The Blessed Virgin Mary

Sermon preached at 11am Eucharist at St Alphege, Solihull
Sunday 16th August 2009, The Blessed Virgin Mary
Readings: Revelation 11: 19-end 12: 1-6 & 10 Galatians 4: 4-7 Luke 1: 46-55

Today we celebrate the festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary, transferred from its normal date of 15th August. There are many different festivals in the churches year when we remember different events in Mary’s life, but this is perhaps the festival where we think especially of her. It is a very important date; 15th August is a public holiday in many countries because of this festival.
And why is it so important to have a special day set aside for Mary? Well first of all we have to acknowledge that not all Christians think it is important. More protestant Christians tend to play down the significance of the saints and encourage us to focus on Christ and on God. But this kind of thinking is relatively modern. It has only been around in the church for 500 years or so. The much older and much more widely established tradition of the wider Church has been to place great importance on the saints and on the BVM in particular. And why is this?
Well I believe the saints are important because they show us what can and should be happening to us. God calls all of us to holiness (Matt 5: 48, Rom 6: 19-23, Eph 4:23, 1Peter 1:15-16). We are all called to become saints, to take up our own special place in heaven, fulfilling our own special function for the good of all.
But the holiness that we aspire to does not come from our own resources. Our human nature can be very base and ordinary. Rather our holiness comes from Jesus, it is a sharing in the holiness of God (Heb 12:10). We are co-heirs with Christ, destined to inherit his glory (Rom 8:17). So this pattern of shared life in Christ becomes very important and it is the saints who show us how to do it.
Looking at the saints, and studying their lives helps us to understand how all this can come about in practice. There are many, many saints and their lives are all very different. But some of them have personalities that we can identify with. Some of them have passed through situations that we can recognise. There are some extremely inspiring examples here.
And the Blessed Virgin Mary is probably the most inspiring of them all because her co-operation with God is so perfect, so intimate and so very important to the salvation of the world. I would like to highlight some of her qualities in particular.
The first quality is her readiness to follow God’s plans. At the annunciation Mary famously says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” Luke 1: 38. With great simplicity and humility she agrees to go along with God plans and to do her part, at great personal risk. Through her, Jesus is brought into the world, and by her Jesus is brought up and educated in the values of family life.
A second quality is her readiness to suffer with Jesus. Unlike most of the disciples, who ran away when Jesus was crucified, Mary stood near the foot of the cross and suffered in her own way alongside Jesus until he died. She was not able to do anything practical to help Jesus in that situation, but she stayed there in solidarity with him. We are left with a sense that she has a mother’s love, a great big heart overflowing with motherly love. She is ready to care for and to suffer for all her children, and in a certain sense this includes all of us.
A third quality is her ability to persuade Jesus to act. We see this most obviously at the wedding in Cena in Galilee (John 2: 1-11). The family who have run out of wine approach her. She approaches Jesus, and Jesus gives a couple of good reasons for doing nothing, but in the end he cannot refuse his mother so he performs an extraordinary miracle creating the equivalent of about 800 bottles of wine! And many, many Christians repeat this pattern in their prayers. Rather than pray directly to Jesus or to God, they pray to Mary, and invite Mary to somehow sort things out with God. And for reasons that are hard to understand this does seem to work. It seems to be a very powerful way of praying and it continues to be extremely popular.
Now I have to admit that, in the past, I personally have had a bit of a problem with this. I used to think that it must surely always be better to pray directly to God. But as I have got older I have come to realise that life doesn’t necessarily work like this. The kingdom of heaven is not just about God; we all share in it. Things happen by the mutual love and co-operation of a great many angels and saints. Just as we all have different roles in our local church, so different angels and saints have different roles in the life of heaven. Now you might be best mates with Fr Tim, so when you want a Baptism Information Pack sending out you telephone Fr Tim and ask for one. Well, Fr Tim, however pleased he is to talk to you, is eventually going to pass that request on to Paula in the Parish Office, because it is Paula who does that job of sending out Baptism Information Packs on behalf of Fr Tim and the whole parish. And if you were to regularly ring up Fr Tim asking for Baptism Information Packs he would certainly tell you to start telephoning Paula directly, and the truth is that the whole business would work much quicker and more efficiently if you did go directly to Paula. Well it is my belief that there are many things that we can ask for in prayer that actually get sorted quicker and more cleanly if we address them directly to Mary. That in no way undermines the authority of God. Rather it properly and respectfully recognises the way that God as ordered things, and the way that he wishes relationships to work. Also Mary knows how to approach God and to ask for things. So, it seems to me that very often God would prefer us to communicate in pray directly with is his servant Mary, and in my experience this does seem to work.
A forth quality of Mary is her ability to get things done very quietly and with no fuss and without blowing a big trumpet to announce all that is happening. This is to do with humility and simplicity and beauty and love. She has the absolute opposite attitude to our current day world where everybody has to seek to raise their own profiles, to publicise and promote their activities and to draw attention to themselves by shouting loader and more persistently than the other people. This very low key approach of Mary’s makes it very easy for us to overlook her, to fail to take her seriously, to judge her by the standards of this world. There is something very quiet and recessive about Mary, but in the kingdom of heaven this is not a weakness, rather it is a way of serving others that we are called to emulate.
So I would like to encourage all of us to develop our own personal relationship with Mary, by praying to her. We don’t worship Mary, because she is not God, but we do venerate her, because she is in very close relationship with God. She is a person and we can talk to her, in prayer, just as we can talk to any other person. Let’s talk to her, trusting in her motherly love for us. And let’s become students of all the relationships in heaven, so that when we ask for things in prayer we know who to ask, and how to ask, and so our prayers can become more effective. Amen.