AS WITH THE SON, SO WITH THE MOTHER

Feast of the Assumption, 15th August 2010:  All Saints' Margaret St

Solemn Evensong & Benediction

Song of Songs 2.4 

“He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention towards me was love”

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

It is I think a fact of ministry that one day is never like the next, and each day is often a bizarre cocktail of very different happenings.  Last Wednesday was a case in point. After an hour and a half at my desk, I celebrated the Eucharist at 10 o’clock in honour of St Clare of Assisi.  I then had an unscheduled visit from a young man troubled by the voices of demons in his head, and troubled further by the well meant advice of other Christians.  I finally got to my next appointment – visiting a member of the congregation for good coffee and exceptionally good homemade biscuits -  and from that conversation came some unexpected inspiration.  After lunch (for reasons too complex to explain here and now) I spent 3 hours bombing up and down the River Thames on a reinforced inflatable rescue boat – bouncing above the wash of the Clippers and tourist boats at great speed, and on more than one occasion almost being thrown overboard.  Then around 6pm I was dropped off at Hammersmith Bridge, peeled off my lifejacket and dry suit, and made my way to the Hammersmith Apollo to hear the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh speak about ‘Global Ethics for Our Future’.

Not a typical day by any means (even for East Barnet!).  But in all the activity and variety of last Wednesday, one thing stands out in my memory.  After the exuberance of the afternoon on the river, I sat with around three and a half thousand others listening to the quiet, at times barely audible voice of an 84 year old man sitting cross-legged on the podium.  And of all the things he said I remember this: “A piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos”.

He was explaining the Buddhist understanding of mindfulness, the discipline of living in the present moment, which of course has many connections with the Christian contemplative tradition.  He was articulating the  sense that in a piece of bread there is the essence of the wheat from which the flour is made, but also the sun; the soil but also the rain; the toil of the one who sowed the seed and the effort of the one who harvests.  And all of them are drawn together, embodied, in the end result.

“A piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos”  Try to find a ‘post-it note’ in your brain and just make a note of that there for the time being.

Today we celebrate the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  The Revised Common Lectionary is too coy to give the feast its full title but none the less, from as early on as the third and fourth centuries the Christian church has taught that the mother of our Lord did not suffer corruption, but at the end of her life – having held a central place in the apostolic community as this evening’s reading from The Acts of the Apostles reminds us – at the end of her life she was assumed bodily into heaven.  Now clearly it isn’t a biblical event - and because of that some Christians find the Assumption problematic.  But equally clearly, it is a biblical logic.  The Old Testament teaches us that Enoch and Elijah were so close to God in their human lives that they were caught up in the divine glory:  in 2 Kings chapter 2, Elijah gets whisked off in his chariot of fire, and in Genesis 5 Enoch walks so closely with God that, we are told, ‘ he was no more, God took him’.

Surely as mother of Jesus, God-bearer and co-worker with God the Father in the incarnation, Mary’s closeness to God is unparalleled and without rival?  Writing in the 8^th century, St John of Damascus describes the Blessed Virgin as ‘the Earthly Heaven’.  By giving birth to God incarnate she unites earth and heaven, making heaven earthly, and earth heavenly.

First and foremost the Assumption is a mystery to be celebrated in the worship of the Church rather than requiring us to work out the mechanics of what might have happened and how.  The earliest tradition in the Eastern Church was that Mary died a natural death – one she embraced with joy as she was reunited with Christ – and that after three days she too was resurrected and assumed into heaven.  Again in the words of St John of Damascus, ‘as with the Son, so with the Mother’.  The early church taught that Mary’s life became a mirror, following the exact pattern of Christ’s.  Bearing that in mind, if we look closely, Luke moves effortlessly from the end of his gospel where the apostles are gathered around the risen Jesus – to the beginning of Acts where the apostles are gathered with his mother Mary. For us to celebrate the Assumption is to celebrate the very dynamics of the incarnation – the intimate and loving relationship between the Blessed Mother and her Son, Jesus Christ.

Song of Songs 2.4 “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention towards me was love”

As Hebrew love poetry, The Song of Songs captivated the imagination of the Church, and provided the language and imagery to describe the relationship between us and God; a relationship with the potential to be as close and intense as that of the Lover and the Beloved, as that of the Mother and the Son.  Above all commentators on The Song of Songs, it was Bernard of Clairvaux who grasped the importance of this sense of relationship.  Central to his understanding of God was the sense that the one who is Love created us out of love to share Love itself.  Mary’s life of loving obedience is crowned and completed with the Divine Love.

Scrabble around in your brain, if you would, for the post-it note you left there a few moments ago.  The Zen wisdom that “A piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos”

Just as the whole of creation may be seen in a tiny part of it, so the entirety of God’s relationship with humanity - and the depth of humanity’s response to God – is drawn together, embodied, held in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  She whose life became a mirror of Christ’s life, becomes the model for Christ’s Church.  Obedience that is born of, sustained by and ultimately crowned with Love.  Just as ‘a piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos’, so Mary is for us the ambassador of our relationship with God.  To celebrate the Assumption is then not just to celebrate the intimacy of her relationship with God in Christ, but to celebrate ours as well, as together we ‘look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come’.

“He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention towards me was love”

In the Eucharist, and in the sacrament of the Altar at Benediction, we encounter the risen Christ in a piece of bread. So, in the company of Our Mother Mary, consider your relationship with God.  And remember that primarily is it not about what you do or even how you live - but primarily it is about how God loves you.  Intimately.  In this present moment. Now.

In the sacramental intimacy of Benediction, consider the invitation, the promise and the potential depths of your relationship with Christ.  Because this bread is no mere ambassador of the cosmos, but the one through whom the cosmos came to be.  The one who sustains and enlivens and crowns all that you are, and all that you can and will be, with Love.  Amen