| The Foundation of Lady Katherine Leveson at Temple Balsall | ||
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St
Mary's Church
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Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary Luke1. 46 - 55 Sermon preached on Sunday, 15th August 2004 by Today we honour Mary - our Patron Saint. I want share with you two things from my prayer and reflection about Mary, the model for discipleship. The first thought focuses around our partnership with God. Mary in her life has free choice, like us - it is she that makes the decision to say 'yes' to God. Out of this 'yes', this response, comes a birth which is also a birth-giving, an act of liberation and response that changes, renews and transforms. This is a model for our relationship and our partnership with God. Like Mary, we are partners and co-creators, for as Mary's faith makes God's entrance into history possible - so we, turn to God, wait on God, struggle with God and by God's grace respond with our 'yes'. Our response to God is at the heart of what it means to be the Church. Renewal, hope, change, growth, love, worship and transformation depend upon our entering into the mystery and pleasure of God as Mary did. How little we hear and see of this dependence, this 'yes'. How hard it is for us to stand still and wait and watch. How difficult we find it to discover the presence of God and bring ourselves and others into that presence. What poverty we live in if our Church is not a place where our hearts are open to God and our lives are transformed by worship. So much distraction, so much clutter, so much irrelevance in our lives and particularly, our Church life. So we like Mary are free in our choices and decisions, free to respond to the gift of God if we wait and say 'yes' in love and faith and worship. My second thought and reflection I want to put or share as a problem and a challenge. It concerns the inescapably strong economic and political language of Mary's song, the Magnificat. This is to say that what Mary shares with us in her vision of God is not limited to individuals - it extends universally to the poor, the hungry, the humbled and the lost. Let me put this challenge starkly. Does God love the rich and the poor the same, alike? The partial answer from Luke's gospel is 'no'. God's favour is of people who are despised by the wealthy, traditionally religious folks like you and me. God is on the side of the poor, the oppressed. This opting for the poor, is being on their side, is the characteristic of the Church in Like. What does this mean for the Church in Temple Balsall? Who are today's oppressed and poor? This is a challenge and a judgement. I have no answers to this challenge only a belief that we should never escape the tension, the difficulties of living with inequality and injustice in our world. At the moment we forget the poor and are part in their oppression and we fail to glimpse the mention of the nature of God, who in Mary, reverses the present order of power and powerlessness; a God who breaks the power of the mighty and gives strength to the feeble. One final thought. Mary's gift of faith was for saying 'yes', her letting go and letting be. She trusted. She allowed her son to grow up free from control. She watched him suffer and die. Her 'yes' allowed him to be. So the living out of the earthly vision of Mary and the earthly realities of our lives means that together in this place, our 'yes', our vision of God, our worship and our journeying should allow others to be themselves, to be truly themselves. I hope and pray that we will in this place continue to welcome all people, regardless of age, sex or race or class, regardless indeed of how much or how little they believe... I hope that our 'yes' can help us to be free from the control that we exercise over others, through our stereotypes and prejudices- that people here, wholly dependant on God - can feel healed, accepted, loved, transformed and liberated. So, we give thanks to God for Mary. We ask for a deepening of our dependence upon God and our partnership with Him. We thank God that in the Magnificat we continue to be challenged about injustice and poverty and we continue to work for a place, to build a community where all can be free to be themselves in the light of God's love, to say 'yes' to Him and 'yes' to one another. Amen
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