St. Mary the Virgin

+ In the Name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

We gather this afternoon for our annual faculty retreat on the threshold between summer vacation and the year's work, and on the threshold, as well, between two feasts of the Christian year. August 14th is one of the so-called "Lesser Feasts" of the Episcopal Church's calendar, commemorating Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a contemporary American martyr; August 15th, on the other hand, is a major feast, the feast of Saint Mary the Virgin, the Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, and, as it is now past sundown and thus the eve of the feast, the lessons we have heard are obviously the ones for the Blessed Virgin.

The Virgin has certainly been more widely, more exuberantly celebrated than any of the other saints of Christendom. Universal councils of the Christian church honored her centuries ago with the Greek title "theotokos," which means "she who gave birth to God," and declared that while the saints were not to be worshipped, but rather reverenced (for worship belongs to God alone), she alone among all the saints was to receive hyper-reverence. We couldn't begin to count the churches dedicated to her, from Notre Dame and Chartres to little St. Mary's of the Lake around the corner from my house, whose bells I really can hear ringing through my bedroom window; from Garrison Kiellor's all-too-realistic sounding "Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility" to St. Mary the Virgin in New York and to the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford, scene of so many significant events in the history of the Anglican church. And St. Paul, who never mentions the Virgin by name in any of his letters, nevertheless points us directly to the reason for this hyper-reverence that Christians have competed with each other to give to a humble peasant girl from Galilee: "when the time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive adoption as sons." The mystery of our redemption centers on Jesus the Christ, on the God the Son who condescends to take on our human nature, to be born as we are born and to die as we die, so that we might live as he lives. And because that great and gracious plan could not take place in isolation, because to be born as one of us meant, and for the moment still means, to be born to a mother, we honor the mother who held the new-born savior in her arms and received his bleeding body when they took it down from the cross. The joys, the sorrows, and the glories of her life all point to the work of our salvation accomplished in her son our Savior. As is the case with all the saints, but immeasurably more so in her case, her story is a reflection of the great story of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.

But if St. Paul straightforwardly points us to the theological basis for the hyper-reverence of the Virgin, St. Luke does something a lot more subtle, something we might even call subversive. Luke has some of the characteristics of a Greek historian and at the same time he constantly refers to the Hebrew Bible. Specifically in today's gospel, he makes up a suitable song for the Virgin to sing, the way a Greek historian would have made up a suitable speech for a general to give before a battle or for a politician to make during a crisis in the state. But Luke's idea of what a suitable song would be comes from his reading in the Hebrew Bible: the song of Mary, traditionally called the "Magnificat" from the first word of the Latin version, is the sort of song that Old Testament women sing when they receive the gift of a child. Hannah, for example, says something like this after the birth of the prophet Samuel.

But Luke's song for Mary doesn't just refer back to Hannah. As we all just heard, the Magnificat also picks up language from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, language about the righteousness of God and God's salvation. What we heard are the last two verses of the chapter, and the whole chapter is in fact full of statements about God's sense of justice, reassuring statements to God's people after their return from exile in Babylon. And part of Luke's subversiveness is that this chapter of Isaiah is one to which he will refer again, in chapter four of the Gospel, when Jesus comes to the synagogue in Capernaum and reads from the scroll of Isaiah, from the beginning of the sixty-first chapter, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." "Today," Jesus says to the people in that synagogue, "this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." And Luke intends for us, as we read his gospel, to realize that the fulfillment of the prophecy from Isaiah is also the fulfillment of Mary's song: "he has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree, he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away."

Luke means for this language to be reassurance for the early Christians, as the prophecies from Isaiah reassured the Jews who had returned from exile. This is, after all, the gospel, the good news about Jesus. But it seems to me that most of the time this particular passage from the Gospel does not come to us as good news. Surely, there are times in any of our lives when we are the brokenhearted in need of binding up, the prisoners in need of liberty, the hungry waiting to be filled with good things. Indeed, we come to this table over and over again precisely because we are so often spiritually broken-hearted, imprisoned, and hungry. But when we look beyond our own spiritual world, when we consider that we are ourselves, in this twenty-first century, the richest and most powerful nation that the world has ever known, the words of the Magnificat strike against us as the words of the prophets struck at the people of Israel lolling around on their ivory couches. "He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones...and the rich he has sent empty away."

Jonathan Daniels, born in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1939, heard the challenge in the Magnificat. He was a seminary student at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would have said or sung the Magnificat every day at Evening Prayer. In March of 1965, responding to Dr. King's appeal for help in Selma, he took leave from the seminary to work in Alabama with the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity. He wrote a little later that it was the Magnificat that convinced him to do so. Quoting the older translation of the hymn, he said: "He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.' I knew that I must go to Selma. The Virgin's song was to grow more dear to me in the weeks ahead."

Daniels was one of several people arrested on this day, August 14, 1965, the eve of St. Mary's day, for joining a picket line in Haynesville, Alabama. The group was then suddenly released on the 20th. They were suspicious, of course; Daniels walked with a 16-year old girl named Ruby Sales and two other people to a nearby store. As they reached the top step, an unemployed highway worker with a 12-gauge accosted them and began to curse at Ruby. Daniels pulled her to one side and was killed by the shotgun blast meant for the teenage girl--a girl of much the same age as the one whose song had brought him to that place.

"He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, and put down the mighty from their thrones, and sent the rich empty away." These are words of promise: but if we, who enjoy the fruits of so many promises, do not also hear them as a call, we should be prepared to hear them as a warning.

--John Wm. Houghton