Because preaching is such a labor of love for me,
but a labor nonetheless,
I can never remember throwing a sermon out.
No matter how banal or ineffective.
And, as a matter of habit,
part of my preparation toward preaching on Sunday
is a review of previous sermons preached on that feast,
or texts, to see if there is some kernel of an idea
that is worthy of further development…
or some homiletic path once taken
that should forever be abandoned.
True to that pattern, this past week I went searching
through digital files and decades of 3 ring binders
with remnants of preaching that go back to 1974.
But, through all of those archives
I could not find a single sermon for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.
Now, I know that in the past 49 years of preaching
I must have preached on this feast before.
But, I was lacking any previous starting point
either to build upon or repudiate.
The one general impression I do have of this feast
is that it is a very, very confused feast.
For the vast majority of our fellow citizens,
obviously, it is New Year’s…the beginning of the civil year.
Or, for many, a lost day of recovering from revelry
that, for many, was prolonged into the wee hours of the morning.
I doubt few of them are among us.
One blogger thought we should rename this day
the solemnity of low attendance!
There actually is a ritual mass in the new Roman Missal
for the beginning of the civil year,
but the rubrics indicate that “this Mass may not be used
on January 1st.”
As I said, a little confusing.
Traditionally, 1 January, the Octave of Christmas,
is also the Feast of the Circumcision,
when Jesus underwent the ritual that rendered him a Jew.
Yet, that festival remembrance has all but been erased,
apart from the echo in today’s gospel.
That gospel also reminds us that this feast
also celebrates the name of Jesus…
but that ritual aspect seems off the table.
And so, while it is New Year’s,
the Feast of the Circumcision,
and the Naming of Jesus,
the Church celebrates none of those.
Instead, this is the Solemnity of Mary,
the Mother of God.
It is not a feast many would guess would occur today,
and the logic of feast may not be abundantly clear.
A number of years ago, Andrew Greeley
commented on the incongruity
of this civil festival with this Marian feast:
It is curious that the liturgists chose to make New Year’s Day, the day of hangovers and guilt and of resolutions that we know we’re not going to keep, a day to honor the Mother of Jesus who hardly is an appropriate symbol for how many people may feel this day. However, the first day of a new year is a day of new beginnings and Mary represents the perennial new beginning. For one, she brought her son into the world [; this] was the most dramatic new beginning, the most dramatic revolution in human history. The human condition was changed forever. We could breathe easier again. There were grounds for hope. Despite all the things that can go wrong in human life, we began to believe that love was stronger than hatred, good stronger than evil, life stronger than death. So we can accept that we have gone through another frustrating, disappointing, perhaps unhappy year of our life…[but because of] Mary and her son we will continue to live and continue to hope.
Since I read that quote
at the beginning of last week,
I have been trying to concretize how this feast
that focuses on Mary’s title as the “Mother of God”
might be a source of hope and inspiration.
When we consider the title of Mary as “mother of God,”
what the feast and the underlying teaching stress
is that Mary was not just the mother of Jesus,
not just the mother of the Human nature
of the second person of the trinity,
but also Mother of the Christ, the divine nature of that person.
This is not like Greek mythology,
not like Hercules whose mother was a mortal
and whose father was a God
and he, in turn, was a demi-god.
No, Jesus, fully human and fully divine,
had a human mother:
Mary, mother of the person of Jesus in his humanity and divinity–
Theotokos, the Greeks called her–the God-bearer.
I know how contradictory that sounds–
how a human could parent the divine …
but it is precisely in that paradox,
in that juxtaposition of human and divine,
in the inexplicable linking of a creature with the creator,
that hope is born anew.
While I was pondering this paradox,
I recalled the play Elizabeth Rex,
which I attended a number of years ago,
at Chicago Shakespeare theatre.
This is an unusually powerful fictional depiction
of Queen Elizabeth the night before she had her lover,
Robert, Earl of Essex,
beheaded for treason.
There is historical evidence that the night before the beheading
she had a Shakespeare play performed for her.
While we do not know which one,
Canadian playwright, Timothy Findley, chooses
Much Ado about Nothing and, in a pivotal twist,
the Queen has the actors sequestered
and, in need of distraction as she awaits the dawn,
she spends the night with them.
While Shakespeare is in the room with her all night,
it is not Shakespeare who commands her attention,
but Ned Lowenscroft, Shakespeare’s most famous leading lady,
whom Elizabeth had seen play Beatrice that night
and who himself is dying.
The pyrotechnics between these two are riveting:
the actor who is so effective at playing women
and the Queen, Elizabeth Rex, who has had
to bury her femininity…and rule like a king.
And, in the course of the evening,
they strike a bargain…
Ned promises to teach the queen how to be a woman
and Elizabeth accepts the task of teaching Ned
how to be a man….
The power in the paradox is palpable
as they psychologically and physically
dress and undress each other,
baring their own souls and stripping away
the masks of the other,
shearing away the facades and tearing down the walls
each has constructed to protect themselves.
In the course of the evening,
they both reveal and explore how the death of a lover
has changed them, but how it can also transform them
to live and die with more authenticity,
with more self-respect, and with
even more love.
In a striking way,
this wondrous piece of art
touches on a fundamental human paradox-
that women can teach men how to be men,
that men can teach women how to be women,
that children can teach parents how to be adults,
that the poor can teach the wealthy about true richness,
that the sick can teach the apparently healthy about wellness,
and that the dead can teach the living something about life.
It also reminds us that Mary is not only the queen of heaven,
but the queen of paradox who, along with Joseph, played a critical role
in teaching God how to be a human being.
And, in that unusual mixture of humility and tenacity,
she maintained fidelity to her son’s ministry
while largely marginalized in a patriarchal society.
Maybe she has something to teach us as well
as the old year cedes to the new.
As our resolutions to lose a few pounds and better health
turn to resolutions to gain a few friends
and move toward more authentic living and dying.
So, in the spirit of Mary, the Mother of God,
but in the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson [1850]
that sound so oddly contemporary, We pray:
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to humankind [all mankind].
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.