Sermon for the Annunciation

admin | 25 March 2009

The Rev’d David Curry, Rector of Christ Church, preached this sermon for the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“Be it unto me according to thy word”

The Annunciation is a feast of great joy that falls this year in the mid-point of our Lenten journey of penitence and sorrow. It complements Sunday’s theme of rejoicing and refreshment, the theme of Mothering Sunday or Laetare Sunday as it is sometimes called. Laetare means to rejoice. In a way, here is all our joy, all our sorrows notwithstanding. As Mark Frank puts it:

A feast it is to-day, – a great one, Christ’s Incarnation, – a day of joy, if ever any; and Lent a time of sorrow and repentance, – a great one, the greatest fast of any. How shall we reconcile them? Why thus: The news of joy never comes so seasonable as in the midst of sorrow; news of one coming to save us from our sins, can never come more welcome to us, than even when we are sighing and groaning under them”.

“Until they are good Marians, they shall never be good Christians” avowed Anthony Stafford in 1637, words which apply to every age of Christianity. We meet to honour the female glory of Mary, Virgin and Mother, through whom “salvation to all that will is nigh,” as the poet John Donne puts it, Christ being that “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,” his conception the immediate consequence of her Annunciation.

“The Femall Glory.” It is, I think, a wonderful phrase and yet, it is, actually, the title of a book by a pious, devout and theologically astute 17th century English layman, Anthony Stafford, who was the first, he thinks, to have “written in our vulgar tongue on this our Blessed Virgin.” Unique perhaps in its style, it was not unique in its ideas and thinking but belongs to the rich and lively tradition of Marian devotion in 17th century Anglican divinity. It embodies the distinctive qualities of classical Anglican divinity with its strong orthodox and doctrinal sensibility and its devotional focus and emphasis on the purity of Mary. The Femall Glory is an outstanding work of holy imagination but one which understands the subordination of the affective language of devotion and prayer to the language of essential doctrine and creedal affirmation.

Our salvation is Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Mary is the pure source of Christ’s true humanity and as such is the bearer of his divinity into the world. At the heart of Anglican Marian devotion is the strong orthodoxy of the Council of Chalcedon in 451AD which gave theological coherence to the scriptural images of Mary in the economy of salvation by calling her Theotokos, the Mother of God. She is the Mother of God not because she is the source of Christ’s divinity, which as creature she cannot be, but because she is the chosen vessel, pure and prepared by the grace of God, by which Christ becomes man without ceasing to be God, distinguishing, as Stafford puts it, “betweene the Mother of God and the Mother of the Godhead; the first of which she truly is, the latt’r she is not.”

The wonder and joy of the Annunciation is the mystery of the Incarnation, “that the Union of both natures, God and Man, being in Christ, she must, by strong consequence, bring forth both God and Man.” The measure of Chalcedon governs his devotional discourse.

The Anglican Divines of the 17th century celebrate the purity of Mary because of the purity of Christ. Only as pure can he freely bear the impurities of our sins which make us less than ourselves, less than fully human. Only as pure can he restore us to the truth of ourselves in God. Only as pure can he show us the Father and show us to the Father. It is the point that is made in the proper preface for Christmas and for the Annunciation in The Book of Common Prayer in which Christ, it is prayed, “was made very man of the substance of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that without spot of sin, to make us clean from all sin.” Any compromising of the terms of this discourse of doctrinal prayer would be a loss of orthodoxy.

Christ is the eternal son of God, “that pure one,” as Irenaeus puts it, “opening purely that pure womb which regenerates men unto God and which he himself made pure.” “Behold,” says Mary, “the handmaid of the Lord”. What do we behold in her? We behold the female glory.

But what is that female glory? The female glory, as Stafford makes clear, is the glory of our humanity. We behold the truth of our humanity in her who is the source of Christ’s true humanity. Stafford’s treatise contains An Epistle to the Feminine Reader that “here you may learn to transforme your ugly vices, into as amiable Vertues”; and An Epistle to the Masculine Reader, “requiring your Imitation, whose meanest Perfection farre excels all your so long vanted masculine merits”. Such is the universality of its orthodoxy.

Her pure openness to the will of God is not a matter of passivity but signals true humanity’s active engagement with God. Mary, after all, asks the question, “how shall this be seeing as I know not a man?”, lest there be any ambiguity about the uniqueness and the mystery of the Incarnation. Lancelot Andrewes is especially clear, too, that for Mary “to conceive is more than to receive. It is so to receive as we yield somewhat of our own also. A vessel is not said to conceive the liquor that is put into it. Why? Because it yieldeth nothing from itself. The Blessed Virgin … [gave] of her own substance.”

It means being defined by the Word of God and not simply by the discourse of our world and day. It means being defined by the grace of God and not simply by the circumstances and experiences of our lives. It means being defined by the theological Word which must engage the discourse of our own world and day without simply being collapsed into it. Otherwise it is not the Word. Such are the challenges for contemporary Christianity. Corporately and individually, through her “whom no man can honour too much that makes her not God,” as John Donne puts it, we may discover again the essential Marian qualities of the Church, namely, our being with Christ through our active attentiveness to his Word proclaimed and his Sacraments celebrated.

For then, we, too, shall be highly favoured, and never “at any time more fully than in the blessed Sacrament to which we are now a-going”, as Mark Frank so eloquently puts it.

There he is strangely with us, highly favours us, exceedingly blesses us; there we are all made blessed Marys, and become mothers, sisters, and brothers of our Lord, whilst we hear his word, and conceive it in us; whilst we believe him who is the Word, and receive him too into us.

But only if we will be good Marians, that it may be said by us, what Mary says on this day,