The Blessed Virgin Mary 15th August 2010

Last year was the double centenary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the sesquicentenary of his book The Origin of Species published in 1859.

Many see the wane of Christian allegiance in Britain as stemming from the creation-evolution debate that began in those days and which continues to reveal a lack of intellectual rigour in Christian circles.

When we look at human origins we enter troubled waters for those who stick to biblical literalism. I was reminded of this when David Lamb gave me a copy hot from Mitchell Beazley publishers of this book Origins – human evolution revealed by Douglas Palmer. It’s a fascinating summary of the 20 million year evolution of the human family involving 20 separate species and illustrated.

Thomas Huxley’s famous skeleton illustration of 1863 showed the evolution of humans from apes. Helped by a so-called paleo-artist, John Gurche, this new book gives us life like reconstructions from fossils of the faces of 12 iconic members of the extended human family who lived and died out over the last 20 million years. They range over three pages entitled ‘Meet the Family’ and going from the Proconsul plant-eating monkey to chimpanzee-like descendants up to 2 million years back. Then homo habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis and sapiens.

The issue of creation versus evolution is a consuming issue among some Evangelicals struggling with a self-contained Christian authority. If you take the Bible literally you run the risk of defending it against other interpretations of human origins and you narrow down Christianity. If you go with the main flow of Christianity biblical interpretation you go hand in hand with God’s other reference book, the book of nature. We expect truth from both sources, God’s written word and the study of the creation we call science. The truth about salvation is, of course, only in one of those books.

Christians believe the Bible can’t be mistaken as it presents the good news of Jesus to honest seekers but we don’t claim its infallibility as a science text book.

When we look back at human origins we’re bound to the biblical doctrine of our being created in the image of God and human beings’ fall expressed in the poem of Adam and Eve and in the doctrine of original sin. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God we read in the letter to the Romans 3v23.

How we see the emergence of consciousness, the soul and its capacity to be both one with God and to sin is an important question that’s worthwhile wrestling with but one that needs setting in perspective.

Whether the world came into existence over 4.6 billion years or 4004 as Archbishop Usher taught fades into a little less significance when you turn your mind towards the world’s destiny.

Being given a book on human origins last week connected, in my mind, with preaching this Sunday on the Blessed Virgin Mary who is the great reminder of human destiny as the first of the redeemed.

God gave us life through the great chain of being described both by science and by Genesis. This chain started with one cell organisms and moved through multicellular organisms to plants, reptiles then mammals climaxing in the human family.

God gave us life so he could give us his life. It is a difficult question to answer, exactly when the human soul first emerged, exactly when a human being first welcomed, worshipped and sinned against God.

If the supposed 4.6 billion year history of the earth is crammed into a single day, the whole of recorded history is compressed into one fifth of the second before midnight, a blink of an eyelid.

In that blink we have the emergence of the soul and human sin.

In the same blink we have the emergence of a soul perfectly open to God.

When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. (Galatians 4v4)

The process of creation, the evolution of the human race, led to the woman ‘fairest of that race’ whose soul opened to welcome the life of God and its consequences so that we might receive adoption as children of God.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God...(who) for us and for salvation came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man. (Nicene Creed)

Through Mary the Son of God became the Son of Man so that children of men could become children of God.

God came into the soul and body of the Blessed Virgin forever. It was a new creation as important as the first. God, who made all out of nothing, who set up and steers the chain of evolution, went deeper with the world.

Having established by his grace perfect obedience in a human heart he entered the depths of that heart and opened up a new chain of being that we’re part of, the communion of saints.

In Christian tradition we look backwards to Eve. We look forwards to Mary. The greeting of Gabriel, Hail, in Latin Ave can be written backwards, Eva, Eve. Mary is the new Eve as Christ is the new Adam.

The great Anglican hymn writer Bishop Ken’s hymn speaks of this:

As Eve, when she her fontal sin reviewed,
wept for herself and all she should include,
Blest Mary, with man’s Saviour in embrace,
Joyed for herself and for all human race.

Then speaking of today of Mary’s heavenly birthday the hymn goes on:

Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced,
Near to his throne her Son his Mother placed;
And here below, now she’s of heaven possest,
All generations are to call her blest.

We see the exaltation of Mary in all our scripture readings today. It’s an exaltation to be the lot of all who welcome Our Lord as she did. Mary is first redeemed and first fruits of the harvest of souls God planned when he made the world and re-made it through her.

This feast of Mary, Mother of the Lord, centres on human destiny.

We came to this day through the animation of the material world, the evolutionary process from cells to plants and animals to monkeys to homo sapiens.

We can head from this day towards the fulfilment of the new creation beyond this world in heaven for God who gave us life has given us his life which is immortal.

That life first planted in Mary is open to all who’ll direct their attention away from self-indulgence and self-centredness to let Jesus make them members of his family of redeemed humans we call the church.

We were made, however that may be, in God’s image.

We are destined, however that might be, for God’s glory.

The ‘how’ of our creation is beyond us. Not so the ‘how’ of our redemption.

Just as Mary cooperated with God so must we. This is the only way for human nature to flourish as it’s meant to.

Salvation is human flourishing in this world and the next. It’s communal, being one with the church in this world and the next.

God gave us Jesus through Mary and with Mary he gave us a new destiny that we need to choose and own.

It’s not what you have been or what you are that God looks at with his merciful love but what you would be. So wrote the author of the medieval book, The Cloud of Unknowing.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly says Mary in today’s Gospel.

God lifts those who’ll let him lift them - like Mary herself, those with a heart for God’s future.

Mary stands close to us and to the whole church as an example and as one who prays with the company of the saints that surrounds us for all of us to reach the destiny God has for those who’ll be uplifted.

We can’t save ourselves. God can but without us he cannot. Without our permission God can’t get his life into ours nor join us to the company of the redeemed.

Getting that Christ-life into our hearts is what Christianity is all about, what the bible’s all about, what the eucharist’s all about, what Mary’s all about and what the church is all about.

That all comes down to obedience and discipline, as it did for Our Lady, Blessed Mary. She was supremely anointed by the Spirit and she was supremely obedient. There’s no anointing, no heavenly joy without earthly devotion.

God grant us such devotion, with and to the Blessed Virgin, and grant, as we have already prayed, that we who are redeemed by his blood may share with her in the glory of his eternal kingdom. Amen.