ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Sermon preached by Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at High Mass on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 20th December 2009
Readings: Micah 5. 2-5a; Hebrews 10. 5-10; Luke 1. 39-45
I once served in a parish that had a statue of the Virgin Mary carved in Oberammergau. Unlike the statue here it was of plain wood and depicted Mary as a young woman: Mary pre-Annunciation - natural, youthful, blessed, joyful. Near the church there were a couple of small Roman Catholic convents. Most of the nuns were Irish and sometimes they were joined by other sisters from across the water. Some of these gave you the impression that they'd never been out of Ireland before. For them England was a dangerous and Protestant place.
One afternoon I was in church when a wimpled head popped itself around the door. Elderly, bespectacled Irish eyes peered in and scanned the interior. Only two candles on the altar. No tabernacle within sight. Oh dear! But then she spotted the statue. Another nun was obviously hovering outside because she looked back over her shoulder and said in a stage whisper: 'It's alright, Sister, they've got Our Lady'.
It's a surprise to some people that Anglicans 'have' Our Lady. For most of us it's simply the norm. Here the Angelus is rung. We have pilgrimages to Walsingham and a Cell devoted to the shrine. Here Mary has her rightful place as part of the hinterland of our spiritual life. Despite the ravages of the Reformation and the burning of statues (Ipswich, Walsingham, Willesden and many others all went up in smoke) the complicated culture that is the Church of England never totally abandoned her. Even the success of the reign of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I never totally eclipsed the Virgin Mary.
In 1637 Archbishop Laud (1573-1645) had a statue of the Virgin and Child placed above the West Door of Christchurch in Oxford and there were others. Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) in his sermons was fond of pointing out that the name 'Bethlehem' means 'the House of Bread', so he tied together Marian and Eucharistic devotion. Some of the loveliest hymns to Mary are by English writers like the 19C Reginald Heber's Virgin-born we bow before thee. (Heber was an Evangelical.) Many an English parish church has a Lady Chapel often tucked away behind the high altar: a place for the weekday mass, a place of spiritual intimacy.
What the Church of England doesn't do, however is to foreground the Virgin Mary doctrinally. Her feasts take their place in our lectionary because they are part of the historic pattern of worship but Anglican theologians by and large like the Orthodox have been less keen to elaborate doctrine. I suspect that the reason for this is tied up in the phrase that I used earlier: Mary is part of the hinterland of our spiritual life.
Marian shrines are tucked away and hard to get to. Walsingham is up in Norfolk; Lourdes is in the Pyrenees. It isn't easy to get to Fatima, Medjugorje or any of the others. But in a way that's the point. The effort to get there means that when we do arrive we're prepared to put some effort into looking at the deeper recesses of our souls and tackle the parts of our lives that need some attention. The will to get there increases our resolve to take action.
Marian shrines are sometimes criticised for being extreme. They have a difficult time with the hierarchy of the church. That's because they are laboratories of the spirit. They're there to enable people to get to grips with the more wayward and sometimes fantastic parts of themselves. They're the places where 'darkness is made visible' so that this darkness can be seared by a greater light. We go to confession in shrines because they're outside our usual church circle. We can be anonymous. This searing, this spiritual surgery is not conducted without anaesthetic. It's carried out with compassion: a mother's love. We all know about mothers and all of our relationships with them are different. Some people have great relationships with their mums: others don't. But I suspect that we all yearn for that sense of warmth, nurturing and belonging that is symbolised by the wombs from which we've sprung. Mary gathers up all our aspirations, needs and desires in this regard. She is our 'earth'.
By and large in our culture we live without creation myths. We accept scientific understandings of how the world came to be and assume that faith offers answers to the question why things came to be. But in the pre-scientific age people conflated the why and the how into one system. The Greek myths supplied lurid images of creation. According to Hesiod the first divinity was Chaos. From him came Gaia (Earth). Gaia's son, Uranus (Sky) incestuously mated with his mother producing twelve offspring whom he tried to force back into her womb. Gaia's youngest son, Kronos castrated his father, committed incest with his sister and tried to murder his children. How unlike the home life of our own dear Trinity! (This quip comes from Diarmaid MacCulloch A History of Christianity Allen Lane London 2009 p32)
The Christian tradition has love at its core and evolves doctrine and imagery that flows from this however much the church warps the gospel and fails to put it into practice. We in the 21st century tend to forget that the gospel brought welcome relief to the institutionalized violence reflected in the myths of the world in which Christianity took root. For us the universe is friendly. It's been created by a loving God and Mary personifies the reaction that God desires all of us in return: to say 'yes' to this loving God and be a blessing to the world and the people around them.
This cooperation is tricky. Human sinfulness and selfishness get in the way. We screw up. Sometimes we do it massively. Sometimes we do it massively and collectively. In Copenhagen these last few days the world as a body has had the chance to set a course for the future that would be less destructive than the course it's been on since the Industrial Revolution. The world is finite so it won't take the kind of pressures that we're placing on it indefinitely. We can't go on consuming and polluting in the way that's become a habit.
What's happened these last few days demonstrates how threadbare the human political will has become. In recent years we've been encouraged to leave things to market forces. These invisible destinies were supposed to sort everything out. Ideas of the collective political will have gone out of fashion. They smack of socialism but we seem to have thrown the baby out of with the bathwater. The refusal to engage the human will lovingly, charitably and cheerfully means that disaster has been brought nearer instead of it being averted.
To say that 'Mary is the answer' to all this is as crass as saying that 'Jesus is the answer' to every problem. But let's not repeat the sin of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The answer to God's invitation, his call, his summons to life is 'yes', a blessed 'yes'. It's a 'yes' and a blessing that should inform every thought, every word, every action, every purchase, every vote, every relationship.
Every time we encounter another person and engage with the world around us there should be that 'leaping within': the sort of 'leaping' that characterized the meeting of Elizabeth and Mary - a recognition of the divine life within all things. Then and only then will people know that we 'have Our Lady': only then will God be incarnated in human life again; only then will God's love well up from our depths and our hinterland be clear for all to see; only then will there be that fulfilment that is God's will for our planet and for humankind.