Solemnity of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary: Cycle B 20-21

1 Chronicles 15:3-4, 15-16; 16:1-2 | 1 Corinthians 15:54b-57 | Luke 11:27-28

 Almighty, everliving God who assumed the immaculate Virgin Mary, the mother of God, body and soul into heavenly glory, grant, we pray, that always attentive to the things that are above, we may merit to be sharers of her glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. 

It’s rare that we interrupt a series of ordinary Sundays to bring a feast day, but when a major feast and, in our tradition of Roman Catholicism, one that you should basically gather together and ponder the meaning of it, meaning the times that we ask people to come together as an obligation to worship — so this is one of those days, and it’s a major feast throughout the world in circles that are Catholic.  But the interesting thing about this feast is it focuses on one aspect of Mary, one that is not in scripture, and that is that, when she died, what happened?  And the tradition is, since there’s never been a place where Mary’s tomb is — and you think about that.  We have tombs for almost everyone else that knew Jesus at that time, but there’s not one for Jesus, and there’s not one for Mary.  It makes some sense that there was something extraordinary about what happened to her when she died, and so the Catholic tradition is pondering just the logical things that make sense and the tradition that’s always been part of our faith.  We come up with this matter of faith that Mary did not die a normal death and buried [sic], and then her soul went to heaven.  No, for some strange, mysterious reason, she, like other people in scripture but most especially Jesus, somehow went from an existence here in this life into heaven, body and soul.  Okay?  Now, whether you believe that or not is kind of questioned.  Some people don’t.  Some people do.  There’s no absolute proof for anything, even in scripture, but I don’t want to focus so much on that mystery of what happened to Mary at the time that she died.   All we know is she’s alive, as we all are when we die, and of all the people in salvation history that God has had a relationship with, from all of them, from Adam and Eve to Noah, to Abraham, to Moses, to all the patriarchs and then the prophets, all these — the disciples, there’s not one human being that was ever chosen to take on the role that Mary took on, the role being that she would be impregnated with a seed of some form that created a man whose father was God, in a human being.  So I want to focus just on that mystery and just go a little deeper into it with you, because I think it’s fascinating, because it says so much about who God is. 

So I want you to just imaging God for a moment in your mind, and what is it that he wants in his relationship with humanity?  He created a beautiful world, spectacular universe, and it seems, in the way we understand the stories that unfold, that he was very pleased with all that, but then there was something missing.  And so he wanted to create human beings.  He’d already created angels even before he created the world.  So he had beings that were similar to him, like him, and then he created these incredible plants and animals and insects and birds and all that, and that gave him pleasure.  Their very existence is so beautiful that, if you were the creator of those things, you’d have to sit back and say, “Wow, I did a really good job,” just like he did in the creation story.  Everything he did was so very, very good.  But he wanted something more.  He wanted a relationship with something he created that would have the ability to choose him or not, called free will, and he wanted them not only to be able to make that choice, but to make that choice, he designed the world in such a way that the greatest thing he created, human beings, would be able to be cared for not just by other human beings or not God doing it from on high.  But the thing about God’s plan is that he said, “I would like to partner with human beings, be like them, be with them, and I would like to ask them to let me be in them and let me use them, not in a way of I control them but in a freely, surrendered to partnership.  And we would dwell together for all of our time on earth and then forever in heaven.” 

To me it seems very boring, in a way, to imagine life is just nothing but the work of growing up and then the work of dealing with growing old and then all the tasks in between.  Some of it’s great.  Some of it’s fun.  Some of it’s exciting.  Some of it’s boring.  There’s got to be something more, something that we’re here to accomplish, and that’s God’s plan.  So unless you have a sense that you’re part of something really big and you’re not doing it on your own — you’re doing it in partnership with divinity, and divinity’s living inside of you.  Well, that takes imagination.  That takes a lot of, “Wow, could that really be going on?”  So when you look at the way God reveals himself throughout history, you get a real good sense of how it is that we’re supposed to understand who he is.  And the first thing he does after creating us and trying to nurture us into something more highly evolved than the way we were at the very beginning, he has this plan basically where he reveals slowly what he’s up to.  And one of the first things he does is creates us.  That’s one thing clear, and then he tries to guide us.  And the way he figured he could guide us is create a family, a community called the Israelites, and he said, “Well, let me get you together as a community, and I’ll start guiding you.”  And the whole story of that relationship with human beings, symbolized in his call of Abraham and the Israelite people, is a journey from slavery to freedom, okay?  Slavery to freedom, that’s God’s interest in us.  He wants to come into us and free us from slavery.  Slavery from what?  Well, what is it that God had to use in order to start us on a path of evolution, moving from a lower level of consciousness, where it’s all about us, to a higher level of consciousness, where it’s all about service and love and care for others?  He had to deal with one major problem.  Human beings need to be under some kind of obligation to follow a way of life that is in the right direction.  So we had to be given something to guide us when we were not conscious enough of what our choices really would affect in other people.  So what we have is the law. 

So the first thing he gives us is the law.  Before there was a law, there was no sin.  So God gives the law, Ten Commandments, and that’s his food.  That’s his gift to us, and we look at the Ten Commandments.  They’re a description of who God is and what our relationship with God should be, first three commandments, and the other seven are all about how we should treat each other.  It’s like a manual for living on this planet.  And yet there’s an obligation to follow those things, and if we don’t follow them, since this comes from the authority of God, there’s punishment.  And that’s the way it started.  The law was holding you to a way of life.  If you didn’t do it, you were punished, lost God’s favor, condemned, and so you were a slave of having to do something you didn’t choose to do out of fear that you’d be punished.  That’s the slavery that the relationship with God, starting with the Israelite people, has been about from the very beginning.  “I don’t want you to do what you should do, what you really want to do if you are in touch with who you really are — I don’t want you to do that because you have to or because you’re going to be punished.  I want you to do it because you believe it is the best thing to do, that you’re enlightened, that you have a sense that, ‘This is my destiny, and it gives me joy and pleasure.’”  So you have to get free of the slavery.

Now, I want to use an image that is major in the Old Testament, and Mary took over that image in the New Testament.  It’s the ark of the covenant.  Mary is the new ark of a new covenant.  What’s the old covenant?  The old covenant is based on the law — that was the nurturing thing about God — and the authority of God over the person who would break the law.  Now, what was in the first ark of the covenant that the Israelites carried for 40 years in the desert?  A jar of manna, an image of food from heaven.  Jesus is the new food from heaven.  The second was a rod, and the rod was Aaron’s rod, but the rod is a symbol of authority.  A bishop carries a rod in our tradition.  The Episcopal Church is the same and many churches.  It’s a sign of authority, and the other thing in the arc was the law.  Okay?  So the nurturing law was there under the authority of God, all right?  Now, Mary is the new ark, and imagine her as a symbol of what that ark was.  It was made of wood, covered in gold, carried, placed in the center of the temple.  Only certain people could go and be around it.  It was considered resonating, radiating some kind of amazing spiritual power that human beings were not ever really able to go to other than the few Levites who were privileged to go in very seldom.  So this divinity, the presence of divinity in the world was something that was basically kept from human beings because of their humanity and their brokenness and their sinfulness.  So something had to change.  We had to have a new ark, and the new ark of the covenant, the new presence of God is he’s inside of you, inside of me.  And I think of Mary as a human being.  She was like you and me.  The thing we believe is, when she came into the world, she was uniquely kept from sin.  So she had no original sin in her.  Well, the only thing we know about the sinlessness of Mary, if you read her story in scripture, is she never doubted, never doubted God.  She was confused by what he asked, and she was afraid of the ramifications of it.  But even Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane had this problem with God the Father and said, “I don’t want to do this.  I don’t want to do this.  I don’t want to do this,” which I think is a great image of his humanity.  And don’t take this too literally.  What I’m saying is there is something in all of us human beings that resists whatever it is that God is asking.  Mary never resisted.  “Let it be done to me as you say.”  Jesus eventually is saying, “Let it be done as it is written.”  So Mary has this unique role of no resistance to the indwelling presence of God.

Here’s another thing to think about, which I think is fascinating.  What would it be like to be her?  What’s it like to think that God has placed, out of pure love, into your body something that makes a child?  That makes sense to us in the way human beings procreate.  The love that implies about God having for human beings is extraordinary.  He didn’t enter into anything else like that.  He is — his presence is everywhere, but in a certain way, when you think about it, God entering into Mary is something we should all think about, because as extraordinary as it is with that person, he’s doing the same thing for us, not as dramatically, but the image and the symbol is the same.  He comes into you, and there’s new birth.  And what is the new birth about?  Well, take the image in the Old Testament of the manna and the commandments and the rod.  The first covenant, we’re under the obligation of a law that we have to do, and the fear of failing is a great shadow of that whole system.  It means that we live in a certain anxiety, and you’re never quite sure you follow the law well enough.  And when you don’t, if you lose God’s favor, it’s pretty depressing.  What if he comes into you with no, ever, desire to leave you, no matter how bad you are?  That’s not in the old covenant at all, and that’s what he does.  When he enters into Mary and does the thing he does, taking on all of our sins, he changes the human race into who Mary was when she entered the world, sinless, freed of all original sin, freed of everything.  The relationship that God has with you and me in the new covenant that we tend not to move into as quickly as we should or as thoroughly as we should is so beautiful, because it said, “There’s nothing about you that will keep me from entering into you and being there and being willing to work with you and ask you to work with me.  The only thing you have to do is have this quality of Mary.”  “Okay, it doesn’t make any sense.  Okay, I don’t understand.  I don't know.  If I start acting like this, everybody’s going to think I’m kind of nuts,” but she said, “Okay.”  Simple, simple faith, that’s her gift, and if we just have that simple gift of faith the way she had it and can believe that God is living inside of us, like he was living inside of her, and the fruitfulness is not — we’re not going to have a baby, but we have a new person inside of us that’s born.  What a gift, and what a shame to miss that in this great mystery and argue maybe about, “Well, did she really assume to heaven or not?  Was she a virgin all the time or not?”  Those are issues, okay, fine.  I’m not saying they’re not issues to maybe think about, but that’s not the heart of the mystery.  And the mystery is what transforms us, but not because it exists.  We have this absolute childlike trust and faith that that thing that happened to Mary can happen to me, and I believe it with all my heart, and I want it to happen.  And all I need is the gift of faith and a great imagination. 

Father, your love for us is so beyond our imagining that it’s really hard for us to believe that you overlook the stupid and selfish things we do, but you say you do. And why can’t we just believe it? That’s the gift that we pray for at this prayer. Just please give us the kind of faith that oversees all kinds of normal, human feelings and trust in something that’s beyond anything we could have hoped for. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.