Sermon for the Feast of the Annunciation
“Be it unto me according to thy word.”
If there is a test for catholic orthodoxy, it invariably centers on Mary. Only through her do we understand the mystery of our redemption in Christ. She is the theotokos, the God-bearer, the mother of God. To begin to understand that is to begin to understand the wonder and the joy of our redemption.
Anglican divinity is not without its cloud of witnesses to the role and place of the Virgin Mary in our salvation and nowhere does that become more abundantly clear than in the Feast of the Annunciation.
We forget that this was the actual beginning of the year for over a thousand years. March 25th points us to December 25th. The ancients and the medievals were not so uninformed about the mundane and yet miraculous prosody of human reproduction as we might suspect. England, as reluctant as ever to be drawn into anything that smacks of continental superiority, held out until 1752 with respect to the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar, adopted for the most part in most of Europe in 1582, which designated January 1st as the beginning of the civil calendar year.
The older sensibility reflects the idea of our lives as marked spiritually by the doctrinal moments in the life of Christ. That sensibility still underlies the ecclesiastical calendar. In this case, the Annunciation marks the beginning of the year by way of the commemoration of the entrance into creation and humanity of God himself. In short, Mary’s Annunciation is Christ’s conception, humanly speaking, in the womb of Mary. He who is “God of God” and “Light of Light” becomes incarnate in the womb of Mary. The event is the Annunciation.
