Sermon: Evensong - 14 Aug 2011

 

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford Photograph of Victor Stock

Preacher:
Victor Stock
Date:
Sunday 14th August 2011
Service:
Evensong

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or in Russian and Greek Orthodoxy, the Dormition, or in the Roman Catholic Church, the Feast of the Glorious Assumption.  This feast of the crowning of Mary by grace alone, finds one of its most famous expressions in the great Titian altar piece of the Assumption; Mary soaring under her own volition, so it seems, fulfilling her destiny, God the Father waiting to receive her, the Apostles surrounding her, empty tomb, gazing up in wonder – this beautiful painting, one of the most uplifting (in every sense) images of the Renaissance, appropriately the crowning glory of the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice.

Compare and contrast the pictures of Clapham High Street, every shop vandalised, no police to be seen until all the damage, the mindless, stupid, cruel horror was over.  And so, Tottenham and Birmingham and Liverpool - images I personally found almost impossible to watch, so ashamed am I of my own country, and so depressed by this evidence of the reality of the human condition.  We’re told that one of the strands in the destruction and mayhem of the last days has been the social networking apparatus or device of Facebook and especially Twitter, where, on the instant, gangs of criminals and hooligans can be in contact with each other and move as one to the next shop to smash up and loot.  These pictures then circle the globe and, as a friend from Zurich said to me this week, lower Britain in the eyes of the world on the instant.

Compare and contrast tomorrow’s Feast.  From the fourth century to the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages till 1955, when Pope Pius XII promulgated the dogma of the Assumption, Christians in the West and East have been giving thanks for human destiny, fulfilled and revealed, in Mary received into heaven, the work of grace alone.  Ruskin’s description of the Titian Frari is artistically correct, but theologically inaccurate.  Mary does not ascend to heaven by her own merits, but by the grace of God.

Meditation on the place of Mary in the scheme of salvation, began even further back than the fourth century, when the doctrine of the Assumption begins to emerge in West.  The doctrine finds its place in imagery in the book of Revelation, that woman clothed with the sun and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.  Christian belief requires prayerful, meditative thought in front of God.  Nothing instantaneous, no Twitter or Facebook or I-Phone can do what Christian prayer must do, for Christian prayer and Christian theology take time. 

Here, where Evensong during the Choir holiday is appropriately taking place in Our Lady’s own Chapel, are there any of you who could make time to come tomorrow morning here to the Holy Communion, when we give thanks for Mary and for the triumph of the Gospel embodied in her coronation?  Her coronation is the earnest of our own crowning, where she is, in that wonderful picture by Titian in the Frari in Venice, all humanity embodied, so that the last word is not Clapham or Tottenham burning, but by grace alone, human destiny fulfilled.