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.”

From T. S. Eliot’s poem The Dry Salvages:

“The way up is the way down.”

And from the writings of Carl Jung towards the end of his life:

“In my case,” he said, “Pilgrim's Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.”

I have to confess that I feel some disappointment when I think about the way we’re celebrating the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin today in contrast to the way we usually celebrate The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin.

You see, the way we usually begin The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin is with a solemn procession—a kind of liturgical parade in which all the servers and the choir members process around the assembly as we all sing a grand processional hymn.

What we usually wear on The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin is what we call the Portuguese vestments: beautiful, heavy brocade adornment that reminds us all that this is a high, solemn occasion.

And, finally, on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, we usually burn mounds of incense—enough to enfold the high altar in the mystery and beauty of prayer, obscuring the sight of it in the process.

We, of course, are not doing any of these things this year, because this year we are not worshipping up there in a place that points toward heaven but down here in a portion of the building that not only sits on the ground but under the ground—a place with no solemn procession, no Portuguese vestments, and no mounds of incense—a place with soil, the ashes of the dead and the greenery nourished by those ashes surrounding us.

And so it’s here this year, here in this place, close to our nursery where babies are crawling around on the floor, close to the kitchen where we can hear and smell coffee brewing, that the barefoot teenager who was Mary comes walking towards us dressed in the simple array of a young Palestinian girl. It’s here that we know as we perhaps have never known before, that God came to her and comes to us with the seed of holiness, the promise of being sons or daughters of the Most High, while we were not grand, while we were not high and lifted up, while we were closest to the little clod of earth that we are.

The way up is the way down.

Not much is said of Mary in the New Testament, but what is said has fueled the imagination, yearning and fear of many Christians. For some, Mary is a window onto the feminine dimensions of God; for others, she is a dangerous distraction from a focus on Jesus. For some, Mary is first among the followers of Jesus and a paradigm of what living the Christian life is all about; for others she is too receptive, too passive to be an adequate model of womanhood—Christian or otherwise. For some, Mary is simply the Mother of Jesus; for others, she is Theotokos, the God-bearer.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had conversations with newcomers who struggle a bit with this parish’s attachment to Mary. “What,” they ask, “is ‘the Mary thing’ all about? Isn’t it wrong to give her so much attention—I mean, am I putting myself in some kind of peril when I join others in lighting a candle in front of her image?”

What I want to say to this is, yes, you are putting yourself in some kind of peril—but not the peril you think. For Mary, the young Palestinian girl in simple dress who meets us here in this space this morning, the woman holding the child in the beautiful red and gold icon in the corner, has a way, a feminine way, of getting under your skin, and before you know it, before you realize what’s happened, she’s gotten into, that well protected spiritual life of yours. It’s then, that you realize that all along she was singing a song: a song of reversal and revolution. It’s something about God having brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifting up the lowly; about God having filled the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty.  

It’s a song about humility and the porous soil it provides for the seeds of God to take root in and to grow in our own lives. But it’s also a song about solidarity with the poor, the oppressed: those we would in our blindness believe were no more than little clods of earth under our feet.

This, then, is the peril Mary brings with her—she is yet another way that the person and the message of Jesus can find their way under our skin and into our hearts. And once there, who knows where things will lead? Who knows what way down we may need to travel in order for the world to travel God’s way up? Who knows what ladders we may need to descend in order for the world we live in to make its own Pilgrim’s Progress?

When I first came to St. Paul’s one of the things I heard about was a sermon preached here by Ralph Carskadden on Mary. He had used a striking image that had stayed with people and had shaped how they had come to understand her. Ralph, ever the gardener, had proposed that his listeners think about Mary as a sunflower. For, like a new sunflower follows the sun, turning its head in the direction of the light, Mary is forever oriented toward her own son, Jesus. For us, then, to allow her into our spiritual life is to open our hearts and minds and lives to the one she bore—Christ Jesus.

In my own garden many of the flowers have already had their day. Among these are what are called “peony” poppies—brilliant blood-red poppies with frilly feminine double blooms that you cannot help falling in love with.

Grown from the tiniest of seeds, they germinated, grew and bloomed, and almost as they did this, their gorgeous red petals dropped, leaving behind fat seed pods that would begin the process all over again.

Last Friday it was my gardener’s task to pull up the plants. In that I had not done this before, I had no idea what the roots would be like or how much disruption would occur in the soil when I pulled them up.

As I began to pull the first one up, I realized that these beautiful, frilly feminine flowers had been growing from plants with stems and roots so strong that I had to brace my foot against one of the garden pavers to give me enough leverage to pull it out. Once I got the first one out, I made another discovery. What had made the plant so difficult to pull up was not that its roots had dispersed and gone down deep, deep within the ground. What had made it so difficult to pull up was that its roots had firmly and powerfully enclosed and grown form a single little clod of earth.

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