1 Last Sunday, I Preached on the Sacrament of Confession, Also

Last Sunday, I preached on the Sacrament of Confession, also known as the Rite of Reconciliation. This Sunday, I’m preaching on Mary. I suppose in a way these two sermons, taken together, are helping to establish my Anglo-Catholic credentials. It’s no secret that I haven’t always been a card-carrying Anglo-Catholic, however. I did not have the good fortune to grow up an Anglo-Catholic, or any other sort of Catholic, for that matter. Neither confession nor Mary played any part in my religious formation as a child or adolescent. I did not grow up expecting to go to confession, nor did I grow up praying the rosary. If anything, I was taught that it was “unbiblical” to make one’s confession to a priest, and that the rosary was nothing more than “vain repetitions.” Which reminds me of a story about my first encounter with Marian devotion. First, a bit of background: My father was the pastor of my childhood church, which proudly aligned itself with a loose association of like-minded groups called the Independent Fundamental Churches of America, or IFCA. Dad described the IFCA as a “nondenominational denomination,” and claimed its motto was, “We put the fun in fundamentalism.” You weren’t required to believe that the pope was the Antichrist or that the Roman Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon as described in the Book of Revelation, but if you did voice such opinions, no one would contradict you. As you can imagine, my father’s congregation in Southern California had its fair share of former Roman Catholics who had indeed come to look upon Mother Church as the Whore of Babylon. Perhaps in so doing they were over-reacting, but to quote Pope Francis, “Who am I to judge?” One might reasonably expect that an IFCA pastor such as my father would have as little to do with Roman Catholicism as possible, and you’d be right. Ironically, however, it was my father who introduced me to my first Roman Catholic liturgy. A member of his congregation had succumbed to cancer, and though her funeral was going to be held at our little community Bible church, her Roman Catholic family insisted on having a rosary service with an open-casket viewing at the local RC church. My father decided to attend out of respect for the deceased. I must have been between ten and twelve years old at the time, and for some reason, I was curious, and asked to accompany him, and strangely enough, he consented. Little did he or I know where it would lead. The woman who had died came from a large Mexican family, and when we arrived at the church, many of the parishioners were praying in Spanish, so I wondered if the service itself might even be in Spanish. Instead, a ruddy-cheeked fellow in a black dress came out and the first words out of his mouth were, “In the Name of the Fah-therandofthe Sonanddofthe Holyghost. Ay-men.” I remember thinking, “This is just like the priests in movies. Are all Catholic priests Irish?” Everyone crossed themselves and then Father turned to the casket and shook something at it several times. It looked to me like a silver baby rattle, except it didn’t make any noise. I was sitting too far back to see that there was holy water coming out of it, so I was incredibly confused. Once Father got through the preliminaries, he settled right down to business, saying, “HAIL Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee-blessed art thou among women-and blessed is the fruit of thy wooomb, JAY-sus. HOLY Mary, MotherofGod, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our deeth, Ay-men.” The little old ladies in the congregation tried valiantly to keep up with him in 1 English, but it was an uphill struggle as they repeated, “Hail Mary…” I’m sure some must’ve just switched to Spanish or the original, “Ave Maria, gratia plena.” As we sat there, looking at the body in the open casket, the priest and his people simply repeated this Hail Mary prayer over and over and over again. Finally, they started in on “OUR Fah-ther, whoartinheaven, hallowedbethyname…” I perked up because I knew this prayer, so I started praying, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done…” My father put his arm on my shoulder and said, “You don’t have to join in.” So I stopped, wondering if I’d done something wrong. I’ll spare you further details. The homily was memorably awful, worse than this one, if you can believe it, and afterwards I asked Dad what he objected to about the service. He could have given me a lecture about “Mariolatry,” but instead, he just said two words, “vain repetitions.” Dad was referring, of course, to Matthew 6:7, “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.” From a Protestant point of view, the veneration of Mary is not warranted by Scripture, and in fact distracts Christians from the worship due to Christ alone. And as an outsider, it was difficult for my young brain to grasp the point of all of these “repetitions.” Fast-forward a few decades, and here I am, a known bead-worrier, though admittedly, despite the fact that I am a life member in the Society of Mary, I have never given as much time to Marian devotions such as the Rosary as I have given to Eucharistic devotions such as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. But the more I know about the Rosary, the less I think it consists in “vain repetitions” at all. The problem isn’t with the Rosary, it’s a problem of catechesis: people either do not know, or those who do know don’t bother to explain, the value of the Rosary as a form of Christian meditation on the mysteries of our Salvation. Having said that, my aim in this sermon is not to teach you about the Rosary, but about the woman behind it: Our Lady. If you want to learn more about the Rosary, there are plenty of good articles online about it. The main point I want to make about things like the Rosary is that all Mariological devotion has as its proper end Christological devotion. That is, Mary always points us to her Son. As one document emanating from the Vatican puts it, “The history of theology shows that an understanding of the mystery of the Virgin contributes to a more profound understanding of the mystery of Christ, of the Church and of the vocation of [hu]man[ity].” The Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos, Mary the Mother of God, officially known in the Canadian prayer book as the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and perhaps best known in the West as the feast of the Assumption, has deep roots in the church, though its definition as a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church in 1950 has turned it into a sort of Catholic shibboleth, a litmus test that divides Catholics from Protestants. This is too bad, because in both the Latin West and Orthodox East, as well as in the Anglo-Catholic tradition within Anglicanism, the dormition and assumption of Mary is a powerful statement of our faith in the resurrection. This feast celebrates the fact that Mary was the first person to undergo the full resurrection of both soul and body that we, too, hope to undergo. In this way, Mary the Mother of God points beyond herself to the fullness of 2 resurrection life found in and through her son, Jesus Christ. Far from distracting Christians from the worship that is due to Christ alone, the feast of St. Mary the Virgin stands as a testimony of Christ’s ultimate victory over sin and death in the life of the believer, as manifested in the Blessed Virgin Mary. Consider these words by Pope St. John Paul the Second: At a General Audience in the Vatican on June 25, 1997, JP2 said, It is true that in Revelation death is presented as a punishment for sin. However, the fact that the [Roman] Church proclaims Mary free from original sin by a unique divine privilege does not lead to the conclusion that she also received physical immortality. The Mother is not superior to the Son[,] who underwent death, giving it a new meaning and changing it into a means of salvation. Involved in Christ’s redemptive work and associated in his saving sacrifice, Mary was able to share in his suffering and death for the sake of humanity’s Redemption. What Severus of Antioch says about Christ also applies to her: “Without a preliminary death, how could the Resurrection have taken place?” To share in Christ’s Resurrection, Mary had first to share in his death…Whatever from the physical point of view was the organic, biological cause of the end of her bodily life, it can be said that for Mary[,] the passage from this life to the next was the full development of grace in glory, so that no death can ever be so fittingly described as a “dormition” as hers. Anglo-Catholics agree with the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Church that Mary has already undergone the bodily resurrection, which we all will experience at the Second Coming, and that Mary is enthroned in heaven in that glorified state of soul and body, which all other saints will enjoy only after the Last Judgement.

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