Three years ago on this date, I was attending a conference of liturgical scholars from around the world and from every major Christian tradition. We gathered in the beautiful chapel at Santa Clara University in California on the evening of August 15 in order to celebrate the vespers of the feast. Which feast? The bulletin included the all the titles of the feast according to the different churches: feast of the Assumption for the Roman Catholics - referring to the doctrine that Mary, at her death, was assumed, taken up, body and soul into heaven; the dormition of the Theotokos for the Orthodox - that is, the falling asleep of the God-bearer, 'falling asleep' being that good NT term for the death of those who die in Christ; and Feast of Saint Mary or Saint Mary the Virgin, for the Anglicans and the Protestants. It was a beautiful and moving celebration with psalmody accompanied by jazz piano, a rendition of Rachmaninoff's Ave Maria by a choir, readings in various languages, heartfelt intercessions, and praise from many lips. At the end of the service, a procession formed spontaneously, and people of all manner of Christian backgrounds came forward to venerate the Orthodox icon of the falling asleep of the Blessed Virgin. It was an extraordinary service, not least because Christians who have been so often divided on the place and importance of Mary came together to honour her. For a change, she united us, rather than dividing us. Together we echoed Gabriel the archangel, greeting her: Mary we hail you, full of God's favour, blessed are you and blessed your son.

Our gathering today is rather more ordinary, the faithful Christian people of St. John's, Elgin Street and some visitors and newcomers - like me - who may wonder why the focus on this woman about whom Scripture says very little, while pious imagination has said very much.

As Anglicans we call this the feast of Saint Mary the Virgin. August 15 is, indeed, the traditional date of her falling asleep or death, and so, as with any saint, we keep her principal feast on her dies natalis, not her ordinary birthday, but her heavenly birthday, the occasion when, as the Salvation Army puts it, she was "promoted to glory." And as Anglicans, we are reluctant to be precise about details of that promotion that are not given in Holy Scripture. Rather, we hear today her great song as recorded by Luke - the Magnificat.

This poem is mainly a collection of OT quotations. Time is present in every line of the poem. There is present mirth and present laughter, there is a backward look of gratitude to remotest beginnings in the past, and there is the thought of an endless praise from all human voices to come. This thankfulness and joy derive from seeing past and future in terms of God's continuous purpose to bring satisfaction to all people. The Magnificat is an outburst of joy about the beginning of Jesus' unique life, the life in which we believe that purpose of God was made clear to us.

There are two strands to God's purpose woven into the joy of this poem. In the first place there is the built-in obsolescence, if not self-destructiveness of all power and prestige, the doom in things which brings to an end one "establishment" after another. "....for [God] has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts, [God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones."

It's a subversive message. The singing of the Magnificat was banned at Evensong from time to time during the British Raj in India so as not to give the restive natives any dangerous ideas. For a period during the 1980's the government of Guatemala banned its public recitation. In Poland during the same decade the Black Madonna of Czetochowa became such a potent symbol of resistance to the Communist regime that as many as five million people made an annual pilgrimage to her shrine near Krakow.

No small part of Mary's emotional weight for many women is the wayin which the Church has so often used her as an ideal of passive, submissive femininity. But those repressive governments intuited what others have also found in Mary: a woman of great strength, a biblical interpreter, whose imagination was enlarged - magnified! - who heard and believed what God told her though it would pierce her own soul like a sword. There is an awful lot of art that depicts Mary as a teenaged beauty queen, forever 18 years old and perfectly manicured. "Depictions of Mary as a wealthy Renaissance woman do far outnumber those that make her look like a woman capable of walking the hill country of Judea and giving birth in a barn. I wonder if, as Christians, we who seek to reclaim the Mary of Scripture may well require more depictions of her as a robust, and even muscular, woman, in both youth and old age." *1*

For Christians whose spirituality is outward directed, who are consumed with a passion for peace and justice, who embrace a preferential option for the poor, Mary is the model. It is no small thing to be able to do difficult, demanding, poorly paid work on behalf of the needs of the world. It is no small thing to be able to do it day in and day out, year after year. The burnout rate among such people is high. Mary serves as a model for such vocations. Her poem speaks of God already having cast down the might, already having lifted up the lowly, already having filled the hungry. All this she sings before Jesus Christ has even been born. Hers is the prophetic imagination that is able to see beyond the details of the here and now to the deep reality of what God is doing, has already done when by the passage of Christ through death to resurrection, the principalities and powers of this world are finally defeated though they may retain the appearance of control for a time yet.

All who have known what it is to be on the margins of life, all who have known the quickening call of peace-making, all who seek to overturn the injustices of church and state, all such may join in honouring Mary: Mary, we hail you, full of God's favour, blessed are you, and blessed your son.

But for those of us sitting pretty at the top of the world's economic pyramid, venturing out from the safety of gated communities, growling with basso profundo on our full stomachs to any in need who might get in our way, Mary's song may well stick in our throats. It sure sticks in mine. I am not in a very good position to sing with Mary.

By the world's standards, I am so rich, so comfortable and so healthy, I can even fool myself into thinking I do not need God. But Mary just keeps singing, ranging high on her scales of praise, soaring in her expectant and revolutionary libretto, because God has reached so unexpectedly down to where the least and the lowly still struggle for life.

Were this the last word, we might wonder if there is any good news for us in Mary. But the other dimension of her song. Mary's importance in Luke's gospel begins before her visit to her cousin Elizabeth. It begins with her reception of Gabriel's announcement. It begins with her willing acceptance of God's will for her. In order for God's Word to become flesh, there is needed the consent that allows all. She is gifted by God with the freedom to receive God unconditionally. Her words "let it be to me according to your word" remind us that every experience is a kind of annunciation, an announcement that God wishes us to receive something, to do something, or to endure something, and that, if we are willing to say "yes", our receiving, doing, enduring, will be the occasion of God's self-revelation in history yet again.

But this means that Mary is exemplar not only of the outer journey, into engagement with the world and especially the wounds of the world. She is also the exemplar of the inner journey, the journey into the heart, where, St. Luke tells us "she pondered on these things." If we remain outwardly directed alone, our work for justice and peace, however worthy, will be no different from the work of others of other faiths or no faith at all. Worse, it will not bear the fruit is could since it comes out of our alienation and anger. Mary's song speaks also of the way of humility, from humus earth, that is from being grounded. There are strong towers well-guarded within the heart of each of us, places where we would not allow God to go, would not wish life to touch us very deeply. And it is here precisely where those strong towers, too, must be cast down, where the old Adam must die, the false self, the ego, in order that the new Adam, the true self, can come to birth.

That journey into the heart is a journey of both suffering and joy which is the blessing of God, as the NT understand blessing. Mary is described as "blessed among women", blessed because included in the purpose of God. That purpose, Jesus said, was that we have abundant life. Abundant life is not a painless life, for a painless life, in time, would be a curse, not a blessing. It would be a life outside the movement of all that matters.

The aged Simeon at the presentation of Jesus in the temple tells Mary that a sword will pierce her own heart. The sword is a symbol of dramatic intensity, a symbol of the word of God itself. That word, incarnate in Christ, questions us more deeply than we wish to be questioned, confronts us with truth that will be sharp to the mind that has not cared about the truth, laying bare without indulgence, but always healing and restoring, in the sharp compassion of the healer's art, setting people on the road to health and wholeness.

And so for all who set out on the journey into the heart, Mary is there too as model and companion. Those on this journey will join as well in greeting her: Mary, we hail you, full of God's favour, blessed are you and blessed your son.

So it is that Mary supports the prophet and invites the mystic, is model and companion as we undertake the journey outward and the journey inward. All that the Church says of her in its language of prayer and worship is to express and rejoice in what God has done for us in Christ. She is a sign of the first light of the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps we will finally know that every song of the future apart from Mary's is simply off key. Every future projected apart from Mary's God has no future --it is doomed, and it is damned. But if Mary's song declares that her God has a future, and her God will bring us the future. And this is the point of this feast-- indeed, this is the turning point -- not only for Mary, but for us all.

So sing it again, Mary. Sing to us of your God. Sing on, Mary, sing on, till your song at last becomes ours. Sing, till all the world hears you and makes your lines its own. Now is the feast of your Son laid out before us, so that we like you may learn to pronounce the name of God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, so that in us, as in you, the Word may become flesh. Now is the table laid out for us, sign of your Son's heavenly banquet where you share with all the saints in glory and in which we too shall share.

*1*
Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace. A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 118.