Mother of God

Scripture: Mary, Mother of Our Lord (Marymass), A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

I remember, some 15 or so years back now, when my home congregation in Pennsylvania first reinstated the Feast of Mary, Mother of God. We in the pews all looked at our bulletins, a bit befuddled, and the pastor stood up during the announcements to assure us: “Don’t worry.  You’re not in the wrong church.  You can all sit back down.”

“Really?” I retorted.  “Will we be selling indulgences in the narthex after service, too?”

See, as a young man I never really got the whole “Mary” thing.  Don’t get me wrong. I had nothing against her.  She’s Jesus’ mother, after all.  But I didn’t understand why our fellow Christians—those non-Protestants, the Catholics, the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox—made such a big deal out of her. A nice lady, to be sure, but the Bible is full of nice ladies.  It’s not like she’s Jesus.  Those poor deluded other Christians had best get their priorities straight.

Nevertheless, there was an undeniable beauty to the Marian devotions of my Catholic friends: those sublime icons of the Virgin Mother dandling the baby Jesus on her knee; the dulcet tones of the Ave Maria; the methodical progress of the Rosary. In college I found these devotions admirable, even inspiring. But such things were not for me.  I was a good Lutheran, after all, and Lutherans didn’t dwell on Mary—other than perhaps figuring out who would play her in the live Nativity at Christmas. After all, Luther himself wrote that the greatest way to honor the Virgin Mary is to pray to her Son.  I mean, honestly, if Lutherans started going on about Mary, how would we be able to tell ourselves apart from the Catholics?

But as time went on, I found that things were not quite so clear-cut as I had thought.  I learned, for example, that there were Lutherans who prayed the Rosary—Hail Marys and all—and that in fact they had done so throughout the last 500 years. Martin Luther dedicated tracts to her, asked in writing for her intercession, and defended such Catholic doctrines as her Immaculate Conception and perpetual virginity.  Even Calvin—John Calvin, the harshest and most anti-Catholic of Reformers—praised and honored the Mother of God in ways that his Calvinist descendants surely would find embarrassing.

But the tipping point for me, in terms of Lutheran attitudes towards Mary, came in reading the Ecumenical Councils of the Church. For those of us who may not quite recall our Confirmation lessons, there were seven great Ecumenical Councils in the early centuries of Christianity. These Councils convened in order to clarify certain teachings, to combat threats to God’s people, and to insure that the true faith given by Christ to His Apostles would be passed down authentically to each successive generation. To this day, nearly all Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant alike, uphold and confess the decisions of these Councils.  And every Lutheran pastor, I should note, swears to abide by and to teach them as confessional documents.

Now, one of these historic Councils had to do with images.  Christianity at this point was having its first real contact with Islam, and Islam strictly forbade any images representing God, people, or animals, because these would be graven images, false idols.  “Aren’t we supposed to avoid false idols too?” Christians asked. The Council responded by reaffirming the difference between an idol and an icon. Jesus Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. An icon is any work of art—painting, sculpture, stained glass, or even a rough-hewn cross—that reflects the beauty and truth of Jesus. It is an image of the image of God.

To put it another way, an idol is a false image that leads us away from God, while an icon is a true image that helps to bring us closer to God.  Make sense?

This distinction between idols and icons led directly to another: the distinction between worship and veneration.  A Christian properly worships God alone. Yet when we acknowledge God’s goodness and the work of God’s hand in, say, the excellence of an athlete, or in a fine work of art, or in the life of a saint, that isn’t worship but veneration.  We worship the Creator and venerate His creations. This may sound academic at first, but in fact the Council’s clarification of this matter is quite faithful and down to earth, bringing beauty and wonder to everyday life.  When we live knowing that only God is worthy of our worship, but that His Creation is good, reflecting God’s own beauty as a sort of living icon, our world becomes more fulfilling because we see it as it truly is.  Isn’t that cool?  I think it’s cool.

But after reading all of this, I came across something even more remarkable.  The Seventh Ecumenical Council—the same Council that ruled on icons and idols, and that remains binding for Catholics, Lutherans, and Orthodox all alike—included a third category, something between veneration and worship. In Latin the term is hyperdulia: literally, above the veneration given to creatures but below the worship reserved for God.  And hyperdulia, this “super-veneration,” the Church bestowed upon one person and one person only: the Virgin Mary. When I first read that, I was blown away.  From the earliest days of the Church, even before the Spirit hammered out for us our full understanding of the Trinity, Christians sang hymns to Mary.  But here I had a Lutheran confessional document hailing Mary as above Creation, higher than the angels, second only to God. “Well, nuts!” I thought.  “How are we not Catholic now?”

What is it about Mary?  Why are so many Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, so enraptured by her?  The Baptists and Pentecostals surely think that we’re nuts, lifting up Mary as a sort of second savior, a rival to her own God and Son. That’s what I thought, years ago, when I first saw a Lutheran congregation dedicate a Sunday to the Mother of God.  But I was wrong. Mariology, in all its forms and throughout the millennia, isn’t about downplaying or replacing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—the one true God-Man, Who died for our sins and rose for our salvation. To the contrary, the very core of Christian devotion to Mary is nothing less than the irresistible human desire for union with God in Christ.

When God chose to be born as a human being, a weak and vulnerable baby, He chose for His mother the young woman Mariam, barely more than a girl, who not only freely accepted her role as the Bearer of God—despite the very real danger it posed to her life—but who even sang her Maker’s praise in assent! In her, through her, God turned the world upside-down.  He laid aside His omnipotence and immortality, His might and transcendence, to come down here, down into the mud and the blood, as one of us, that we might all become one in Him. That, dear Christians, is our salvation: living and dying and rising again as members of Christ’s own Body, home to His Spirit, sharing His Flesh and His Blood, bound in Baptism to Jesus’ own death and Resurrection.

And that’s what Mary had.  She was just an orphaned peasant girl from a conquered tribe in a backwater corner of an empire that couldn’t care less about her people. Yet through the sheer grace and mercy of God, He took on her body as His own, shared with her the complete and total union that only a pregnant woman can know with her child.  She and God became one in Christ Jesus—not because she was so great, so special, so amazing in and of herself.  For who cared about little Miriam?  But simply because God chose her, unconditionally, to be His own.  And she said yes.  Christ is God come down; Mary is Man brought up.

That’s why the early Christians sang praises to Mary, and why so many of our brethren still do today: not because she’s some sort of rival or alternative savior, but precisely because of the complete and utter union she knows with her Son, Jesus. That’s what we want!  That’s what, deep down in our very being, all humanity wants!  We want Jesus and we want all of Him!  We want God made Man!  We want unconditional love!  We want Resurrection from the dead up to a new and eternal life unlike any we could now imagine, a life given purely by the grace of God! Don’t you see?  We are Mary; Mary is all of us!  The Virgin Mary is a symbol, a type, an icon of the entire Church of Christ!  Though she was His creation, He chose her lowly body to be His home, His throne, His ark, His womb.  So it is with all of us.

Just like her, we now live with Christ alive inside of us.  Just like her, we know God not as some transcendent unfathomable ideal, but as a member of our own family. Everything that she has been given, everything that she was promised, all the legends and stories told of her Assumption, her Coronation in Heaven—we are promised these things as well!  Indeed, since she is the Mother of Christ, and we are baptized into His Body, that makes Mary the Mother of us all, and we stand as her heirs. Someday we too shall be drawn by Christ into Heaven.  Someday we too shall be crowned with glory by the Son.  Someday all generations shall call us blessed.

Until then, dear Christians, the mission to which we are called remains the same as hers: to love God amidst a hostile world, to rejoice at the indwelling life of Christ within us, and to give birth to the Lord anew for this and every generation.

Hail Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee.  Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb—Jesus.  AMEN.