Mary, Mother of Our Lord and the Twelfth Sunday
after Pentecost
August 15th, A+D 2021
Our Savior’s and Our Redeemer Lutheran Churches
Hill City and Custer, South Dakota
Listening to Mary, Listening to Jesus
August 15th is a special day, the
day we remember and celebrate Mary, the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ. August 15th also stands out for
me, as it was the first Sunday that I preached as a called and ordained servant
of the Word. I started with Mary. Then, after 10 years I went to Spain, the
Land of Mary, to serve the tiny Spanish Evangelical Lutheran Church. So rightly understanding Mary, her role, her
example, and the way she points us to her Son have been, since the beginning of
my ministry, especially important topics for me.
Important, but not always easy. Sadly, we Christians have been arguing about
how we should understand and celebrate St. Mary since the earliest centuries of
our history. Is Mary rightly called the
“Mother of God”? Are we to pray to
her? Is she sinless? Should we even pay her any extra attention at
all? Since the schism in the Western
Church that resulted from Luther’s rediscovery of the truth of the Gospel in
the 16th Century, the debate over Mary has largely fallen into two camps.
On the one side, the Church of Rome,
especially in the centuries following the Reformation, doubled down on their
focus on Mary, formally declaring her to have been conceived and to have lived
without sin. After she died and was
buried, it was also said that she had been bodily resurrected and ascended
above, to be crowned Queen of Heaven by God the Father and Jesus. Rome holds Mary forth as a necessary mediator
for Christians, someone who must be prayed to, so that her influence might lead
God to hear our prayers. And of course,
it is said she has appeared on earth to people numerous times through the
centuries, seemingly always giving special new rules to live by, to really make
God happy. Coincidentally, this has led
to a boatload of Mary Shrines, and a worldwide religious tourism industry. A
few Roman Catholics even want to designate Mary as Co-Redemptrix, a second
Savior figure alongside her Son. Lord
have mercy.
On the other side, many Protestant
Churches, reacting to the errors just listed, have swerved off the road in the
opposite direction. Many downplay Mary’s
importance, and accuse anyone who praises her of idolatry. Mary, for some Protestants, is nothing more
than a Jewish peasant girl chosen by God for a particular task, but really no
big deal. Which is weird. I mean, Mary, after a miraculous, unique-in-all-human-history
virgin conception, gave birth to God’s Son, the Savior of the world. Kinda seems like a big deal. If we are going to look up to Moses, or John
the Baptist, or the Apostle Paul, it seems like Mary would also be worthy of our
attention and praise.
I would suggest that the right perspective
on Mary lies between the two mistaken camps of Rome and the Protestants. And the way to find this correct middle way
is, no big surprise here, to carefully look to Scripture.
From Scripture we come to realize that
humble Mary is chosen by God to fulfill an indispensable role in the Promise
spoken first to the serpent in the Garden, that the Seed of the woman would
crush Satan’s head. Mary is the
culmination of the primary task of the nation of Israel, which was to provide
the human lineage of the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed Savior, of Israel,
and of the whole world. Our God and
Savior took up nine months’ residence in Mary’s womb. She is indeed most highly favored among all
women, faithful and self-sacrificing; we should look to Mary as the highest
example of both faith and works. We already
see her faith, and the good works she would do, foreshadowed in her words to
the angel Gabriel, when she first learned of her calling to be the mother of
God’s Son: “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word.” God has honored and worked through Mary in a
unique, mysterious and tremendous way, and so we rightly honor her, and seek to
imitate her faith and her faithfulness.
Most helpful in understanding how we are to
relate to Mary is simply to listen to her, as she speaks in the Bible. Mary doesn’t say a lot that the Holy Spirit
caused to be recorded as Scripture. For
our Introit today we used the Magnificat, Mary’s Song, the song of the faithful
sinner who looks with confidence to the promised salvation of the Lord, which
would come through the baby boy she would bear, in the fullness of time. Mary’s soul, and ours, magnify the Lord,
because Christ the Savior is born, for us.
Mary only speaks a couple of other times in
Scripture. And what might be Mary’s last
word to us? The final Scriptural words
of Jesus’ mother came at the wedding at Cana, when the wine ran out, and the
joy of the newlyweds was going to be spoiled.
Mary asks Jesus to help, “They have no wine.” Jesus’ reply to her is mysterious, and hard
to understand: “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” But in faith and confidence that Jesus would
do just the right thing, Mary turned to the servants at the wedding and said: “Do
whatever He tells you.”
Do whatever Jesus tells you. Listen to Jesus, and follow Him. Learn from Him and seek to obey His
word. This is Mary’s final word to us,
and it is good advice indeed. The very
best. Thank you, Mary.
Not that doing what Jesus tells you to do is
easy. Sometimes, sure. The servants at the wedding in Cana received
a simple task: fill up these six water
jars to the top, and then take some of the water turned into the very best wine
to the master of the feast. Simple
enough, and pretty cool. Mary’s tasks
were harder. Be my mother, Jesus told
her, through the angel Gabriel. And then
have a sword pass through your own soul, as Mary heard through the prophet
Simeon. Being the mother of the baby
serenaded by angels and worshiped by shepherds would be terribly painful for
Mary. Bad enough must have been
suffering the gossip of her neighbors, who assumed Joseph had fathered her
child, before they were wed. Or the
flight to Egypt, protecting the Child from hateful King Herod. Far worse, Mary would one day watch
helplessly as Jesus suffered shame and scorn and was tortured, and then died on
a Roman cross.
What about you? Do you like listening to Jesus and doing what
He tells you? Love your neighbor, even
when it costs you time and effort and money.
Love your enemies, pray for them and do good to them. Give to Caesar, that is, the government, what
belongs to the Caesar. Which means pay
your taxes and obey the law. Stick with
the wife or husband God gave you. Flee
from sin. Indeed, if your eye causes you
to sin, pluck it out! Better to go into
the Kingdom of God with one eye, than with two eyes to enter forever the
Kingdom of Satan. We struggle to do the
things we know the Lord has told us to do.
But our struggle doesn’t change the fact that we should listen and do
what Jesus tells us.
But that’s not the hardest part. Today in John 6 we hear what for many is the
most difficult thing that Jesus tells us to do.
Jesus said to them, "I am
the living bread that came down from heaven.... Truly, truly, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no
life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh
and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
We struggle and fail to avoid sin and keep God’s commandments about how we are
to live. But these words at least make
sense to us. Honor your father and your
mother. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal.
Do not lie to hurt your neighbor.
Reasonable enough. But feed on
Jesus’ flesh? Drink His blood? This is immoral, forbidden. Truly, this is a hard
teaching. How can a reasonable, intelligent
person accept this?
Well, Jesus’ words aren’t really meant for
reasonable, intelligent people. Jesus’
words are for dying sinners. Which is
why many of Jesus’ followers very reasonably grumbled and turned away from the
path, when Jesus insisted that His flesh is real food and His blood real
drink. How could a self-respecting,
moral and intelligent person accept such a thing? What kind of people does He think we
are? Jesus knows how hard His words are,
and yet vital for salvation. So He turns
to the Twelve and asks, “What about you?
Are you going to leave me, too?”
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom, and Peter begins to show such wise, soul-saving fear when he cries out
to Jesus: Lord, to whom shall we
go? You (and only you) have the
words of eternal life! It doesn’t
completely make sense to us, but we have believed and have come to know that
you are the Holy One of God. Peter
and the 12 have no where else to turn.
Notice Peter doesn’t claim to understand, or
be entirely comfortable with what Jesus has told them to believe and do. He
cannot, by his own reason or strength, believe in or stay with Jesus. But the Holy Spirit has called Peter by the
power of the Gospel. Which isn’t a happy
story about how God is going to help you be all you can be, keep His rules and
so make your way into His favor. No, the
Gospel is the sword that pierces Mary’s soul, the frightening plan of God to save
us from death, not just physical death, but rather eternal death, forever and
ever separation from God and every good thing.
Life comes from the Lord, and is intended to
be lived as God commands. But we are
dying sinners, flesh, blood and spirit sinners, who cannot keep God’s commandments. So the Lord became flesh and blood, our
Brother, in order to defeat and reverse our sin and our death with His own
sinless life, death and resurrection. Jesus
gave His flesh on the Cross for the life of the world, so that now we can eat
and drink this same Body and Blood, given and shed for the forgiveness of all
our sins. This is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last
of Jesus’ words to us, the beginning and the end of the Gospel.
Is there anything to which we can compare
this hard teaching? Not perfectly, but
one thing does come to mind:
Chemotherapy. Due to the
blessings of modern medicine, we have come to believe and trust that by taking
in chemicals, poisonous chemicals, a person dying from cancer can be
cured. Doctors are getting better and
better at it, but in the end, chemotherapy is still taking poison in hopes that
the cancer will be killed before the patient.
It is a hard teaching. Similarly,
the ancient church called the Lord’s Supper the Medicine of Immortality. In every other case, eating the flesh and
blood of a man is prohibited by God and threatened with destruction. But in this one unique, mysterious and
tremendous case, God Himself gives us His Body and Blood, once given into the
Cross, in order to rescue us sinners from eternal death. The Medicine of Immortality. Eat this flesh in faith, and you will live
forever, with God, in paradise.
All the rules for living that our Lord has
given us, as good and true and right as they are, must follow and be empowered
by the Bread of Life, come down from heaven.
There is no other way, no other path to life that we can walk. If we consider our works as qualification for
God’s favor, then our works are pitiful and useless. But by God’s grace we begin to obey the Law
and serve our neighbors as the overflow of a faithful, thankful heart, which
knows God has fed us with forgiveness and eternal life. Inspired by Jesus, truly present in, with
and under the Bread and the Wine, our works then ring forth like Mary’s song:
joyful, and pleasing to God, who has accomplished His salvation for us.
In the Name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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