Standing at the Dormition of St. Mary

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READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:

• Isaiah 61:7-11
• Judith 13:22-25; 15:10
• St. Luke 1:41-50

To you all who are beloved of God called as saints:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus speaks in your hearing today, saying,

“And Elizabeth…exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!’”

Dormition is a word that is not so hard to figure out. You hear “dormitory” in there and that’s what it means: to fall asleep. In today’s case of celebration it means to fall asleep, never to wake again. Falling down to never stand again, at least until Jesus comes to wake us.

Stand up. Sit down. Stand up. Sit down. Begrudgingly named “lutheran aerobics”, or rising and our sitting down all through the Divine Service, grates on some and confuses everyone else. Usually you only stand up when someone important enters the room, but each and every time you all do it, the count of people remains the same before and after. You can see why its confusing.

 No more confusing, however, than calling a normal, young, pregnant teen the Mother of God. We have already talked about the mysteries of the Faith that God has given us. That is, those things He does and that happen in this world to which we have no explanation. We concluded then that we simply assert them and not try to explain them, which would just ruin them.

But what is so wrong with mystery? This world thrives on it. It cannot live without mystery. Take dinosaurs, for example. My son is absolutely absorbed by them. He knows names and features and yet he has never and will never see a dinosaur. The best paleontologist in the world can only offer him scraps of bone as proof. So many gaps, so much mystery, yet such a following.

 The sciences, though extremely helpful, continue to aid and abet their cult-like following by encouraging mystery. Just think of all the things you know, but don’t really know about. Gravity, black holes, space, viruses, among many others. You’ve heard people mention them, but when push comes to shove, you cant really say what impact those things have on your everyday life. They are mysteries that keep the money coming in.

 It should be no stretch of the imagination then, that a teenager can be called by God directly, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, and give birth to God, and forever to be remembered as the Mother of God. And yet, for some reason, that’s too much for you.

The difference between the world’s mysteries and the Lord’s mysteries is this: the world hides its mysteries behind a veil of intellect. These gatekeepers are mere wordsmiths, trying to keep their jobs by describing things in the most complicated way. The Lord, on the other hand, uses words and displays His mysteries out in the open.

Or at least He has enacted them in front of more than just elitists who wish to keep their government grants. As St. Mary shows us, even a normal, unassuming, girl can be a witness to this. The mysteries remain mysteries and yet are revealed to the uninitiated. In other words, God hides His wisdom from the wise and reveals it to infants.

In this case, the infants are us, who have recently been newborn in baptism and had our minds renewed in the Spirit. We call ourselves God’s children, even His little lambs and we are. Our thoughts are not His thoughts and our ways are not His ways. Nevertheless, the Lord displays His thoughts to the world and makes His way directly in front of us, hiding nothing.

But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man imagined,

what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ. (1 Cor. 2:9-16)

 This is why the world and the sinner doesn’t understand standing in the Divine Service. This is why you don’t understand a celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of God. In sin, you don’t love God or your neighbor as you should. These things must be revealed to us and explained to us by the Spirit.

We stand as sprouts in the Lord’s garden, as we heard in Isaiah today. We stand as Judith did, in front of our enemies of sin, death, and the devil. We stand as St. John did when he heard the voice of his Lord’s mother, not because St. Mary was there, but because she was there with Jesus Christ.

Today we stand because the Lord of Life comes to commune with us in Spirit, Body, and Blood. We believe that our God is both spiritual and physical and so we physically stand. We believe that our God has conquered death so that we will stand, alive, on the Last Day, even if we are in the grave. We believe that standing is our preparation for that Day, because Jesus is here now and will be, then.

We celebrate St. Mary, not just because we can chop her down to being a sinner, chosen by God, just like ourselves, but first and foremost because the Bible, God’s Word, gives her great preference. So much so, that we sing hymn 670 that states that St. Mary, the bearer of the Eternal Word, leads the angelic praises of heaven.

The Bible gives her this magnificence because God’s Word of Grace has bestowed this upon her by His Gospel. “He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden”, sings the Magnificat, and He has regarded the low estate of you, His Church. 

Our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and true man, Mystery of mysteries, walks an earthly, discoverable path for you and with you. This obvious path begins in the most obvious way that most are offended by it. For He begins in the same way we begin: conceived inside of His mother. And He is mighty, mighty enough to suffer, die, and rise again for you. 

Mary’s name, Blessed as it is, is not Holy. Only Jesus’ Name is Holy. And His holy mercy is on the Virgin Mary and upon you, His newly reborn virgins, made white and redeemed by His holy Blood that flows over you, from your baptism, and flows upon your tongues in our Lord’s Supper, today.

St. Mary is not dead, she has only fallen asleep, so you can still love her. The papists may have made St. Mary into a cultic, faith-denying co-redemptrix with Christ, but you can still like her and honor her. You may not love anyone as you should; your neighbor as yourself nor God as Himself, but Christ’s Gospel gives you love that you did not have before.

Jesus loved St. Mary. To love the Lord is to love Him in His saints as well. Jesus loves you and grants you sainthood so that with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven you may rejoice in the rich forgiveness, redemption, and resurrection that the Lord gives you. A resurrection at which you will, at last, truly stand up, never to lie down, die, again.