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Hail Mary
The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin, 8/15/04
The Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis
Charles W. Allen
When I was about thirteen my Southern Baptist conscience was burdened by a suspicion that Don, one of my best friends, was engaging in a practice that might put his very soul in jeopardy. He said he was a Christian, and I knew he sincerely believed he was. But I knew that if he did this thing on a regular basis, regardless of his sincerity, he’d be in trouble. It wasn’t just a minor sin. It was among the worst. It was blasphemous, abominable, downright idolatrous. If he engaged in it, it was a wonder that God didn’t strike him dead right then and there, as God had so often done in the Bible stories I’d read.
One day, while we were walking home from the city park, I worked up the nerve to ask him about it. “Don,” I said,“do you Lutherans pray to Mary?”
He looked startled. “Of course not,” he answered.“Only Catholics do that.”
I still wasn’t satisfied, so I pressed on. “You mean you wouldn’t kneel in front of her statue and cross yourself?”
He actually laughed. “We especially wouldn’t do that!”
I felt a little silly for asking, so I had to explain. “I was just wondering. I’ve seen Catholics do that on TV, and I’ve wondered how they could call themselves Christians and do that. The Bible says we shouldn’t pray to anybody but God, and we should never bow to a ‘graven image’.” But Don assured me that he and his church didn’t go for any of that pagan stuff either.
And that put my worries to rest. I hadn’t met any Lutherans before Don moved to our town, and all I knew about them was that they were really different from Baptists. What a relief to learn they weren’t like those Catholics![1]
So imagine what Don and I might have thought if we had stepped into a time machine and wound up here today. Here’s that grey-headed erstwhile Baptist boy honoring Mary’s statue with incense and holy water, listening approvingly as the cantors chant, “Hail, O Queen of Heaven … Plead with Christ our sins to spare.” They’d probably shake their heads and wonder just where that misguided boy went wrong.
Now if you grew up Catholic you might not identify with this story. But here in the Midwestmost of today’s Episcopalians started out as some sort of Protestant. We never heard prayers or hymns addressed to Mary in our childhood churches, and we’re sometimes startled when we’re reminded that the majority of Christians in the world today can’t imagine worshipping God without singling out Mary for special devotion.
There are others of us here who have other problems with Mary. You may be tired of people who’ve used her example to define women’s roles—you can be a virgin or you can be a mother, and that’s all. It’s a perfect scheme to keep males in charge of everything else. And speaking of virginity, what about that? Are you irreverent if youbelieve that Jesusgot his “Y” chromosome from a human father?When we honor “St. Mary the Virgin,” are we talking about biology or are we talking about something harder to pin down?
Of course one of the good things about the Episcopal Church, and especially about All Saints, is that we can disagree over questions like these and still worship together. Ask any ten of us what it means when we stand and say,“… by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,” and you’ll get ten different answers—and at least one of them will strike you as really strange.
One of the lessons I’ve learned about worshiping here is that it never hurts to try out a new practice and see if it doesn’t awaken something in you that you didn’t know needed wakening. If you’re new to all this, that’s what you get to do today with the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin. There are all sorts of things to learn from all these traditions about devotion to Mary.
Let’s get clear about one thing at the outset—we’re notworshipping Mary today. We honor her with devotion, we pray to her and with her, but we don’t worship her. There was a whole Church Council in the early centuries devoted to explaining the difference between “the true worship of faith,” which belongs to God alone, and the “due salutation and honorable reverence,” which can be given to God’s creatures as an aid in worshipping God.[2] When we honor Mary with incense and hymns, we honor her as one of us. And when we pray to Mary, we’re asking one of us to pray with us to God, just as we ask for prayers from our friends. We’re not confusing her with God. Maybe that difference does get confused in popular worship, but if we worship a God who takes on our flesh that’s a risk we can’t avoid taking.
Mary is one of us, but we honor her above all other saintsas the first one of us to hear and believe the Gospel. Did you ever notice that the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds mention only three people by name? There’s Jesus, of course, and then Mary, and then Pilate. Mary and Pilate stand for the two responses we can make to God’s living with us in Jesus. With Pilate, we can reject it and kill it off, or with Mary we can welcome it and give it life. Mary was the first to recognize that something was about to begin in her that would change the world forever, and the first to say, “Then let it be so.”
Our creeds do always call her “the Virgin Mary.” But that’s more a statement about her character than a lesson in biology. In fact, the Bible never says exactly how she got pregnant. It says that she was a virgin when Gabriel broke the news. It says that her future husband was not the father. It says that the pregnancy will be prompted and overshadowed by God. But most surprisingly it says that what by any human measure was an illegitimate pregnancy would be holy in God’s eyes and in the eyes of God’s people. From this day all generations will call her blessed. So what we’ve come to call Mary’s virginity is the holiness of her indecent condition. It’s her conspiring with God to bring about redemption without the immediate help of a husband or the benefit of a decent reputation.
So despite what our male-dominated culture would prefer, Mary doesn’t teach women to be nice girls. This is the Mary of the Magnificat, the Mary who sings of God turning the tables on the proud, the powerful and the rich. When angels showed up on her doorstep she had to argue her way into believing: “Tell me again, Gabriel, just how do you expect this to happen?”
Above all, we honor Mary, not for showing us how to be well-behaved, but for showing us how to be holy, showing us how to live what one recent author calls “the godbearing life.”[3] One of her official titles, after all, is “the God-bearer,” and it points to one of the central mysteries of our faith—that the God who brought us and the whole world to birth wants to be the God we bring to birth in our own lives.
In one of my favorite poems, W. H. Auden has Gabriel say these words to Mary: “Hear, child, what I am sent to tell: Love wills your dream to happen, so Love’s will on earth may be, through you, No longer a pretend but true … What I am willed to ask, your own Will has to answer; child, it lies Within your power of choosing to Conceive the Child who chooses you.”[4]
What Gabriel asks of Mary is what God asks of each of us in a different way. It lies within our power of choosing to conceive the God who chooses us. We all stand with Mary, summoned to an adventure filled with peril and misunderstanding and mystery and unspeakable grief and joy.
In the poem Mary answers: “My flesh in terror and fire Rejoices that the Word Who utters the world out of nothing, As a pledge of His word to love her Against her will, and turn Her desperate longing to love, Should ask to wear me, From now to their wedding day, For an engagement ring.”[5]
Mary is God’s pledge one day to live in all of us the life begun in her. And with Mary God asks each of us together to be worn by God as God’s engagement ring offered to the whole world.
Hail, All Saints, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Amen.
[1] I’ve adapted this story from an earlier version. See “When One Person’s ‘Sinfulness’ is Another’s ‘Holiness’” at
[2] See the text of the Seventh Ecumenical Council held in Nicea in 787 CE:
[3] Kenda Creasy Dean and Ron Foster, The Godbearing Life: The Art of Soul Tending for Youth Ministry (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1998).
[4] W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being,” in Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 359-360.
[5] Ibid., p. 360.