St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Our Lady’s Birthday 8.9.21

 

WHY MAGNIFY MARY? We do so firstly because GOD HONOURS HER. How sad to see Christian disagreement about Mary! That despite Luke’s Gospel saying ‘all generations will call [Mary] blessed’ Luke 1:48. It's biblical to magnify Mary because God himself honoured her in making her Mother of his only Son Jesus Christ, God with us. Honour though is less than worship.

Secondly we magnify Mary because JESUS LOVES HER. You can’t love Jesus without loving his Mother. The idea that magnifying Mary diminishes Jesus misses the point. Jesus and Mary aren’t in competition. Jesus is our Saviour. Mary’s love and prayer draws attention to our Saviour as it did especially on Good Friday when Jesus said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” John 19:26-27.  She can be our Mother too! ‘Shall we not love thee, Mother dear, whom Jesus loved so well?’

Thirdly THE SPIRIT FILLS HER. Art over the centuries has attempted to capture the radiance of God-bearer Mary. As the Archangel promised; ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God’ Luke 1:35. It is a widely held view, expressed in the Church of England Prayer Book, that the Holy Spirit kept Mary ‘a pure Virgin’ freeing her from sin to be fitting instrument of bringing our Saviour to birth. There’s no better reason for magnifying Mary! 

Fourthly we magnify Mary because THE CREED ACCLAIMS HER. Week by week we honour Mary as we profess ‘the only Son of God… for us and for our salvation… came down from heaven, was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was made man’. Salvation came into the world through the unique partnership of God and Mary. Though the choice of Mary is God’s and her cooperation is inspired by God it remains an astonishing truth that without that cooperation the cosmos would not be redeemed! ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women!’.

A fifth quality of Mary is: HER PERFECT OBEDIENCE. In her ‘Yes’ to God given to Gabriel and confirmed in the hardships she bore Mary models to us an unselfish obedience. Simeon prophesied her heart would be ‘pierced with a sword’ in Luke 2:35 and we see this fulfilled in Mary’s presence at the foot of the Cross, obediently following her Son in his sufferings. She is model Christian, one with us, exemplifying obedience to God in sorrow and in joy. At Cana she gives advice to the servants we take for ourselves: ‘Do whatever [Jesus] tells you!’ John 2:5. 

Why magnify Mary? Sixthly, in my scheme, for HER PERFECT PRAYER. Who on earth or in heaven pleads for us as effectively as the Mother of Jesus? She above all knows what Jesus wants. ‘There is one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus’ we read in 1 Timothy 2:5. Jesus made clear Christians gain a share in that unique mediation so that ‘anything we ask in his name he will give to us’ John 14:13. The only qualification we have as his intercessors is close abiding in him, a quality few would question when it comes to Mary. Invoking her prayer undoubtedly furthers God’s will. 

We magnify Mary seventhly on account of HER PROPHETIC ROLE.  Over the Christian centuries apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been welcomed including the one at Walsingham to Richeldis in 1061. These apparitions have come with prophetic messages calling for repentance and deeper trust in God in the face of hardship and persecution as well as indifference towards him. Miracles associated with these apparitions amplify Mary’s thanksgiving to God recorded in our Gospel: ‘the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.’ Luke 1:49 On this commemoration of her birth Mary is our prophet inviting the Lord to do such great things among as we look forward with Fr Edward Pritchett to a new partnership of priests and people in our churches.

My last reason for magnifying Mary is SHE’S NORMAL.  It’s you and I who’re not as we’re meant to be, not Mary! If trust, obedience and Holy Spirit empowerment flow from Mary’s purity our own distrust, disobedience and spiritual apathy flow from our impurity. Visions of the Virgin Mary show her normality in an infectious display of warmth, joy and radiance. Such displays as at Walsingham draw pilgrims in their thousands to humble themselves before God whose norm is humility, as stated by Mary in today’s Gospel: ‘He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly’. Luke 1:52 

May such God-given humility, warmth, joy and radiance be ours on this feast of Mary, Mother of the Lord, and flow out from our Churches to the community we serve! 

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Trinity 14 (23B) Poverty of spirit 5 September 2021

Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?  James 2:5

There’s an obvious link between today’s Old Testament and Gospel reading about the unsealing of the ears of the deaf – it’s about Our Lord fulfilling the Old Testament as Messiah, the promised one who comes to help people hear the word of God.

I felt God lead me though to the reading that stands rather on its own – the epistle of James Chapter 2 which speaks of the blessings of poverty. It seems as if James’ church had rather forgotten what Jesus said about the poor since the rich were getting the best seats in church! At any rate the apostle makes a striking point that it’s those who are poor according to the world…God chose to be rich in faith.

What do we make of this? Or for that matter of the blessing Jesus himself announces upon the ‘poor in spirit’ in his Sermon on the Mount.

Seeing all those refugees and would be refugees from Afghanistan puts in your mind’s eye how, faced with the need to flee, what would you take with you, or even, less emotively, faced as we often are with short breaks what not to take!  That sort of review touches on a key feature of spiritual poverty, the call to detachment which goes alongside confidence we should have as children of God in Our Father to provide for us in all circumstances. God bless the many migrants across the world who are fellow believers and victims of international unrest with such confidence and provision.

There’s a school of Christian faith that speaks of abandonment to providence. Jesus is said by St. Paul to have ‘emptied himself, taking the form of a slave’ in his abandonment to God’s will. It is this sort of poverty that’s in Christ himself that’s spurred on his Saints all through the ages. St Francis of Assisi is the great example, casting even his clothes to one side to belong wholly to the church as servant of God! There’s a story of how the Bishop of Assisi one day said to Francis: ‘Your way of life without possessions of any kind seems to me very harsh and difficult’. ‘My Lord’, Francis answered, ‘If we had possessions we should need arms for their defence. They are a source of quarrels and lawsuits, and are usually a great obstacle to the love of God and one’s neighbour. That is why we have no desire for temporal goods’. There’s wisdom there! The migrants on TV again speak of this!

The wealth of the rich is their strong city we read in Proverbs 18:11-12, in their imagination it is like a high wall…but humility goes before honour. The ‘high wall’ riches can literally raise up can all too easily put worldly honour before humility. This ‘honour’ is also the false lure of materialism into which we are brainwashed day by day – the valuing of people for what they possess rather than for who they are as those loved by God bearing his image!  

What does it mean to be ‘poor in Spirit’? It means to have a true knowledge of God for who he is and of ourselves as who we are. To know God in his infinite grandeur is to know oneself as a child of God yet materially nothing and less than nothing through sin. 

We all want progress writes C.S.Lewis but if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back on the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. To be poor in spirit is to be progressive in that you go further when you’re travelling light. When you repent of ‘seemingly little sins’ and turn back from an alluring path you’re not regressing on your spiritual journey but progressing. You’re seeing all sins are great and you’re moving forward in the knowledge of God as the great God he is and as his beloved daughter or son.

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you know! Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? Job 38:4,5,12 Words from God provided through the poetry of the book of Job. If you’re ever feeling self-satisfied pick up your Bible and turn to Job 38 – it puts you in your place more than any other passage I know and moves progress for you in the sense we’re examining! What must he be like who made the earth, who provides the dawn new every morning? Who stretches out the stars above? 

From our town we enjoy splendid views of the South Downs and have ready access to the beauty of Mid Sussex which motivated my ‘Fifty Walks from Haywards Heath’ with its quotes from scripture and the Sussex poets. What must he be like who designed the grandeur of the Downs? 

When James warns being ‘rich in faith’ means poverty according to the world this must be at the heart of his concern – that a true knowledge of God in his infinite grandeur brings with it humbling recognition of one’s inadequacy! Our capacity to do harm is a deadly quality even though balanced by capacity to do good things.

As someone put it, our poverty is like that of a song compared to the singer. We are like a song of the Lord – he is the singer, we are the song. How can the ‘song’ compare itself to the singer?

Yet it is our privilege to be able to live in the praise of God! Here at the Eucharist, the great thanksgiving sacrifice of the Church we can admit this truth – all things come of God and of his own do we give him… through, with and in Jesus Christ!

If poverty of spirit is about detachment, abandonment to providence and humility it is also a whole sphere where we find Christ in this world. In Matthew 25 Our Lord’s picture of the Last Judgement portrays the poor as manifesting his own hidden presence. As C.S.Lewis again wrote, next to the Blessed Sacrament your neighbour should be to you the most sacred object on the earth. 

We are to welcome Jesus in a moment in the Blessed Sacrament. God in the material order, hidden in bread and wine. As we welcome him here, may he open our eyes to see him elsewhere in the material order - particularly in the run of our lives in the coming week - that we may encounter him in the needy - those who are enduring personal ordeals in need of attention - our attention, our time, our money if needs be, especially to serve Afghan refugees. 

God free us to travel lighter in our Christian pilgrimage more detached from material things, abandoned more to his purposes. The Lord deepen our humility, strengthen confidence in his provision and set our hearts more into the praise of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion and power now and henceforth and to the end of the ages. Amen.

St Bartholomew, Brighton St Gregory the Great Fri 3rd Sept 2021

 

‘The same God that said, ‘Let there be light shining out of darkness’, has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ’ 2 Corinthians 4

In an earlier existence as a research Chemist I was involved in CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research and its particle accelerator which has in recent years done so much to reveal the origins of the Universe by recreating the aftermath of the Big Bang that science now assumes started all things.

Faith in the Big Bang among scientists happily coincides with the Bible’s affirmation that God himself acted in creation saying ‘Let there be light shining out of darkness’. 

In our special reading from 2 Corinthians for the feast of the missionary Pope Gregory the apostle Paul tells his readers of not one but two Big Bangs.

‘The same God that said, ‘Let there be light shining out of darkness’, has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ’

Christians believe there are two major explosions that make history. The radiant energy that flows from creation and that which flows from the coming of Jesus and the Spirit.

When Gregory sent us Augustine with the news of Jesus he was carried forward in that purpose by the momentum of mission that flows back to Lady Day, the day Jesus came into Our Lady’s womb.

Just as the first Big Bang gave out light, heat and physical energy so the radiant power of the Spirit of Jesus makes a tremendous difference to the world lightening minds, warming hearts and galvanising wills. 

In this Eucharist we are caught up into that radiant power of Jesus, the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ. As we lift our hearts we are ourselves lifted into the same momentum of mission that Gregory was lifted into when God said ‘send Augustine to Britain’.

‘The same God that said, ‘Let there be light shining out of darkness’, has shone in our minds to radiate the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ’

We bless the Lord God of all creation at every Eucharist for the bread and wine that earth has given. We go on to bless him for his second great act in sending Jesus and the Spirit. We go on to plead that the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ will irradiate us this very day as we hear his word and celebrate his sacrifice.

Irradiate our minds with Christ’s light, driving away the negative thinking that so often defeats our witness.

Irradiate our hearts with the Spirits’ fire so that all we do today we may do in love and not just because it has to be done.

Irradiate our wills to empower them, grasping us and carrying us forward from this altar to be his joyful instruments. 

Yes the Eucharist is – or should be – like having someone – God in this case – putting a rocket under you to get you going. So be it at this altar this day!

Eucharist of St Giles celebrated for St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath & St John, Burgess Hill 1.9.21

We know little about Giles save his being a French Saint whose cult was brought to England by the Normans and that he is paradoxically the Saint of cripples and hunters. St Giles, Horsted Keynes, of which I am former Rector, has a wooden medallion where he is stuck with an arrow.  The story runs that 7th century Giles lived in southern France as a hermit in the forest and there was a deer who sustained him on her milk. Hunters one day tried to kill the deer and shot an arrow at her but Giles jumped over the deer and took the arrow. This is why he’s patron Saint of both cripples and hunters. 

Giles reached out to the deer at a cost to himself. Christians reach out to the vulnerable and get wounded. We are active symbols of Christ who reaches out to sinners and suffers on their behalf. St Giles encourages us to serve the Lord who died in our place to live in our place, who died for our sins so we can live with new life by his Spirit.

That sacrifice renewed for us daily at the eucharist is captured in the fine painting of ‘The Mass of St Giles’ in the National Gallery (picture) painted about 1500 by the anonymous Master of Saint Giles. The scene is set before the high altar of the royal abbey of St Denis near Paris. The king, Charlemagne (kneeling left), is unable to confess a sin and asks Saint Giles to pray for him. As the saint elevates the host during Mass, an angel appears with a paper explaining the king's sin is pardoned.

As we offer the eucharist this morning on the Feast of St Giles angels in heaven indeed surround us, carrying our requests and relaying answers to the specific prayers we offer. Those prayers will include, if not hunters, certainly the disabled and, the people of France, the people of Horsted Keynes down the road, and all called to the contemplative life.

Father through the example of St Giles help us to be ready to risk ourselves in reaching out to the vulnerable in our circle. Lord, hear us.

Lord, we pray for the sick and those who live with disability, their carers and  supporters. Mindful of the threatened closure of Hollyrood residential home for adults with autism in Lindfield, we pray for all involved and the best outcome for the residents. Lord, hear us

Devotion to St Giles bridges the English Channel. We pray for President Macron and the people of France especially for an effective partnership with them in stemming the flow of migrants across the sea. Lord, hear us

At the prayer of St Giles, Lord, bless this deanery and especially the people of Horsted Keynes. Raise up among us fuller contemplation of you and Christian service of the needy. Lord, hear us

With Blessed Mary, St Wilfrid, St Giles and all the saints we pray for the faithful departed and those whose anniversaries of death fall at this time. Lord, hear us.

 

St John, Burgess Hill Trinity 13. True worship 29th August 2021

 

I want to think with you this morning about true worship.

The thought is implied in our Gospel from Mark 7 where Our Lord makes a stinging attack on lip service.  He draws on Isaiah: This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me.

There’s always lots of talk about renewing worship. This, as Jesus says, is primarily about renewing hearts and secondarily about changing outward forms. Impatience with outward form can be godly, but it can also be ungodly. It’s a godly motive to make worship accessible to outsiders. It’s ungodly to make worship bespoke.

Bespoke is all the range. Some of you may be wearing bespoke clothing which has been custom made to your own specification as opposed to being a ready to wear item. Bespoke is no longer just about tailored clothing. It’s about all sorts of things.

Worship though can’t really be bespoke! It’s rather the opposite. The Anglo Saxon means to give worth to something beyond you. Worship is, to quote Evelyn Underhill, the adoring acknowledgment of all that lies beyond us – the glory that fills heaven and earth. It’s very ‘unbespoke’ and hardly consumerist

Worship is about centring on God rather than self though its agenda is mixed.  The word adoration means from the Greek submission and from the Latin ad-oratio, literally, mouth to mouth, the kiss of love.

Renewing worship is about building Godcentred-ness in the church and in individuals through personal prayer. Accessibility is very important. It’s not Christian to be an élite community. Yet, at the heart of Christian worship there is awe before God drawing us to submission and loving devotion. We don’t want our church to be élite and inaccessible but we do want our church to be awesome – awesome, not awful. There’s quite a fine divide here for young people I’m afraid. 

I remember preaching in a church in Lewes where there were a good number of teenagers kneeling with everyone else through the Prayer Book Holy Communion. Talking to them afterwards I learned how they found this traditional worship authentic and intriguing. It intrigued, it drew them to a God beyond this world.

Sometimes we lose confidence in the power of the age old liturgy. People see this loss of confidence in anxious attempts to provide novelty in Church.

Other times, of course, we shirk the duty to make this liturgy accessible. Newcomers to the prayer book get hopelessly lost without page numbers! Our parish eucharist here at St John’s is greatly facilitated by the service booklet though making worship accessible is far more than making the words intelligible. Even the truths of the faith can be made as plain as can be and worshippers, this one included, fail to act on them. This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me.

The role of the sermon in worship is both to touch on what is awesome, open up some windows to the resurrection world we enter on the Lord ’s Day, and to serve access to scripture. The role of ceremonial around the proclamation of the Gospel and the consecration of the Eucharist is to herald and make accessible the Lord in our midst. If we want to renew worship at St John’s we’re not going to find anything ready built other than what the Lord has provided in word and sacrament and his call for us to participate actively in it. 

Just a suggestion. Free your eyes on occasion from your papers and hymn books. Don’t feel obliged to follow every word in the booklet as if you were word checking a proof. Try closing your eyes or looking up at the east window. When the priest takes, blesses, shows and breaks the elements, watch. Jesus didn’t say read this in remembrance of me – he said do this. The Eucharist isn’t something read out of a book. It’s a sacrificial action. As Christ was taken, broken and shared in his passion so is the bread – and so are you and I. 

The church teaches that there is a change, a real happening, in the worship of the Eucharist. It’s a mysterious change which affects the bread and the wine and the worshipper and the world they come from.

Here is a poem that expresses what I am saying:

I lift this bread/and lift therewith the world, myself and Thee.

Hast Thou not said/‘I, lifted up, will draw the universe to me?’(Martindale)

Attendance at this service is about lifting ourselves and the world on our hearts with Christ to God. I lift this bread and lift therewith the world, myself and Thee.

As the bread is offered at the Eucharist see your life and the lives of all those on your heart as being placed on the altar. As the wine is mixed and offered, see your sorrows and those of the world that are on your heart as being offered. 

Why not look as you sing the offertory song – it’s not just your money that’s going to that altar but your whole life – if you want it so! There’s the rub for you and I!

When the priest says over that bread and wine on our behalf and on behalf of Christ himself This is my body…my blood see your life, your body and blood, taken up into his life and his love.

The love that descends anew upon the Altar, to draw us moth-like, into its celestial flame.

After the words of the Lord and at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer priests lift the consecrated bread and wine upwards as a sign of hat drawing up of that love towards God through with and in Jesus Christ 

True worship is about submission, and the adoring kiss of love. It is about our love for God and God’s for us and our love for one another in the body of Christ.  Accessible worship is worship that helps a congregation see such a vibrant flow of love from their joined hearts through the externals of word and sacrament to God and back. 

There should be enough organisation for people to hear the word and lift up their hearts in the Eucharist but not so much as to distract and deaden things. Priests are there for us but with a brief not to get in the way. They represent Christ, of course, as our two small west windows indicate, one of the cross and one of the priest at the altar. Priests are also, so to speak, midwives, bringing things to birth by coordinating a prayerful liturgy. Part of that birth giving is the call to repentance we have already picked up from today’s gospel about worshipping from the heart. We are also warned of prayerful participation at the Eucharist by St. Paul when he says in 1 Corinthians 11v28 examine yourselves and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

Self-examination has two aspects – negative and positive. As we celebrate the Eucharist we are to do so confessing our sins. We are also to do so, more positively, through offering the Lord all our positive aspirations. Are you there now – before the altar? Are your joys and sorrows, your family and friends, your ambitions and frustrations – have you put them there yet as a living sacrifice?

I lift this bread and lift therewith the world, myself and Thee. Hast Thou not said ‘I, lifted up, will draw the universe to me?’ Coming to the Eucharist is a lot more than taking a piece of blessed bread and sipping consecrated wine. Sometimes the consumerist streak in all of us sees Holy Communion as the important thing – what we get out of the Eucharist. No, it’s what we put in as well! 

True worship is about our souls and bodies being made a living sacrifice with those on our hearts, part of the universe that is ours, being drawn through our devout prayer into true worship of God, into the celestial flame of love which is his, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Eucharist Wednesday 18 August 2021

As we follow the daily Eucharist lectionary through Judges and Matthew both sections read today converge in speaking of how being a Christian believer flies at times in the face of the world.

Take the Gospel reading we just heard from Matthew 20:1-16. The early birds get paid the same as the slackers in Our Lord’s parable against the presumption of the religious leaders of his day. To be a Christian believer is to trust a God who is gracious and not to be tied down to any worldly reckonings. 

Or, look back to that passage from Judges about the trees. The prophecy of Jotham in Judges 9:6-15 warns against power structures. The trees, wanting a king, offer a crown to the olive, the fig tree and the vine but all are too busy being fruitful to want to wave their branches over their fellows. This task is eventually welcomed by the thorn bush and everyone suffers. People who seek power are prickly and we are to be wise of them.

The Gospel works back to front and turns worldly thinking upside down.

In his book ‘What’s so Amazing about Grace’ Philip Yancey refers to ‘the atrocious mathematics of the gospel’ which reverses the question ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ with the question ‘Why do good things happen to bad people?’ like the slackers in today’s passage.

When it comes to living our Christianity comparisons are invidious. Why? Because God has the right to do as he likes with those he owns – which is all of us – so that he can disturb our worldly reckonings. Thus the last will be first and the first, last.

In the same way the all-powerful One we worship is not interested in power. He is, to coin a phrase, downwardly mobile. He blesses those who will be servants like Jesus. His blessing is held back from the self-important – we can see that from the consequences that flow from self-important leadership.

How can we live the Gospel? Can we attempt to go back to front and upside down in the way Christ teaches?

Not deliberately - but as the Spirit leads. He can be very surprising - a God at work in lowly places and people, One who is at work to turn worldly thinking about people’s value on its head.

I suppose being the best sort of Christian is to be one who is less and less surprised by the workings of the Holy Spirit.

Like the telling question ‘are you more surprised when God answers your prayers than when he doesn’t?’

We have a God of overflowing goodness more eager to provide for us than we are to seek such a provision.

In this Eucharist we come once again to meet with him in the bread of life and the cup of salvation which are the mystery of Christ’s logic-defying love. 

We come like the workers in the vineyard to this feast. Some of us are more early birds but most of us are towards the other end of the spectrum. All of us are welcomed with the same grace.

We do not presume to come to this your table trusting in our own righteousness, Lord, but in your manifold and great mercies for none of us is worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under this table.

St Gabriel, Pimlico Churchill Gardens Assumption 15th August 2021

 

When we look at human origins we enter troubled waters for those who stick to biblical literalism. Sometime back I read Douglas Palmer’s book Origins – human evolution which provides a fascinating summary of the 20 million year evolution of the human family going from the Proconsul plant-eating monkey to chimpanzee-like descendants up to 2 million years back. Then homo habilis, erectus, neanderthalensis and sapiens. Here above is an illustration capturing the sense of this.

The issue of creation versus evolution has been a consuming issue for some but the main flow of Christian biblical interpretation goes 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 needs setting in perspective and the best perspective is to look forward from our origins to our destiny. Today’s Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary provokes above all days the thought of human destiny as we ponder 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… 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, that we who are redeemed by his blood may share with her in the glory of his eternal kingdom. Amen.