Assent, Assumption and Incarnation

I didn't expect to be quoting the Church of England's Declaration of Assent from the Worship and Doctrine Measure when I preached for yesterday's Solemnity of (the Assumption of) the Blessed Virgin Mary - but I did, going on to ask how we are to bring "the grace and truth of Christ to this generation." Mary is a model for us in this. The part she plays is one with the Mystery of the Incarnation, God entering our world in human flesh. The whole sermon is here. Part of it is printed below...

Meanwhile here's a link to the September issue of our Parish Magazine - and another link to some items from our churchwarden (the one with the carrots in the last post), which missed the bus when we moved the magazine deadline forward. As ever the linked pages open in funny places or need you to tweak the scroll button on the sidebar to make them appear - or is it only me that has this problem?


From the homily...

How do we bring the grace and truth of Christ to the people who live around us in the here and now? How do we proclaim afresh this faith to each generation?

The answer is to take seriously the world we live in, to explore the issues which confront us day by day. But I’m afraid that here the Church often falls down on the job. The temptation is to make the Church a sort of refuge from all the problems we face, a bubble that surrounds us for an hour or so on a Sunday morning before it pops and we have to go back to things just as we left them outside. Or on the other hand we can come along to church and find that real issues of justice, peace, freedom, poverty, corruption and human well-being are ignored for a rather more small-minded concentration on the sexuality of the clergy and whether women can become bishops. Meanwhile the world looks on, wondering what we think we’re about - if it bothers to wonder at all…

What we need to remember is that Christian faith is not about insulation from all that troubles us - it’s about transformation. It doesn’t mean ignoring the world we live in. It requires that again and again we recognise just how seriously God takes this world. The fundamental difference from any other religion that Christianity proclaims is that God gets mixed up in this world. God comes to us in Jesus. The Son of God is born into this world in real human flesh. God doesn’t say he will simply save us from this world. What God does shows that he will save us in this world. It’s there in today’s Second Reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:

When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law…

St. Paul tells us very little about the actual life of Jesus. But here in just a few words, he shows us the fundamental shift that needs to be recognised in God’s dealings with the world. At the heart of the Gospel is the Incarnation - God comes into this world the way any of us do. All that God is, we can find in Christ. But in Christ we find also humanity in its fullness. And God does this not just by his own action. He works through what is human. His Son is born into the world because of Mary. This woman, Mary, hears the message of God through the angel - and she gives her “Yes” to God. She will bear God’s Son in her womb.

We need to recognise the part Mary plays, her response to the call of God, if we are going to be able to play our part - to make our response to the call God makes to us. She bears Christ in her womb - will we bear him in our hearts?...

There's more both before and after this section...