THE WORLD SAVED BY MOTHERHOOD

The Holy Virgin and Child, "Greater than the Heavens", an Ancient Icon from the St. Irene Blachernae, Constantinople

A SERMON FOR MOTHER’S DAY AND THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PASCHA

By Bp. Joseph (Ancient Church of theWest)

INTRODUCTION

Back in 2011, I was invited by my father’s church in Ohio to stand in for him after he had a series of strokes. We were already Orthodox at the time, and I asked my bishop if it was permissible. He told me, "If you are preaching the truth, wherever they allow you, go preach the Gospel." I promised him that I would and went to my father’s Evangelical church with a clear conscience, preaching about the Bible, Ancient Church history, the doctrines of the Nicene Creed, and a host of other helpful things over the course of five months. During our stay, I preached a sermon for Mother’s Day called “The Motherhood of God” and talked about how Motherhood was one of the foundational truths of Christianity, best seen in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I was shocked by how much this sermon meant to people, especially women, who said that it was the first time that they had heard anything mentioned about Mary from the pulpit that was not dismissive or negative. I remember one grandmother, who came up and said, “I always thought that she was important, but I could never figure out why people couldn’t talk about her.” It was a very special experience from my side, because, more than anything else, it cemented in me a feeling that people in the Protestant world thought that rejecting Mary was equal to loyalty to God, but that this was based on a misunderstanding that needed to be gently corrected.

MEDIATION AND THE FUNCTION OF HUMANS IN GOD’S ECONOMY OF GRACE

What I intuited over that summer of preaching was that people were desperately trying to cling to the idea that salvation was something between the individual and God, on one hand insulating the individual from judgment, and making the judgment of individuals conclusive on the other hand. “Me, My Bible, and God” was the paradigm that my friends were desperately clinging to, under the impression that anything else was idolatry and disloyalty. However, the more I thought about it, the more that this perspective didn’t make sense.

The first reason for this is that Christ didn’t write the New Testament. Instead, His Apostles and their disciples wrote the 27 books that the Christian Tradition calls Scripture. This already makes our experience of Christ dependent on other people, who are not God, and who had differences of opinion and different writing styles. Secondly, the Bible had to be endlessly copied and preserved by the Church through 2000 years in order to come to us today. This means that there was never a time when human agency could be separated from biblical knowledge. And third, when we read the Scriptures, where Christ undoubtedly meets us in His Grace by the power of the Holy Spirit, the concepts, images and storyline that we construct in our heads are not the original things in themselves, but are forms, shadows, icons and emotions generated by us. We do not know the literal thing in itself, but a mediating image in which we play a substantial role. Therefore, if we are trying to get around human mediation, arguably the most important person we need to get around is our ignorance, bias, and malformed opinions, and yet, the whole process of knowing God is mediated by our own darkened understanding. So, literally, no matter if we want to put humanity aside and have a direct experience with God’s divinity, we are still unable to get around the necessity of mediation.

The second reason that dismissing human mediation is impossible is that God chose to bring Christ into the world through St. Mary, and Christ chose to send His Gospel out into the world through the Apostles. Every part of this story involves a chain of people who had some kind of authority predicated on their obedience. It is true that Christ is the ultimate mediator, as it says in 1 Timothy 2:5 that “there is one mediator between God and Man, the Man Jesus Christ”, but this is in a sacrificial sense, and does not mitigate mediation of the Gospel in an evangelical sense - there must be someone through whom the power of God is manifest for salvation, both in bringing the Apostolic and Orthodox Gospel, and also in preserving and interpreting the Words of Scripture, so that those who hear and believe, obeying the Gospel, might be saved. This missional capacity is often reflected in the tradition of martyrs, “witnesses” in Greek, who gave their lives for this cause. In this, they follow Christ and become like Him, engrafting their own story into the story of the Gospel in a real and undeniable way.

When I considered all of these things together, it became clear that the dismissal of human activity within God’s plan of salvation, and actual mediation of God’s grace through carrying the Gospel, obeying God’s commandments, and laying down our lives for others and for the Truth, could not be biblically or historically justified. Just because someone idolizes something does not mean that this thing is bad and needs to be cast out of the Church. If someone thinks Pastor Bob stands for God and worships him as God in their hearts, this doesn’t mean that we must assume these motives of pride and self-deification on the part of Pastor Bob. How much more ridiculous, then, are those who try to exclude the Blessed Virgin from the story of Christ because they feel that others have exalted her above the savior, or because people have believed in error that, because she is “the Mother of God, the Lord Jesus Christ,” that she is also the mother of God the Father and the origin of spiritual divinity. Something can be in error and be corrected, without the other opposite extreme being true. You can proclaim Mary to be the “Theotokos”, without worshipping her as a goddess, arguing that she is the third or fourth person in the Trinity, and seeing her as a Co-Redemptrix, which confuses the Created with the Uncreated, and the human with the eternal God.

In reaction to those that have a difficulty with understanding this, the Romans and the Orthodox often overcompensate by trying to compete to praise and glorify the humble Mother of our Lord and God, trying to make everyone exalt her more. But, God has already exalted her above all the angels and has even made her to be “Greater than the Heavens,” because God cannot be contained in the universe, and yet in the incarnation, He was contained in the womb of the Virgin for nine months. This does not confuse her created nature, and this position is one of divine grace, given by God. It is also true that St. Mary was just as dependent upon her Son for salvation as we are, that Christ died for His Mother like He died for all of us, and that St. Mary is a Christian in the same way that we are all members of the Body of Christ. The difference is that Christ received His incarnate, physical body from the Holy Virgin, and the Holy Virgin was the first Christian - the first person to ever have Christ inside of them by the power of the Holy Spirit.

WHAT MARY MEANS TO MOTHERHOOD

When we think about this mystery, we start to see a pattern of balanced, biblical, self-evident truth, that in no way offends the Written Word of God, and also is consistent with the intuition of the Church throughout time. There have been abuses. There is still a struggle. Because every time we come into contact with great holiness or great beauty, our idolatrous hearts want to fall down and worship, esteeming the Creatures more than the Creator. We see this in the guru-worship of various Orthodox elders. We see this in the over-veneration of miracles as if they are the seal of the Gospel. We see this in the way that various practices, like giving gifts of jewelry to icons, have crept into the Church and have overcome ancient, biblical prohibition. But, this does not mean that we reject the Ancient Church, overthrow the altars to create a Christian religion without covenants, sacraments, and commanded symbols. We cannot reject St. Mary or any of the other saints who brought the salvation of Christ to us, because someone has misunderstood or misapplied the Gospel. We are constantly struggling with this, repenting of our sins of idolatry, and constantly trying to rectify our thoughts so that we can receive God’s grace and love His Body.

The story of Christ coming into the world through a humble young woman, the Virgin Mary, is a story that tells us about God’s thoughts regarding His Creation. He loves women. He has a highly exalted plan for the female lineage of Mankind. He does not exclude them from the Church. He does not see them as second class. He does not relegate them to an observer status. No, God is not only integrating women into His Kingdom and giving them ownership, but He is also doing something through them that He will not and cannot do through men: Holy Motherhood is a divinely inspired work that saves the world, first through Christ as the “Seed of the Woman,” but then throughout the whole cosmos as a covenantal act of holy women, raising up generations of righteous children, sacrificially for God. This means women are divinely chosen, created for this great work, which only they can do, and this also means that the all-male priesthood of the Church, which is often seen as discriminatory towards women because it excludes them, is actually meant as a support and service to them, a less fundamental calling, that, while highly visible, is meant to undergird the real spiritual work upon which the Church is built - Motherhood.

This is why I feel that feminism hasn’t hit the ancient Orthodox Churches like it has destroyed the Western Protestant Churches. These Churches have a deep sense of female ownership. Mothers prepare their sons to be priests as a sacrifice of the family, seeing their own lives and ministries fulfilled by their son’s representation of the Mysteries of the Church “in persona Christi.” There is nothing wrong with women holding this profound, deep, and paradoxical place in the Church. That while they are not in the Altar, they ARE the altar, and while veiled and invisible, their presence is the real, life-giving, grounded source of all life in the Church. Our world mistakes the liturgy for a performance, instead of as an icon of the Life of Christ. Our world thinks that maleness is complete on its own, and tries to make women more like men, rather than allowing women to be themselves and be adored and appreciated for their differences to men. Our world hates children and thinks that motherhood is a waste of time, lying to women that a career is more important than a baby, and that fulfillment is found in money, rather than in a nursing babe. But, the truth has always been clear to the Church, from the very beginning, because of how much we love and respect Mary. She was the “door of our salvation,” and the irreducible part of God’s plan to bring salvation into the world. Because we love her, see her as important, call her blessed in every age, calling her “more glorious than the Cherubim, more exalted than the Seraphim,” our women know their true place in our hearts and know that our disbelief in modern feminism is not because we hate or oppress women… it is because these modern ideas denigrate women, reduce them to men, and deny the most powerful thing about them, which is the God-given ability to cooperate with Him in the act of creating and nurturing life. We reject feminism because it destroys the most beautiful and powerful aspects of the feminine and substitutes a bland masculinity that is both unfulfilling and truly unfruitful.

MOTHERS DAY AND THE MESSAGE OF THE GOSPEL

Today, on this Mother’s Day, let us remember what it means to love our mothers, grandmothers, wives and daughters, who are grafted in as co-equal heirs of God in the Kingdom of Heaven. Circumcision, which was only for men in the Old Covenant, has been replaced with the waters of baptism, and in this, we all become co-equal and complementarian aspects of the work of mediation that God has called us to perform in the world, as we submit to the Gospel, are transformed through repentance, and offer this world back up to God. Mothers play a huge role in all of this, as they generate the divinely gifted life of the next generation. Fathers, too, as sacrificers and givers of strength, love, protection and blood, are called to contribute their whole selves to this process as well. This is the created, binary, male-female dynamic of the world that God created, and this is what He calls “Good.” On this day of appreciation for Mothers, let us thank God for the blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ, the Mother of us all, as we partake of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, which God took from the Blessed Virgin, and enfolded into Himself, and now enfolds the rest of us into this Body as One.

We thank all our mothers. We remember them with love. We remember their stories, their sacrifices, their countless hours of discomfort, the pains of labor, their patience in teaching us, and the sorrows and joys that they shared with us as we grew in wisdom and stature. We remember our beautiful and saintly ancestors in the faith, the myriad of holy women that we commemorate as a Church. We remember and pray for all of our motherly ancestors, who are in the hand of God, asking Him to have mercy on them, and to save them in His mercy. We thank all of you mothers here today, praising you for the work you have done to raise up children in the Lord, and to pray God would continue to work through you, as you share your love and experience in the future, and that you would all shine with holiness as the stars of the heavens!

A POETIC REFLECTION

“Holy Mary, Mother of God”

These words are hard for some to hear,

For many fear that love and memory

May wander into idolatry and fear.

Yet we, with all the Ancient Church,

Remember that lowly maiden, strong and brave,

And in our reverence toward her

Give thanks to Christ alone, who saves.

For Mary was the first to hold

Our Savior as a hidden gift,

The first to bear within her womb

The Lord who raises Adam from the pit.

Her humble answer to God’s command,

“Be it unto me according to Thy word,”

Shows forth the beauty of obedience

To every soul that hears the Lord.

And through her faithful “yes” to God,

The Word was made flesh for you and me;

Not by the power of mortal man,

But by divine grace and humility.

A lowly maiden, young and trembling,

Yet full of faith beyond all earthly fame,

Offered herself in trust to God,

And bore the everlasting Name.

Thus Christ came forth into the world

To heal the wound of Eve’s first fall,

And through the Holy Virgin’s faith

The Savior stretched His arms to all.

Therefore every generation calls her blessed,

Not as a goddess throned above,

But as the chosen handmaid of the Lord,

A living witness to redeeming love.

SUMMARY

And so, beloved, as we honor our mothers on this day, let us remember that the mystery of motherhood is not something small or accidental in the eyes of God. From the beginning, the Lord chose that life should come into the world through sacrifice, tenderness, patience, and love. In the fullness of time, He chose that His own Son should enter the world through the obedience of a humble Virgin, sanctifying forever the dignity of women, the holiness of family life, and the quiet faithfulness that sustains the world from generation to generation. Let us therefore give thanks for our mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and all holy women who have borne life, nurtured souls, taught children to pray, endured suffering in silence, and reflected, however imperfectly, the gentleness and steadfast love of God. And may we, like Blessed Mary, learn to say with trusting hearts: “Be it unto me according to Thy word.”

Let us Pray…

COLLECT

O Almighty God, who by Thy divine grace didst send Thine only-begotten Son into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary; grant that we, following her humble obedience and faithful submission unto Thy holy will, may be made partakers of Thy heavenly grace, and be found faithful at the glorious appearing of Thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.