August 15, 2021
Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 2021 – Revelation 11:19A, 12:1-6A, 10AB; 1 Corinthians 15:20-27; Luke 1:39-56
In a religious education class, the teacher asked the class, “What do you think we mean by Mary’s Assumption?” One little child raised her hand and said, “I think it means that she was so holy, we simply assume that she went to heaven.” And that little kid spoke more truthfully and at a deeper level than we can possibly imagine. So, what is the Feast of the Assumption?
In the Latin language, one of the simplest words, just like in any other language, is the word Am, Is, and Are. ‘I am’ is simply sum. If you add ad to it, you get ad sum. The old ritual for ordination to the priesthood required that when the role was called with the names of the candidates to be ordained, each one would stand and say, “Ad sum.” When we translate it into English, the way I was ordained, it loses something when you say, “Present,” because it means something more than simply ‘present.’ It’s ‘Here I am, ready willing, and able,’ all summed up in that one word – Ad sum.
And so the word drifts into the story, at the end of Mary’s life. As though we imagine her stand before the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit saying, “Here I am. Here I am.” A cry of joy and victory.
The Feast of the Assumption has a very foggy beginning. The first evidence – it’s not in scripture anywhere, although we’re going to see that it accords very well with scripture, it’s not in scripture anywhere. The first vague beginnings of a belief that Mary, at the point of her death, was taken body and soul into heavenly glory is found in some second century documents. Most of them are apocryphal gospels. And those apocryphal gospels were condemned by the church as heretical, so for a while we threw out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. Good things in those books were dismissed along with things that were antithetical to the faith.
And so, it wasn’t until sometime in the fourth century that we began to seriously talk about what happened to Mary, and until the fifth century before it became a more or less widely accepted doctrine with liturgies, both in Eastern and in Western Christianity, to mark the belief in her assumption. But it wasn’t declared and infallible doctrine of the church until 1950.
People are always talking about papal infallibility. The pope is never infallible, unless he says he is. And, in order for him to say he is, he has to use a specific legal formula, and he has to declare it from the Seat of Peter in St. Peter’s Basilica. Otherwise, no matter how strongly the teaching is proclaimed, it is not infallible. In the last two centuries it has only been done twice.
In 1854, a pope declared infallible the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Exactly a century or so later, in 1950, Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary to be an infallible doctrine. In each case, what the pope was saying is not, “You must believe this,” but rather he was saying, “It is indeed a fact that all Catholic people DO believe this. We’ve checked to find out and see.” And so, since the church thinks in centuries, the doctrine of the Assumption as an infallible doctrine, is a baby doctrine. It’s just getting its legs. I was in second grade when it was proclaimed. That’s how new it is.
Now we need to talk about scripture and the doctrine of the Assumption. Our first reading comes from the Book of Revelation. The Book of Revelation is pretty much a closed book for most people. Basically, this is how it’s structured. After an introduction, in which the writer writes to all the churches under his authority, he begins to talk about what we would call a once-and-future event. Something that happened in the past, is happening now, and has a future. And so, what the author is talking about at the turn of the first into the second century, is the ongoing history of the persecution of the church.
The story we have this morning is the first great event in that persecution. If we had kept reading, we would have found out that the woman, who escaped to the desert, where there was a place prepared for her, stayed in that hiding place for 1,260 days. Why in God’s name would the scripture be that specific? It must refer to something real. And, in fact, it does. It refers to the siege of Jerusalem, which went on for three and a half years, through the reign of three or four different Roman emperors. It began in 68 A.D., when the Romans surrounded Jerusalem, and both the Jews and the Christians headquartered in Jerusalem were stuck inside the city or, if they escaped, had to run for their lives. And it ended when the Roman troops invaded the city and destroyed everything and everybody inside the city. And Jerusalem was no more. The place where the apostles had gathered, the headquarters of Peter and James, was gone.
The way the images are presented, it’s fairly obvious that the woman’s child is the Lord Jesus. But he’s gathered up into heaven. Jesus rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and was not part, physically speaking, of the persecutions. But all these Christians, who have been given birth by the preaching of the apostles, were caught up in this terrible persecution.
Why the twelve stars? Because, in the Old Testament, there are twelve tribes of Israel. And in the New Testament, there are twelve apostles. And so the Old Testament gives birth, through Mary, to the coming Messiah. The twelve apostles, through their preaching, give birth to generations of Christians, now caught up in a terrible persecution that is ongoing and seems to have no end, but had its beginning when people ran for their lives. Where did they go? It says, “She ran out into the desert, where there was prepared a place for her.” The dragon that is chasing her has seven crowns and ten horns. The seven crowns in the Book of Apocalypse always represent the Seven Hills of Rome, where each emperor has his headquarters. The ten horns may possibly represent the ten Roman cities – they’re called a city, but they’re really only a little town – that are just to the northeast of Galilee, just past where Jesus lived most of his life. There is a place that is desert-like, but there are twelve settlements there that enjoy the same autonomy that Jerusalem had enjoyed until Jerusalem tried to revolt against Rome. And so it is a safe harbor for Christians and Jews, where they have protection, under the same Roman Empire that is persecuting them in Jerusalem. Now, for St. John, this happened a long time ago. He’s writing in the year 100 A.D.; it happened in the year 68 A.D. But he sees it happening over and over again, the pattern repeating itself. And so he says, “What was, is now, and shall be until the end of time,” that those who follow Christ will suffer persecution. But they will be rescued by the grace of God.
Now we turn to the gospel. The gospel is very interesting. If you were to look at the first three chapters of Luke’s gospel, what you see there is, every now and then, he takes a pause, and has somebody sing a hymn. It’s almost as though he scotch taped them into his story. Where do they come from? They are hymns that were sung at Christian worship in the time of St. Luke, which was the middle 80’s of the first century. Where did they come from? They’re almost always restructured Jewish songs. The Magnificat of Mary is based very closely on the hymn sung by Hannah, in the first book of Samuel. Hannah and Elkanah were an old couple. And they went to the temple like all good Jews, and Hannah sat crying in the temple because she wanted a child. The priest said, “If you come back next year, I guarantee you, by then you’ll have a child.” So she comes back with her weaned son and leaves him in the temple to be raised by the priests. And as she leaves, she sings this hymn about how God has been merciful to her. But that hymn is based on two older hymns – the hymn sung by Judith after she chops off the head of Holofernes, and the hymn sung by Miriam after Moses triumphantly leads the people out of Egypt. And so, the Magnificat, just like those older hymns, is a victory song.
We don’t get victory songs, although at one time we did. After WWII, two of our greatest crooners, Bing Crosby and Perry Como, both sang victory hymns. Bing sang “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin,” referring to the bombing of Berlin. Perry Como sings a songs in which it’s imagined that two vets meet each other on the street and, among the things they say to each other is, “It Was Mighty Smoky Over Tokyo.” Those things are so politically incorrect that they’re never played on the radio anymore, except on programs dedicated to the music of the late 40’s. By the 1950’s, during the Cold War, our songs about the military had morphed into sweet little ballads about leaving your Fraulein or your Geisha girl back in Japan or Germany when you came home from your tour of duty. By the 1960’s we were talking about guys going off to war, and leaving somebody behind. And so, Glen Campbell is cleaning his gun on the beach in Vietnam, singing about his girl back in Galveston. And Barry Sadler tells his girl, “If I don’t come home, pin silver wings on my son’s chest.” But we never sing victory hymns anymore, so we don’t understand them. But St. Luke places a victory hymn on the lips of Mary before she even gives birth to Jesus. Why?
Probably because the entire church knew by that time what happened to Mary. By the time Luke writes his gospel, Mary, if she had still be alive, would have been in her late 90’s. So it’s not likely that she was alive. And if she’s not alive, everybody knew about what happened at her death. It wasn’t something you needed to write about, but Luke placed a victory hymn on her lips.
What does Mary’s victory hymn say? It says, “God has been good to me, personally, despite the fact that I’m a nobody, a lowly person. God has been good to me, personally.” Then she multiplies that into a truth about all those who follow her son. That they, too, will recognize the fulfillment of the promises of old. And she uses very strong language. It’s not a sweet hymn. It’s filled with bloody images. Because goodness makes a bloody entrance.
So where does that leave us this morning? We have scriptural stories about a time of crisis. And we have rescue that is based, not on our earning it, but on God’s recognizing the fact that we are lowly and helpless in ourselves. But it’s also seen as the reward for those who remove themselves from the center of their lives. He has looked upon his lowly servant. All the way through the hymn, God rewards those who do not think of themselves in terms of greatness, and makes them great.
This is what the Feast of the Assumption means to us. That, where Mary once went, all Christians expect to go. And each one of us, in turn, will go. Mary received that gift in a unique way. It was only logical that she do. She’d be the first one to experience the fullness of redemption. But it’s the hope held out to all of us. That kid was right. She was so holy, we simply assume that she went to heaven.