Sermon for the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, transferred
Luke 1:46-55
Aug. 11, 2025
This morning, we’re celebrating the feast
of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is this Thursday. Now, when I mention Jesus’ mother, Mary, what
comes to mind for you?
In popular culture, Mary is the star of
the Beatles’ classic “Let It Be,” coming to us in times of trouble and speaking
words of wisdom. In Christmas art, she’s
a supporting character, meek and mild, having just given birth with not a hair
out of place. In our personal piety, at
least for many Episcopalians, Mary is our intercessor, the chief saint among
saints, the one who understands our suffering and who brings our needs to the
throne of grace.
For the past 2,000 years, the Church has
been trying to figure out what to do with Mary – who she was, what happened to
her when she died, and how to understand her now. In
the 400s, early Christian theologians finally settled on calling her the theotokos,
“the one who gave birth to God.”1
Given that status, the theologizing goes, Mary can’t simply have died like a normal person but somehow
must have found her way to heaven directly.
In the Roman Catholic tradition, it’s the doctrine of the Assumption of
Mary, the belief that she didn’t die but was taken physically into heavenly
glory, like Elijah in the Old Testament.2 In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, it’s the doctrine
of the Dormition of Mary, the belief that she did die but without human
suffering, like falling asleep, and that she rose physically into heavenly
glory after three days, like Jesus.3
And in heaven, however she got there, tradition would say Mary is now ruling
with her Son, the queen mother of the sovereign Lord Christ. For us Episcopalians, the holy day we’ll mark
this week isn’t named for the Assumption, or the Dormition, or the heavenly
reign of Mary. It’s just Mary’s feast
day. We don’t worry so much about the
details of how she got to heaven, focusing more on her earthly story.4
So, what do we know of that story? Well, in Luke’s Gospel, Mary steps onto the
stage as a teenaged peasant whose life is about to hit the wall. She’s minding her own business in Nazareth
one day when the angel Gabriel comes to her and says she’s been chosen to bear
God’s Son, the one who will “be great” and rule over Israel, and “of his
kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:32-33). Mary, engaged to a nice older carpenter, has
just lost out on that engagement for having become pregnant – and with it, she’s
lost any hope for her future, since she’ll be an outcast in a society with no place
for single mothers. Yet, from the start,
Mary shows herself to be anything but the meek and mild young woman in the
paintings, instead asking Gabriel some pointed questions and eventually accepting
God’s assignment: “Here I am,” she says,
“the servant of the Lord. Let it be with
me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38)
From there, Mary keeps appearing in the
Gospels as this faithful supporting character in her Son’s story, happy to let
the spotlight shine on him. She brings the
baby Jesus to the Temple to receive his name, and she returns for her own rite
of purification. Twelve years later, she
loses her Son in Jerusalem at the Passover festival and finds him in the
Temple, arguing with the old guys. A
couple of decades later, she’s with Jesus at a wedding in Cana, pushing him to
work his first miracle. Then she finds
her own place among the disciple community and hangs in there through thick and
thin, even at the foot of the cross when everyone else has run away. After the resurrection, she’s with the other disciples
in the upper room, witnessing the coming of the Holy Spirit to turn a miracle
into a movement. In all this, unlike some
of the other disciples, Mary isn’t polishing her image or angling for
leadership; she’s serving God’s purposes by serving Jesus.
But it’s more than that, too. Mary is a magnifying glass. She captures divine light; and as it passes
through her, she reveals God among us in extraordinary ways. Her faithfulness to God’s call; her tending
Jesus as he grows up; her abiding with him a disciple, even caring for his body
taken down from the cross; her going out as an apostle to share the Good News –
in all these facets of faithfulness, Mary is a magnifying glass, showing the
astonishing presence of God with us. As
she sings in her famous song, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit
rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:47) – not because she’ll be promoted to
Queen of Heaven one day but just the opposite: because this lowliest of all
God’s servants has been chosen to bring divinity into human life and upend the
forces that keep God’s children down.
God has “scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts,” Mary says
(Luke 1:51). God has “brought down the
powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly,” Mary says (Luke 1:52). God has “filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty,” Mary says (Luke 1:53). God has remembered the age-old promise to
invert the world’s ordering of things and exalt the bit players and the nobodies. We know all this because Mary tells us. It turns out, this pregnant teenager isn’t
cast aside. Instead, she becomes the one
who sings the Lord’s song. The Sovereign
of the Universe chooses her to show how God loves us, and cares for
those at the bottom of the heap, and lifts them up to glory. Mary is the magnifying glass, revealing God’s
hand at work in the world about us.
The stunning thing about Incarnation is
that God is still at it. Of course,
Jesus was the ultimate expression of divinity among us, the Word made flesh
that we might see God face to face. Mary
literally brought that truth to life.
But the Incarnation wasn’t a one-and-done event. If we have the eyes to see, we can still spot
God among us in countless unlikely people living into the divinity they bear,
following Jesus faithfully and upending the world’s ways through one act of love
after another. A million Marys are still
magnifying the Lord – and you’ll know them when they angle the light away from
themselves.
Where have I seen it? I’ve seen the Blessed Virgin Mary most
vividly in a woman named Virginia, appropriately enough. Virginia Dabney Brown5 was a
seemingly frail little woman but one of the toughest people I’ve ever known. She was a groundbreaking wallflower, someone
who cast vision and opened doors and changed lives, all the while doing
everything she could to keep people from noticing she was the one doing
it.
Virginia was born in Georgia in 1948 but
grew up in New Mexico. After graduating
with a degree in psychology, she joined the Peace Corps in 1969 and was sent to
Uganda, where she taught math and science at a girls’ school, praying with her
students and protecting them from poisonous green mambas. The evil she faced didn’t just slither on the
ground but through the halls of government, too: She was in Uganda when dictator Idi Amin came
to power.
After her stint in the Peace Corps,
Virginia felt God’s call to ordained ministry in The Episcopal Church – despite
the inconvenient fact that the Church didn’t accept women as priests. She started seminary in 1971 anyway and
graduated three years later, just a couple of months before the ordination of
the Philadelphia Eleven. She was
ordained a deacon, which was allowed, and she got to work quietly
planting a new church in Albuquerque.
The Episcopal Church officially authorized
women’s ordination to the priesthood in the summer of 1976;6 and the
first month it was legal, Virginia was the first woman ordained a priest in her
diocese – and, the story is told, the first woman in The Episcopal Church
ordained with no objections voiced during the liturgy. In New Mexico, in addition to serving
parishes, she helped create a school for ministry to train lay and ordained leaders
in the Church.
After serving there for 18 years, she was
called to a large parish in Memphis, where she founded a religious community she
called Rivendell. In 2000, she left Memphis,
and on her last Sunday, parishioners wore bracelets reading “WWVD?” – “what
would Virginia do?”
From there, she and other members of the
Rivendell Community came to Springfield, Missouri, where she served at Christ
Church and where I got to know her as my spiritual director. While she was there, Virginia founded a motherhouse
for the Rivendell Community, as well as reinventing our diocesan training
program for deacons and priests, an effort that would later grow into the
Bishop Kemper School for Ministry.
Mtr. Virginia died four years ago tomorrow,
leaving behind an astonishing legacy, as well as scores of us whose lives she’d
changed. But here’s the truly remarkable
thing about Virginia: I never heard her
speak about the things I’ve just told you.
I learned nothing of Virginia’s remarkable servant leadership from
Virginia. She simply served, always
pointing to Jesus Christ and refusing to let the powers and principalities
stand in her way. I’ve never known
anyone, before or since, who magnified the Lord quite like she did. If I were creating an icon of the Blessed
Virgin Mary, it would have the face of Virginia Dabney Brown.
Why am I telling you this? Because God needs more magnifying
glasses. Now, Mtr. Virginia was
exceptional, I grant you, but she was not unique. I could easily start rattling off the names
of people, here in our own spiritual community, who follow the model of the
Blessed Virgin Mary. I won’t name any of
them for two reasons: First, they’d be
angry that I’d called them out. And
second, I’d never be able to name them all.
But here is the promise and the call we can take away from Mary’s example: We can each be God’s magnifying glass. You don’t have to serve in the Peace Corps, or help break stained-glass ceilings, or create religious orders, or develop ministry training programs. In your own world, in your own work, in your own relationships, choose to focus the light of Jesus Christ. And in the every-day-ness of your life, you will magnify the Lord.
1.
“Theotokos.”
Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edition. London:
Oxford University Press, 1997. 1607.
2.
Armentrout,
Don S., and Robert Boak Slocum, eds. “Assumption of Mary.” An Episcopal
Dictionary of the Church. Available at: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/assumption-of-mary/.
Accessed Aug. 10, 2024.
3.
“Dormition
of the Mother of God.” Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormition_of_the_Mother_of_God.
Accessed Aug. 10, 2024.
4.
Armentrout,
Don S., and Robert Boak Slocum, eds. “Mary the Virgin, Mother of Our Lord Jesus
Christ, Saint.” An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church. Available at: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/mary-the-virgin-mother-of-our-lord-jesus-christ-saint/.
Accessed Aug. 10, 2024.
5.
Information
gleaned from obituaries for the Rev. Virginia Dabney Brown, available at https://livingchurch.org/people-and-places/obituaries/rest-in-peace-rise-in-glory-september-23-2020/
and https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/houston-tx/the-reverend-virginia-brown-9312279.
6.
Armentrout,
Don S., and Robert Boak Slocum, eds. “Ordination of Women.” An Episcopal
Dictionary of the Church. Available at: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/ordination-of-women/.
Accessed Aug. 10, 2024.
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