Ms. Yanick Savain
When I was a little girl growing up in an immigrant Catholic church, this day was observed as part of a cycle that ended with the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen of heaven, and we celebrated by processing through the streets with a garlanded statue of Our Lady which was crowned with roses by a little girl from the church. I never got the chance to be that little girl, shy as I was, and I feel grateful now, however shy I am, to do the honors by preaching today.
Yet, I am acutely aware that here, today, in this Church, it is not the Feast of the Coronation, or the Assumption, or the Dormition as it is observed in other churches, but simply of Saint Mary the Virgin. And while our collect for the day offered a nod to today as her death day, and whatever else may have accompanied it, it is still simply the Feast of Saint Mary. And what strikes me as so significant about this is that while most saints’ whole lives are celebrated only on their death day, we are blessed throughout the year with a multitude of Marian feasts, from her conception and nativity to her annunciation and visitation, birthing and purification. We get to celebrate the saintliness of her life not all in one day, but drawn out over the course of our own lives. So, what then do we celebrate about her on this day in our lives?
Well I would say her death, primarily. It is traditionally her death day after all. But our readings this morning offer nothing about her death which is not scripturally recorded. Instead we are given striking parallels between Mary’s Magnificat – her song to God, to us about God – and the prophets who came before her, in Isaiah and in the Psalmist. And what this suggests is that importance of a saint’s death – the close of her earthly life – is in what defined her life. And what little we have of Mary in Scripture, so often a silent character in the background of Jesus’ story, is defined by this most powerful song. And what is so powerful about it is how subversive it is, even among the other prophets.
I was mildly surprised by the lectionary decision to parallel Mary’s Magnificat with Isaiah’s song rather than Hannah’s, or even Miriam’s, which it so closely resembles in form. “My heart rejoices in the Lord; my strength is exalted in the Lord,” begins Hannah’s song. “I will sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted” begins Miriam’s. And then Isaiah’s, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God.” And finally, Mary, “My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” Taken together, these texts place Mary squarely in a long lineage of prophets. And as they each go on to list the greatness of God’s hand in their lives and in the world around them, we can see how clearly Jesus himself participates in this tradition with his later delivery of the Beatitudes.
But here is where Mary, and Jesus like her, differ from the prophets before them, or rather offer us an evolution of the tradition in which they participate. While they all start off more or less the same – “My spirit rejoices in God!” – they end up taking a slightly different but very important tack from there. “I rejoice in God,” they proclaim, “because God has done great things for me.” And what do these great things look like? For the prophet singing in Isaiah, it is the declaration of a Jubilee year during which the poor will have their debts forgiven. Thank God. For Miriam it is the safe passage through the Red Sea in which her enemies have just been drowned. And for Hannah, like so many others, it is the announcement of a successful pregnancy. Thank God who has done great things for me, and others like me. And while Mary sings to Elizabeth with joy over their pregnancies, and like those before them, thanks God for their good fortunes by extolling the virtues of a God with a preferential option for the poor and suffering, she ever so slightly shifts the dichotomy toward what I believe is a more truly divine vision for the world.
The psalms and the prophets often tend toward a far-off judgment day when God will reverse the fortunes of all and the poor and hungry will be sated while the comfortable will become the new poor and hungry. Status quo maintained. But Mary, and Jesus later in his Beatitudes, deliver this by now familiar prophecy with the subtle lack of stark oppositional statements. And it’s so subtle it’s easy to miss. Yes, God has lifted up the lowly, but not to the thrones from which the mighty were cast down. Yes, God has scattered the proud in their conceit. And yes, God has filled the hungry with good things, but the rich have been sent away empty. Empty of what? If we read Mary as a prophet of the Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Jesus, then we must read these words in a very particular way. And this gives us a clue to the deeper meaning of Mary’s vision for the Kingdom of God. The Greek word for “empty” as in devoid of content, having nothing, my pockets are empty, is kenoó. But the word Mary uses is kenos, “empty of moral content, vain”.
And what this tells us, as she sings of the Kingdom of God in the present tense, as a present reality, is about nothing less than the Christian goal of life itself. That same word is the one from which we get Kenosis, the Christian contemplative practice of intentional self-emptying of ego to make oneself more receptive to God, to make more room for God’s indwelling Spirit. Reading that word with that possibility in mind – that God might empty the morally bankrupt of their oversize egos – gives us a picture of a kingdom in which all are saved by God’s grace, from each other and from ourselves. In kenosis we’re given an image of heaven that looks less like a mere reversal of fortune than it does the satiation of all, spiritual and physical. The earthly rich, the too-powerful are scattered in their conceit, the thoughts of their hearts. And they are prevented from coming to God – sent away – by their own moral emptiness. The poor and hungry are meanwhile waiting for salvation from those whose power leaves them lacking. And God instead of simply reversing their roles with some sort of easy revenge fills their respective emptiness-es until both are made complete.
With these words Mary sings of a God who in the fullness of time makes us all whole. What would our earthly kingdoms look like if we all lived out these ideals of Mary’s heavenly kingdom? To lift up the lowly, yes, but also help fill the starved souls of the morally bankrupt rich and powerful who perpetuate such poverty could indeed manifest God’s kingdom here on Earth, the hungry filled and the arrogant emptied of their egos. It is a radical vision with the very simple requirement of emptying yourself of yourself enough that your very soul magnifies that presence of God waiting to grow within each of us. Put simply, we just have to get out of our own way. And it is this simplicity, this radical living in the presence of God, that defines Mary’s life. So honestly, it should be no surprise then that such an extraordinarily simple spiritual life comes to a close during the Season of Ordinary Time.
Mary’s death is a very ordinary one at the end of an extraordinary spiritual life. No gruesome martyrdom, no flashy exit. No, she falls asleep in her old age, as quiet and unassuming as her earthly life. And yet the legends about what happened next – the Assumption, the Coronation – reveal for all of us the possibility of an extraordinary union following the probability of an ordinary death. We will all die, and it is likely it will be no flashy show. But the possibility of what happens next is what Mary has to show us today. It’s the possibility of our soul’s return to God in glory after a lifetime of hopefully growing closer and closer to that divine reality. It’s the possibility of finishing that growth, fulfilling our soul’s desire and purpose.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote of Mary’s Assumption that when she ascended an empty seat was waiting for her, and she saw “the empty place, brushed/ by fading twilight, [and it] seemed a small sorrow,/ a trace of loneliness,/ like something that [God] still endured, a remnant/ of earthly time, a dried affliction.”
That loneliness and sorrow paints so poignant a picture of God’s desire for us, earthly remnants each of us, preparing to return to God. Like Mary, there is an empty seat awaiting each of us in the Heart of God, and like Mary we can each be crowned with roses on the day of our return. She models for all of us how to live ever more deeply in Christ, how to pray in a way that makes the line between self and Godself finer and finer still, and how to die fully into the life of God until all we are is One with God. So, my prayer today is that Saint Mary the Virgin, whose ordinary death highlights the extraordinariness of the soul’s journey to God, be an Icon for us on how to live a holy life and die a holy death, ever working toward our own Assumption into Christ’s heavenly kingdom. May it be so.
Amen.
