| The Foundation of Lady Katherine Leveson at Temple Balsall | ||
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St
Mary's Church
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Mary pondered all these things in her heart Fourth Sunday of Advent: Luke 1.39-45, (46-55) Sermon preached on Sunday 21st December 2003 by Attention is directed today to the person of Mary, the mother of the Lord. We think of Mary against the background of the whole history of the longing and expectation of the people of Israel looking forward to the coming of the Messiah. We see her as a living representative of all that history, the one in whom it reaches its culmination. Mary stands for continuity and history, she is faithful to all that has been handed on from the past in the history of God's people, but at the same time and at the same moment she inaugurates an era which is altogether new, a new creation. As St Luke tells us, Mary treasures and ponders all these things in her heart, things new as well as things old, and just as so often in the life of an ordinary family it is the mother who acts as the remembrancer, keeps in touch with the scattered memories of the family, remembers birthdays and anniversaries, so, in a mysterious way, it is with the person of Mary. She is in some way the memory of the Church, its inner sanctuary where the most intimate secrets of God's dealings with his people are pondered and treasured. I've come to know the spiritual reality of Mary at Fairacres, the Anglican Community whose vocation is that of prayer, silence and contemplation. Perhaps the Church in its wisest moments has seen that the mysteries of Mary are somehow hidden inner mysteries to be pondered and discerned in prayer and silence and not to be proclaimed from the housetops. If Mary's prayer and faith and expectations sum up the whole history of God's people in the centuries before the Incarnation, so that constant pondering and treasuring of the things of God remains at the heart of God's people through all the centuries of the history of the Church. And here I feel constrained to say that despite all the controversy and division which has surrounded the Church in recent months, I cannot believe that God is any less with us now than he was before. And that we have something to learn about what is the heart of faith - into what we are calling people to through service and worship, through prayer and struggle. We must discern the way into which we are being guided for St Mary's now, amidst hesitations and uncertainties, we need to discern the way in which God wishes us to walk, a way which in the end will enlarge and deepen, not destroy of impair our realisation of the unity, the holiness, the catholicity and the sheer wondrous beauty of God. If we are living through times of change and controversy, that is all the more a call to us to treasure and ponder in our hearts all those inward riches that God has granted to his people in the centuries of Christian history. It is all the more a call to us to seek to enter into the silence and faithfulness of Mary, to share more fully in her response of obedience and love, so that the new may come to birth in us as it came to birth in her. That mystery of Mary's childbearing which we ponder today in the Gospel, is itself nothing more than the mystery of the incarnation which we will celebrate this week. It is the mystery of the true calling and dignity of our human flesh. The true mysterious dignity of our human life, yours and mine and that of every one of our fellow human beings. How necessary and how vital it is for us to dwell in our thoughts and prayers on the true dignity of that human nature, when, in so many parts of the world we see violent manifestations of inhumanity, contempt for human nature into which we all fall when we give up our lives to the power of destruction and fall out of the loving kindness of God. The stable at Bethlehem shows us the true way of human life and birth. In Mary's giving birth to the Messiah, the anointed one, the Son of God, we see something of the height and depth, the length and breadth, which lies hidden at the heart of every human life, of your life and my life, as we are called to the birth to the love of God within. May we find hidden in the heart of this feast which is coming, this
true and innermost joy, this discovery beyond all we could think or
desire of the birth of the Christ child in the depths of our being,
that birth which is made ours here and now in the mystery of this Eucharist,
here, where we may pray that we may evermore dwell in Him and he in
us. Amen The Reverend Dr James Woodward |
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