Mary the Mother of God

Yesterday, the fifteenth of August, was a major festival in some parts of the Christian Church.
It was what’s called the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
which celebrates the belief that her body, as well as her soul,
was taken to heaven after she’d died.
Or possibly even before, it’s not clear.
Either way, it’s a very old tradition,
going right back to the early years of Christianity,
even though there’s nothing about it in Scripture.
And even those Christians, like us,
who don’t necessarily subscribe to that doctrine,
do still consider 15 August one of the Festivals of Saint Mary. And even though we Protestants don’t really think about Mary much, the fact that she’s such an important figure in so much of Christianity means she’s probably worth thinking about from time to time.

So what do we actually know about her from the Bible, as opposed to tradition? She first appears in our Bibles when Gabriel comes to her to ask her if she will bear Jesus, and, of course, as we all know, she said she would, and Joseph agreed to marry her despite her being pregnant with a baby he knew he wasn’t responsible for.

I do rather love Luke’s stories about Mary – how one of the things the angel had said to her was that her relation, Elisabeth, was pregnant after all those years. And Mary rushes off to visit her.

Was this to reassure herself that the angel was telling the truth?
Or to congratulate Elisabeth?
Or just to get away for a bit of space, do you suppose?
We aren’t told.

But Elisabeth recognises Mary as the mother-to-be of the promised Saviour, and Mary’s response is that great song that we now call the “Magnificat”, which we heard in our Gospel reading.
Or if it wasn’t exactly that –
that may well be Luke putting down what she ought to have said, like Shakespeare giving Henry V that great speech before Agincourt –
it was probably words to that effect!
I think she was very, very relieved to find the angel had been speaking the truth, and probably did explode in an outpouring of praise and joy, and of wonder that God would come down to a relatively poor young woman in a dusty backwater of the Empire!
I’ll come back to that in a minute, but for now let’s go on looking at what we know about Mary.

After Jesus’ birth, the next time we see Mary is when Jesus is twelve and gets separated from them in the Temple.
I spent a lot of time with that story when my daughter was a teenager –
how Mary and Joseph say to Jesus, “But why did you stay behind?
Didn’t you realise we’d be worried about you?”
and Jesus goes, “Oh, you don’t understand!” –
typical teenager!

We don’t see Joseph again after this – tradition has it that he was a lot older than Mary, and, of course, he had a very physical job. It wasn’t just a carpenter as we know it – the Greek word is “technion”, which is the same root as our “technician”; if it had to do with houses, Joseph did it, from designing them, to building them, to making the furniture that went in them! And tradition has it that sometime between Jesus’ 12th birthday, and when we next see him, Joseph has died.

But we do see a lot more of Mary.
She is there at the wedding at Cana, and indeed,
it’s she who goes to Jesus when they’ve run out of wine.
And Jesus says, at first, “Um, no –
my time has not yet come!” but Mary knew. And she told the servants to “Do whatever he tells you”, and, sure enough, the water is turned into wine.

There’s a glimpse of her at one point when Jesus is teaching, and he’s told his mother and brothers are outside waiting for him, but he refuses to be diverted from what he’s doing. And, of course, it could have been that it was just random people who said they were his relations to try to get closer to him.

We see Mary, of course, weeping at the Cross –
something no mother should ever have to do.
And Jesus commending her into the care of the “beloved disciple” John.
And, finally, we see her in the Upper Room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit came.
That’s really all we know about her from the Bible, but other early traditions and writings, including some of what’s called the apocryphal gospels –
they’re the ones that didn’t make the cut into the New Testament as we know it –
tell us a bit more.

They tell us that her mother was called Anne and her father was called Joachim, and that she was only about 16 when Gabriel came to her.
One source has it that Anne couldn’t have babies, and when Mary finally arrived, she was given to be reared in the Temple, like Samuel.
And traditional sources also tell us that, after Pentecost, she went to live in Ephesus, probably with John, and died somewhere between 3 and 15 years later, surrounded by all the apostles.
And that her body was taken up to heaven, which is where we came in!

Well, that’s all very well, but how did they get from there to the veneration of her, not to say worship in some cases, that we see today?

This may be something you find difficult to understand – I certainly do – and that’s okay. We aren’t required to do more than honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord; we mention her when we say the Creed, of course, and there are lots of churches dedicated to her. My family church in Clapham – the Clapham in Sussex, that is, not the one in London – is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, as are loads of other churches around the world.

But we do not think of her as quasi-divine in some way.
We do believe that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by ordinary human means,
but that this was something that happened in time, not in eternity!
She became the Mother of God –
she was not the Mother of God before Jesus was born.

I think it’s probably largely to do with the fact that, back in the day, when the head of your family, or tribe, or whatever, converted to Christianity, you had to, too. And if you were used to worshipping a mother goddess of some kind, maybe you found in Mary something of what you were used to, and what felt natural to you. After all, although we do sometimes use female names for God – Love, for instance, or Sophia, Wisdom – they don’t always come naturally. It is, perhaps, significant that in Italy, 15 August is known as Ferraugusto, and was originally a festival of the goddess Diana – you know, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians”, that one – and has been a public holiday since the days of Caesar Augustus! Diana, whose Greek name is Artemis, is associated with the moon, the hunt, and virginity! So a festival dedicated to a virgin goddess is now dedicated to the Virgin Mary!

Anyway, the point is, what does this have to do with us? The various Mariologies, or Marian theologies, are fascinating, although I don’t pretend to understand most of them, but what can we learn from it all?

From Mary herself, of course, I think we can learn obedience to God. We know how very brave she was saying “Yes” to God’s request that she bear Jesus; I also like to remember that, at the wedding in Cana, she says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you!” – and that’s not a bad motto to live by! Do whatever Jesus tells us.

But there’s more to it, isn’t there?

“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
 he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.”

Mary may well have thought, if, indeed, she had ever even thought about it, that when the Messiah came, he would come in spectacular fashion, a king above all kings, acknowledged by all, revered by all, worshipped by all. But that’s not what happened! Instead, God came as a human baby, born in a house so crowded that the only available cradle was an animal feeding-trough, born in an occupied country whose rulers were ruthless in putting down resistance and dissent.

We see how Mary’s words were later echoed by Jesus – in his teachings, it is quite clear that those who are rich in material things will find it very difficult to be God’s person; those who are self-satisfied won’t be able to find God. Those who think they are righteous probably aren’t. Remember Jesus’ stories of the Pharisee who thought he was righteous and the tax collector who knew he wasn’t – and it was the tax collector who went home right with God. Similarly, it was the poor widow who gave what was probably her food money for the day who was blessed, where the rich man who gave what looked like a lot, but was really only peanuts to him was not.

It is those who are poor, weak, hungry who can find God, who can trust God to fill them with good things. I imagine – well, I hope – that most of us here this morning have decent housing, enough to eat, enough to wear, access to the Internet and so on. But all too many don’t. Our soup kitchens, our food banks, our warm spaces in the winter, and so on, are still desperately needed, and I’m sure we all give what we can, although probably not enough.

But it’s not just about physical hunger – it’s about spiritual hunger, too. We need God. All of us need God, whether we acknowledge that need or whether we don’t. All of us here this morning probably do acknowledge that need, and have committed ourselves to being Jesus’ person.

But it’s all too easy to become complacent, to forget that we need God. There’s a song we sometimes sing at Brixton Hill that begins “May your struggles keep you near the cross and may your troubles show that you need God.” We don’t like struggle and trouble and ghastliness – but what if it is bringing us closer to God? Not just as individuals, but as churches! You here at Lambeth Walk know what it is like to struggle as a church, both when you were trying to build this lovely building, but also before then when you had to split up from St Mary’s. King’s Acre Church united with Brixton Hill many years ago now, but before then we, too, had to leave our Local Ecumenical Project and become purely Methodist. It was not an easy few years, and quite heartbreaking when we had to cease being a separate church, although it was the right decision. But God has blessed us, and I’m sure you will tell me that God has blessed you, too. We knew we needed God.

And more recently, too, during the pandemic when we were not allowed to worship together for so many months. Yet God was there, as we learnt how to be Church on Zoom, and how to livestream our services, which, like many churches, still do at Brixton Hill,

Yet, are we still aware that we need God? Mary, I think, knew that she needed God her whole life long.

“He has filled the hungry with good things!” Are we hungry for God? Am I? Are you?

Waving or Drowning

There is a video, but for some reason it won't link!  

These are two very familiar stories we've heard read this morning, aren't they?
The story of Joseph and his –
I was going to say his technicolour dreamcoat, but that's Andrew Lloyd Webber, not the Bible!
And the story of Jesus walking on the water,
which is the one episode that people who know nothing of Jesus seem to know about.

So anyway, Joseph.
Talk about dysfunctional families –
his was the very worst.
His father, Jacob, had been a liar and a cheat,
as had his maternal grandfather.
And Joseph himself was the spoilt favourite –
his father had two wives, you may remember, Rachel, whom he loved, and Leah, whom he didn't but was tricked into marrying anyway.
He also had a couple of kids by Leah's and Rachel's maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, but Rachel, the beloved wife, had had trouble conceiving,
so Joseph and his full brother Benjamin were very precious,
especially as Rachel had died having Benjamin.
He, it seems, was still too young to take much part in the story at this stage, but Joseph was well old enough to help his brothers –
and, we are told, to spy on them and sneak on them to his father.
And stupid enough to boast of self-important dreams.

It's not too surprising that his brothers hated him, is it?
Obviously, he didn't deserve to be killed, but human nature is what it is,
and the brothers were a long way from home
and saw an opportunity to be rid of him.
At least Reuben didn't go along with having him killed, and had hoped to return him to his father,
although he did appear to go along with selling him to the Ishmaelites who were coming along.

Joseph has a lot of growing up to do,
and we all know the story of what happened and how, in the end, he was able to forgive his brothers and help save them from famine.

Let's leave him for the minute, though, and go on to this story of Jesus walking on the water.

This is the thing that everybody knows about Jesus,
that he walked on water,
and even those who don't realise that the Jesus who walked on water is the same Jesus whose birth is celebrated at Christmas know “walking on water” as some kind of metaphor for the divine.

But there's more to the story than that,
just as there is more to Jesus than someone walking on water!
Jesus didn't go much for spectacular displays of his divine power –
that wasn't what he was about at all.
In fact, you may remember that he refused to be tempted in that way when he was being tempted in the wilderness.
He mostly kept who he was to himself, until the right time came.

And now it was the right time to join the disciples.
He had told them to go on ahead while he stayed behind to pray,
and at some time in the wee small hours he was ready to join them.
He had had a horrible day – first of all, he’d heard that his cousin John had been killed by Herod, and he badly wanted to get away by himself to talk to God about it, and to begin to come to terms with it. But the crowds had followed him, and he had had to spend time first healing them and then, as we heard about last week, to provide a meal for them. And finally, finally, he had been able to spend time on his own with his heavenly Father, and is ready to rejoin his disciples.

They should have been at the far side of the lake by now,
but they were up against a contrary wind.
I've never been to the Sea of Galilee, but I'm told by those who have that the storms can blow up very suddenly,
and the disciples, although experienced fishermen, were struggling slightly.

And then, here is Jesus, walking towards them on the water.
Most of them are terrified, except for Peter, who says,
“Lord, if that's really you, order me to come out on the water to you!”

And Jesus tells him to come, and he comes,
and then he finds he really is walking on the water, and panics.
Peter is a strong swimmer, we know that from John’s gospel; he didn't really need to panic, but in the dark and the cold and the confusion....
well, Jesus grabs him and they get into the boat –
and then suddenly it's calm and quiet.

Now, I don't know any more than you do whether this is a true story or not.
It almost sounds as though it was a dream;
or perhaps it was a legend that got into the story of Jesus at an early stage.
Or perhaps it really did happen.
At this distance, it doesn't matter;
what does matter is that the story got into our Bibles,
and so God means us to learn from it!

But what?
What can we learn from either this story or the story of Joseph?
In a way, the Joseph story is easier.

I am very blessed;
I belong to a wonderful and close family, as does Robert.
But I know how lucky and blessed we are.
It's very unusual –
all too many families these days aren't close,
don't enjoy spending time with each other,
and are what might be classed as dysfunctional.
Sadly, even within our church family.
We do like to put on a happy face when we come to church,
pretend everything is lovely, even when it isn't.
But God sees behind the happy faces to the heartbreak behind.
God knows that not all families are happy ones;
not all parents can be kind and loving,
no matter how much they might want to be.
Not all husbands and wives can get along together.
And so it goes on.

But when we look at the story of Joseph and his family, we can see that this doesn't actually matter to God.
These people became God's chosen people,
the twelve tribes of Israel.
God used them in spite of how dysfunctional,
how disorganised,
how downright cruel
they were.

The story of Jesus walking on the water is, I think, more about Peter than it is about Jesus.
If Jesus is who he says he is, then suspending the laws of nature is reasonable.
But for Peter, fallible Peter –
the one who, if he could get it wrong, did get it wrong –
for Peter to walk on water is not reasonable.
And Peter panicked and nearly drowned, and Jesus had to rescue him.

I was going to say that Peter is the most human of the disciples;
I think, perhaps, it is that he is the one we read most about.
We know when he puts his foot in it and says the wrong thing.
We know when his faith fails him.
We know when he panics and nearly drowns –
or, indeed, when he panics and denies Jesus.

And yet:
“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.”

God chose Peter long before Peter chose God!
Jesus knew that Peter was the one chosen to carry on the work after he, Jesus, had been raised to glory,
even perhaps at at time when Jesus had only the faintest inkling of what lay before him.

God used Peter, even though Peter was so human and fallible.
And God used Joseph and his family, even though they were so awful.
And God can use you, and God can use me.

But.

And there always is a “But”, isn't there?

God couldn't use either Joseph or Peter as they were.
Joseph had to grow up and stop being an immature brat.
As you probably remember,
we're told that he was accused of rape and left to languish in prison for several years,
during which time he did grow up, and became an invaluable administrator and was thus able to help organise famine relief when it became clear that there was to be a massive famine.
He matured enough to forgive his family, and to help them all settle in Egypt where, for several generations, they were happy and comfortable.

And God couldn't really use Peter the way he was, either.
Peter was transformed, of course by the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
Not that he would claim to be perfect, even then,
but he became someone God could use.

And you and I, we need to be transformed before God can use us.
We need to allow God to work in us, to renew us, to make us into the person he intended us to be.

But the good news is, of course, that we don't have to be perfect!
It doesn't matter what our family background is.
It doesn't matter how chaotic our lives are just now.
What does matter is our openness to God, and our willingness to be transformed.

I'm not sure how much, if anything, Joseph knew of God,
other than as the sender of dreams.
His transformation was a slow and painful process.
Ours may be, too –
but I'm sure of one thing, and that is that the more we are open to God,
the more we commit ourselves to being God's person,
the more honest we can be with ourselves and with God about how chaotic our lives are and how badly we get things wrong,
then the easier it is for God to transform us.

And, of course, we don't have to wait for that transformation to have fully happened before God can use us!
We can still be used, ready or not.
And God does use us, sometimes, often even, without our knowledge.
But never, I think, without our consent.

Amen. 

Five Thousand Men

 

Totally forgot to record this.  Probably just as well!

Well, we watched the video (before the Gospel was read), and we heard the original from Matthew’s gospel.
And I expect we’ve known the story from our earliest childhoods –
we older ones probably don’t remember a time when we didn’t know it!

But in many ways it raises more questions than it answers;
Were there literally five thousand men there, not counting their families?

At this distance, we can’t really know whether there were really five thousand men,
or whether this was the way of describing a large number that historians of the day like Josephus or Herodotus were apt to use, and in reality there were only a few hundred.
And the nearby villages had no more than three thousand people in each,
so if there were really about fifteen thousand people, the whole countryside would have been depopulated!

On the other hand, the other two gospels that tell this story say that the disciples divided the crowds into groups of fifty or a hundred people, making it easier to tally them up;
and it was Passover, when literally thousands of people would leave their home villages and descend upon Jerusalem for the festival, so might have been distracted by the knowledge that Jesus of Nazareth was teaching nearby.
After all, Jesus had pretty much gone viral by this stage –
he did tell many people not to say anything about his having healed them, but they did, of course, and his fame had spread all over the area.

So it could be either.
And what about the food?
Had all those people really come out with no food or drink that day?
It seems improbable, especially if people were on their way to Jerusalem!
Far more likely that most people had some kind of snack with them, but didn’t care to be the first to bring it out and start eating
until the small boy, who, John’s account of the story tells us, came up to Andrew and whispered “Jesus can have my lunch, if he’d like!”
One minister of my acquaintance, who used to be a teacher, said that for him the real miracle was that the boy hadn’t already eaten his lunch,
given the tendency of boys on school trips to have finished their lunch before the coach has left the school car-park!


Seriously, though, it doesn’t really matter!
The story was considered important enough to be retold in all four gospels –
the only one that is –
so, even if it isn’t absolutely literally true, we mustn’t confuse truth with historical accuracy.
The story is true, in its essentials, and God the Holy Spirit caused the Gospel writers to record it, so we need to learn from it!

Well, what do we learn?
I think, for me, there are three things to think about.

Firstly, about Jesus.
This sort of food-stretching isn’t unique to him;
there are parallels in the Old Testament.
Elijah goes to stay with the Widow of Zarephath during a famine and promises that her oil and flour won't run out if she will feed him, too.
Which she does,
and it doesn't.

Elisha, Elijah's successor,
performs a miracle very like Jesus',
making 20 barley loaves stretch to feed 100 people, with some left over.
Which mightn't sound too bad to us, but those loaves were only about the size of a hamburger bun –
and if you were only given 1/5 of a bun,
you might well want to complain that it wasn't quite enough!

So this kind of miracle was something that prophets did.
You might have noticed that John doesn't tend to record Jesus' miracles unless they teach us something about who Jesus is.
So on one level, in John’s gospel, the story shows that Jesus was not only a prophet like Elisha, but something greater.

And did you notice something else?
Jesus took the food,
gave thanks,
broke it
and shared it.
Doesn't that sound awfully familiar?
Doesn't that sound like something we do some Sundays,
those Sundays we have a Communion service?
So the story is saying something about who Jesus is;
it is showing us that Jesus is not only a prophet,
he is more than a prophet.

Then the next thing I think we can learn from this story is about God the Father.
You see, when Jesus provided lunch for everybody, it wasn’t just a meagre amount.
It wasn’t just enough food to keep everyone going until they got home.
It wasn’t just enough for everyone to have a decent meal.
There was enough for everyone to have a decent meal and still have masses left over!

That seems to be so typical of Jesus, though.
When he turned the water into wine at the wedding at Cana,
he made enough wine to stock a young off-licence,
never mind be enough for a few guests at the tag-end of a party.
And when people were healed,
they were healed!
He made a proper job of it,
even if it took him two goes.

It's typical of Jesus, and it's typical of God.
I mean, look at the sort of extravagance we see in the natural world –
all those desert flowers, for instance,
and nobody knew they were there.
All those stars,
all those universes.....

This story, with the twelve basketsful left over,
reminds us that God is generous to the point of extravagance.
And also, it was Jesus who broke the bread and shared it out.
He did the serving.
It was Jesus,
elsewhere in John's gospel,
who kneels with towel and basin,
washing the disciples' feet.
It was Jesus who said of himself,
"The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve."

So this story helps to remind us that God longs
and longs
and longs
to give us, his children,
more good things than we can possibly handle.
God wants to serve us,
to heal us,
to make us whole,
to give us what we need –
not just grudgingly,
barely enough,
but pressed down, shaken together and running over!

It's not just in the Bible either –
look at God's creation.
You've all seen pictures of the way the desert blooms when it rains –
look at those millions of flowers that nobody, for a very long time, ever knew were there except God.
Or look at how many millions and millions of sperm male animals produce to fertilise only relatively few embryos in the course of a lifetime.
Or where lots of embryos are produced, like fish, for instance, millions of them are eaten or otherwise perish long before adulthood.
And millions and millions of different plant and animal species, some of which are only now being discovered.

Or look at the stars!
All those millions upon millions of stars, many with planets, some with planets like our own that may even hold intelligent life..…

God is amazing, isn't He?
And just suppose we really are the only intelligent life in the Universe?
That says something else about God's extravagance in creating such an enormous Universe with only us in it!
Our God is truly amazing!

Scientists think that some of the so-called exoplanets they have been discovering lately might contain life, although whether or not that would be intelligent life is not clear, and probably never will be.

So how did God redeem such beings, assuming they needed redemption?
We know that here, his most extravagant act of all was to come down and be born as a human baby –
God, helpless, lying in a makeshift cradle fashioned from an animal feeding-trough.
Having to learn all the things that human babies and children have to learn.
Becoming just like us, one of us, knowing what it’s like to work for his living, what it’s like to be a condemned criminal and to die a shameful death!

But God, God who could only allow Moses the teeniest glimpse of his glory, or he would not have been able to survive it, and even then his face shone for hours afterwards, this God became a human being who could be captured and put to death.

You know, sometimes I think the main function of the church is to help us cope with God.
Perhaps the church, quite unwittingly, limits God, or, like Moses, we’d not be able to handle it.
St Paul prays that we might know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.
And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”

The Church, which is His body.
And yet we –
we the Church –
are so bad at being His body.
We limit God.
We limit God as individuals, saying “Thus far shall you come, and no further!”
We don’t allow God access to all of us, to every particle of our being.

And we limit God as communities, as churches;
We tell God what to do.
We tell God who God may love, and who is to be considered beyond the pale.
We judge, we fail to forgive, we withhold, despite the fact that Jesus said
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged;
do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.
Forgive, and you will be forgiven;
give, and it will be given to you.
A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over,
will be put into your lap;
for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

And yet we still hold back from God, both as individuals and as communities.
I don’t mean just money –
although we do that, too, despite the promise that if we:

“Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts;
see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.”

But we hold back ourselves from God.
We aren’t –
well, I know I’m not, and I dare say I speak for you too –
we aren’t really prepared to give ourselves whole-heartedly to God.
After all, who knows what God won’t ask of us if we do?
We might even have to give up our lives, as Jesus did!
Or worse, perhaps God would say “No thank you!”
Perhaps we would be asked to go on doing just exactly as we are doing –
how disappointing!

But I wonder if it’s really about doing.
Isn’t it more about being?
Isn’t it more about being made into the person God created us to be?
Isn’t it more about allowing God into us extravagantly, wholeheartedly…. I would say “completely”, but I don’t think that’s quite possible.
God is simply too big, and we would be overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, Jesus came, he told us, so that we can have life, and have it abundantly!
Abundantly.
Can we let more of God into our lives, to be able to live more abundantly?

Do you dare?
Do I dare?
Do we dare?
Amen!