A Sermon for the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin

Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.

God is far away.  We are distant from God; God is distant from us.  God is not near.  Whether we put it in those words or not, many of us come at religious life and at Christian faith with that feeling.  God is far away. God is far away from us and we from God: Morally, spiritually, in our very being – we are, as we say, only human; and being only human means, inevitably, that we are far from God;  that we are distant from the divine One whose being is so utterly different from our own.

The far away God is, perhaps, waiting for us; maybe even desiring that we will move ourselves in God’s direction.  But, we fear, if even a short distance of the wide ocean that lies between us and God is to be traversed, we will have to commit ourselves to what the poet Anne Sexton called, The Awful Rowing Toward God. [1]

This assumption that God is far away is enormously common; so deep, so unconscious, even, that we are seldom aware that we even hold it – but it is there nonetheless, shaping our lives in ways we don’t even see.  And that is a shame – because common as this assumption is, it is utterly false, completely untrue. 

St. Mary the Virgin, whose feast we keep today, gives the lie to the assumption that God is far away.  To the contrary, Mary reveals that God is as close to us our own flesh and blood;  as close as baby in its mother’s womb; as close as child in its mother’s arms; as close as the mother who brought each one of us to birth.  Mary shows us the God who is not far away; the God who is nearer to us than we know.

Mary reveals God’s nearness, God’s intimacy with us, first in being the mother of the Incarnate Christ, the one who literally carried God within her womb.  It is from her flesh that Christ’s human body was formed; from her blood that he was nourished before birth.  For this reason, the Church gave her the title, Theotokos – the God-Bearer, or as it is often translated, Mother of God.  What in human life is closer than the physical bond between mother and unborn child?   What could be nearer than that most intimate human relationship in which one person literally lives inside within the body of another, an intimacy that adult lovers seek, but at best find only briefly when they come together? 

Women who have borne children know this experience of intimacy – comfortable and uncomfortable, as when the infant John the Baptist leapt in Elizabeth’s womb – in their own bodies.  Those of us who have not had that experience need to listen to those who have -- and imagine it as best we can. 

Imagine now, for one moment, that growing within your body, taking life from your flesh and blood is the human life of the Incarnate God.   It is this intimacy that Mary had with God as Jesus grew in her womb.  God is not far away.  The God who took flesh and blood in Mary’s body is as near to each one of us, closer than we can even imagine.

We see God’s intimacy with Mary and with us in a second way in the many pictures of Mary holding her infant Son.  We have one such in the insert in today’s bulletin --  a line-drawn version of the Eastern Orthodox icon known as “The Virgin of Loving Kindness.”  In his book, Ponder These Things, [2] Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes of how the relationship between Jesus and Mary shown in this icon turns on its head our conventional assumption that God is far away.  Gone is any sense of a distant, passive God waiting, maybe, for us to move in God’s direction.  Here the Incarnate Christ is full of the desire of young child for its mother; scrambling up into her lap, seizing handfuls of her clothing, with one arm around her neck, and nuzzling his face against hers with that extraordinary hunger for sheer physical closeness that children will show with loving parents.[3]  Instead of awful human effort to bridge the gap between us and God, we find here God’s movement, direct and intimate, toward us. In Jesus’ hunger for Mary, we see God’s hunger for us, a shameless desire to be as close to us as possible. [4] 

Being on the receiving end of such love can be overwhelming – which may be one reason we are often content with the idea that God is –safely – far away.   If you look closely at Mary’s face in this icon, you can see that it has a look that is somber, almost sad:  not the joy of a happy mother we might expect.  She is showing us that the nearness and eager intensity of God’s shameless to desire to be close to us has its cost.  Mary was the first to feel the cost of that love in the physicality of pregnancy and childbirth, and in all that came after, as well.  God’s nearness to her did not leave her unchanged – and so it is with us, too. 

The eager, hungry nearness of God’s love in Christ is an enormous gift, but it is challenge too, one that will certainly not leave our lives unchanged if we let ourselves be touched by that love which is already so near to us.  Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a poem entitled The Angel in which he warns us against inviting angels into the house, because they will turn the whole place upside down and seek out all the hidden corners and mold us into new shapes.   [5]If that is what happens when angels come close, how much more so when God comes close.  Intimacy with God is often not always warm, fuzzy and comfortable.  As Mary shows us in her somber look, God’s closeness will change our lives at least as much as having a child of your own changes it.  Much as we might sometimes wish it, our God is not far away.

There is at least one more way in which Mary reveals God’s intimacy with us, and that is in what she herself has become over the centuries.  For Mary is not only the one in and through whom God comes to physical, incarnate presence in our lives; not only the one who shows us what it can be like to receive the hungry love of the God who seeks so eagerly to be near us, changing our lives.  The intimacy of God which Mary’s child-bearing and motherhood reveal spills over onto her as well, so that for many Christians, Mary has become the Blessed Mother, herself an image, whether acknowledged or not, of the intimate, loving presence of God in feminine form. 

There is an old joke that speaks of this in a down to earth way.   An elderly Italian woman comes into her Roman Catholic Church to pray, and not surprisingly, she kneels before the statue of the Virgin Mary to say her Rosary.  Now it happens that a mischievous sacristan is also in the Church, unseen by her, and he decides to play a trick.  He hides behind the altar, over which there is hung a crucifix, and in a stage whisper calls out her name: Lauretta.  She peers up briefly, looks at the crucifix, and goes back to her prayers.  Lauretta!  the sacristan calls again, a little louder.  Again, she looks up, shakes her head and returns to her rosary.  A third time the sacristan speaks, Lauretta, it is the Lord!  And she replies, “Shut up – I’m talking to your mother!” 

This story helps us see how Mary reveals a God who is as close to us as we each once were – & maybe still are – to our own flesh & blood mothers; whom some find easier to talk to than a father or a brother.  In cultures where masculine ways of relating are typically more distant than their feminine counterparts, the common use of male imagery for God in Christian Scripture and worship can have limited capacity to reveal the physically close, loving, challenging intimacy that God has chosen to share with us.  Male, for many, simply feels more distant than female.  Since loving intimacy has often  been felt to be a feminine trait, it is not surprising that Mary has herself become an image of the intimate presence of God.  Mary is the God-Bearer, not only in giving birth to her divine Son, but by bearing in herself the image of the Mothering God who is as close to us as our own flesh and blood. 

Mary, within whose body the incarnate God takes flesh and comes to birth; Mary, the parent whose life is changed by the eager, intimate love of the oh-so-near Christ;  Mary, herself become the image of the God who is herself closer to us than we can possibly imagine:  Mary, the God-Bearer shows us that God is not far away, but nearer than we can know.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.  Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Amen. 

 

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

August 15, 2010