary! Ah, Mary, generations shall call you blessed. The beads, the rosary, involves saying this prayer ten times:

Hail, Mary, full of grace
our Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, our Lord Jesus Christ.
O virgin Saint Mary, O Mother of God, pray for us sinners,
now and at all times, and at the hour of our death. Amen

That is interspersed with a few other prayers, with the Hail Mary said in sets of ten repeats. Sometimes five sets, sometimes fifteen. That would stop making sense to me, but it would certainly drum the importance of Mary into you if every time you talked out of turn in class you were sent to the closet to say the Rosary.

Because of some aspects of Roman Catholic observance, we tend to have certain problems with Mary. As Lutherans, we are now willing to let Mary have a little more role in our church than sitting quietly in the Christmas pageant. We don’t worship her, and we don’t pray to her, but we do celebrate her life and ministry.

Back when, Lutherans didn’t use Vespers. Sure, there was a service for it in the red book, but I don’t recall it ever being used at the church where I was confirmed. Now we do. You’ll note that I didn’t have Larkin read the text appointed for the Gospel, that’s because we will sing it in a few minutes – we sing it every time we sing vespers, it’s the Annunciation and the Magnificat. The angel came to Mary, and she responded, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

Over the millennia, Christians have given Mary many names. It’s not important that you remember them all, there won’t be a test, but just listen to the titles the church has heaped on her:

Mother of God
Cause of Our Joy
Seat of Wisdom
Mother of Sorrows
Blessed Mother
Our Lady of Peace
Advocate
Our Lady of Light
Coredemptrix
Virgin of Tenderness
Our Lady of Refuge
Virgin of Virgins
The Mystic Rose
Dawn of the Mystic Day
Gate of Heaven
Our Lady of Lourdes
Star of the Sea
Queen of the Angels
Madonna
Queen of the Universe
Our Lady of Succour
New Eve
Queen of Heaven – in Latin, Regina Coeli

In fact, two years ago Anthony Chiffolo released a 216-page book called “100 Names of Mary: Stories and Prayers”, using a hundred of the names to focus on attributes of her ministry to us. One review of that book claims that there have been over 6,000 names used to address her.

Mary may be the most extreme case of God changing a typical person into a notable saint. When Gabriel appeared to her and said that she was going to have a son, she was a normal teenage girl. I’m going to have a son? I don’t think so! But within minutes she was on board, with the wit to say something like “All generations will call me blessed.” Not your typical thirteen-year-old girl, but she probably had been ten minutes before.

All four Gospels relate at least once where contemporary observers were unimpressed by Mary. “How can this man Jesus be special, we know his family, we know his mother.”

I also find it interesting that, of all the myriad characters in scripture, only two mortals are identified in the creeds: Mary and Pontius Pilate. There were thousands of teenaged girls in the area, there were dozens of Roman procuratore, nothing either of them did on their own elevated them to such levels.

I wonder, how would I handle it if Gabriel showed up in my office tonight, and told me that I would be taking on a new role, something completely outside my training and background. It’s hard to imagine anything that might be comparable. For me to be president of the US tomorrow would be a less dramatic change than for a thirteen-year-old Judean girl to become the Queen of Heaven.

And this might be a more difficult test: Would I, after being plucked out of my current environment and thrust by God into greatness, have the modesty and quiet grace that Mary appears to have had? As far as I know, the closest thing Mary ever did to throwing her weight around was to tell the servants at that wedding in Cana to “Do whatever he tells you to.”.

In the history of the church there are many cases of reports of Mary appearing to the living. I’m not sure that I specifically disbelieve them, I just don’t think these accounts or legends are important to understanding Mary. That it has been important to others is not really a concern of mine; debunking their delusions, if they are delusions, would help nobody. If God has sent her back to intervene in mortal affairs over the past 20 centuries, it’s a minor miracle compared to the virgin birth.

The Roman church believes that Mary was taken into heaven at the end of her life on earth, we aren’t expected to. There is no support for this in the scriptures. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Emperor Marcian wished to possess the body of Mary. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, said that Mary had died in the presence of the apostles, but that her tomb, when opened, was empty. And why was the tomb opened? Because our old friend Thomas had missed the event and wanted to see the body. Did he doubt everything? You’ve got to wonder how that boy got along with anyone, and why they bothered to keep proving things to him. But because the tomb was empty, the Apostles therefore assumed that her body was taken up to heaven. If this is true, none of the Apostles, apparently, found it noteworthy enough to write it down.

Larkin and I have a friend, an artist and Roman Catholic monk named Mickey McGrath. In his book, Blessed Art Thou, he relates an event that happened in a third-grade religion class he visited. He asked, “Who can tell me what the Feast of the Assumption is all about?” One little boy replied, “It means that Mary was so holy we just assume she went to heaven.” That’s probably not far from the truth.

The actual feast day for the Assumption of Mary was not celebrated until 1951. On All Saints Day in 1950, Pope Pius XII declared officially that, "Mary, the immaculate perpetually Virgin Mother of God, after the completion of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into the glory of heaven." Lutheran theology doesn’t go that far. If nothing else, we accept that our Lord had a brother and probably other siblings, so we don’t accept the “perpetually virgin” part. We do, however, consider Mary worthy of her place on the calendar and with the 1978 release of the Lutheran Book of Worship officially entered her there.

I think there are two things to have in mind after contemplating Mary. The first of them is an old theme, to be prepared for the coming of God’s call. Gabriel may not drop by to explain the call to you, I hear he’s retired. It probably will not involve an impossible pregnancy, like it was for Sarah, Elizabeth, or Mary. Mary accepted her call, was faithful to it throughout life, and remained humble, knowing that the grace that filled her life was a gift and not her own doing. This is the true model of discipleship.

The second is this: We don’t pray to Mary for intercession, but rather we see that a right regard for her, and her will, always directs us not to her glory, but to the glory of her son, Jesus Christ, who found in Mary’s womb his first earthly dwelling place. Because focusing on Mary directs us to the living Christ, it is good to look to her life and example.

On this feast of Mary, Mother of our Lord, we look to her acceptance, her faith, the example of her gentle life, and in this person we see the Gospel of the Lord. Amen.