Luke 1:46-55

Mary said,
"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

“We know almost nothing about her for certain. There are no surviving documents that were written in her own hand. No letters, no diaries. There are relics, of course—thousands upon thousands of relics. One sparsely written inventory prepared in 1346 for a French chapel includes:

Item, the hairs of St. Mary; item, from her robe;
item, a shallow ivory box without any ornament
save only a knob of copper, which box contains
some of the flower which the Blessed Virgin held
before her Son, and of the window through which
the Archangel Gabriel entered when he saluted her.

These are the opening words of Jon Sweeney’s book entitled Strange Heaven: The Virgin Mary as Woman, Mother, Disciple and Advocate. In it, Sweeney, a fundamentalist turned Episcopalian, delves into the mystery, history and imagination surrounding the life of and legends about the Virgin Mary declaring at last that “what fascinates us about Mary is not reducible to historical fact or theory. It is her myth that draws us,” he says. “Her power to fascinate us intellectually is surpassed only by her ability to inspire devotion.”

Many of us here at St. Paul’s felt this devotion last week as we prayed Evening Offices focusing on Mary. Groups of us assembled each night in the heat of our small, windowless chapel to hear readings about Mary, and to pray Marian litanies before icons of Mary as we sat in candlelit silence.

As we did this, I couldn’t help but think of the conversations I’ve had with many of you about her. These conversations have often reflected something that Sweeney discovered in his work: Mary can inspire deep longing but she can also cause deep ambivalence in those who approach her or feel approached by her.

• Consider, for instance the thousands who kneel or light candles all over the world iin front of images of Mary. Over my vacation I was at a Catholic Church on Mackinac Island on a weekday morning. The Island was filled with tourists, but what I noticed was the stream of people who came into the church were making their way to the Mary shrine, the Mary shrine where they lit candles, kneeled and murmured their prayers.
• Consider, also, for instance, that as Jon Sweeney mentions that an icon of the Virgin was one of Pope John Paul II’s most cherished possessions, hanging above his private desk in the Vatican, as he said “watching over (his) daily service to the church.”
• Consider that entire nations and political movements have identified themselves with Mary’s image—from the enigmatic figure of the Black Madonna as the Patroness of Poland to Cesar Chavez’s belief that devotion to the Virgin was essential to the public fight for justice for California’s Mexican farm workers.

• But also consider the stream within Protestant thought that has been deeply suspicious of Mary, that has branded Marian devotions as “an extra-Biblical intrusion into Christian faith that serves to distract believers from Jesus.”

• And finally consider, again as Jon Sweeny points out, that some of the most famous vandalism of works of art have been perpetrated against images of Mary: from Michelangelo’s Pieta which was damaged by a man with a hammer to a painting of the Virgin and Child in the British Museum (with St. Anne and John the Baptist) which has been vandalized twice, once with a bottle of ink and once with a sawed-off shotgun.

What is it about Mary that evokes such passion, such devotion, and at the same time stirs up such suspicion and hostility? And what can both of these things tell us about her significance to our spiritual lives?

To say it straight out and tersely—what I believe pulls us in and perhaps drives us a little crazy is that she is us. She is us. And I’m going to say this phrase three different times with three different emphases to make three different points about what I mean by it.

First, she is us. She is the testament that God can and does take up residence in the midst of a particular and ordinary life, that God, called omniscient and omnipotent by some, became “localized in the womb of an unmarried teenage girl from Nazareth,” and, therefore, God can be or is being localized in our lives of here and now. This notion can evoke our passion or it can evoke our dread.

Second, she is us. She, a woman, becomes in many ways the paradigm for what Christian life is all about: saying “yes” to God and then following the path that this yes puts us on. For some of us it is good news indeed that this paradigm comes to us in the life of a woman. For others of us it can evoke our suspicion or dread.

And finally she is us. She is all of us. As the words of the Magnificat put it, Mary is the testament that while God chooses all humanity to bring within God’s saving embrace, God has a special bond with those at the bottom of the social stratum, those who would normally be left out. (This is part of the meaning of our statue this morning—Mary depicted as Russian peasant woman). And within this, it becomes part of our Christian vocation to create a society in which the unity of humanity is supported over class and economic privilege. For some this is a matter of great passion; for others who have something to lose in the proposition, it is a matter of great dread.

She isus. She is us. She is us. Each has its own longing and its own dread.

But this is what the spiritual life is all about, isn’t it—giving voice both to our longings and to our sense of dread when it comes to God, doing it together surrounded by people and images and music and sacraments that allow us to grow in grace. And so this morning we have help along the way, don’t we?

We have the legacy of our own Anglo-Catholic tradition, of ritualist priests in England and in America who were assigned by their bishops to the poorest urban parishes as a kind of punishment for their liturgical and devotional practices, but who found their theology and Marian devotions strengthened because once with the poor, they could not help but encounter Mary there, singing her Magnificat and holding her children in her arms.

And we have the legacy of the lives of the women detailed in the list inserted in our bulletin this morning, women who have in some way been for us localized manifestations of God—women who have encouraged us, nurtured us and been our companions along our way.

And today we have an abundance of images of Mary—images that are attempts to capture not only all that Mary is but all that we have needed her to be as down through the centuries we have tried to wrap our minds and hearts around Christ Jesus as God who comes through her flesh to us, Jesus who comes through a meal of bread and wine, Jesus who asks us to house God in the flesh and to become food for the world.

And we are still working on these images.

At Coffee Hour you will see a collection of images of the Virgin Mary, some of which some of you spontaneously brought to the parish this last week. Among them is one created by Claudia Basile during the children’s activity last week related to the saints of God. What Claudia drew is one example of a Christian in the middle of her life trying to put it all together in a way that includes God, Mary and in this case her female priest.

Claudia’s drawing looks like this—two figures are on the page, one labeled “St. God” and the other “St. Melissa.” St. God is a kind happy ghost-like figure. St. Melissa looks to be wearing colorful vestments. Both St. God and St. Melissa have their arms out in similar positions. Inside St. God is a the drawing in green of a small female head. This, I was told, is Mary who is in God. And then inside St. Melissa (who is probably not just St. Melissa but St. Claudia and each of us) is a small ghostlike figure who, I was told, is God.

This, then, is what this feast with all of its statues and flowers and music and bread and wine and people are all about: St. Mary the Virgin—humanity that has taken up residence at the heart of God and God who has taken up residence in our hearts and for the world. For he has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly, he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

Works Cited or Consulted

Strange Heaven: The Virgin Mary as Woman, Mother, Disciple and Advocate by Jon M. Sweeney

“What about Mary?” by Jason Byassee found on Religion Online. He also mentions the words of Karl Barth: “In the doctrine and worship of Mary there is disclosed the one heresy of the Roman Catholic Church which explains all the rest.”

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