Sermon for the feast of the Immaculate Conception

What do you have that you did not receive? Words from Paul to the Corinthians 4:7

In the name…..

Charlie Kaufman‘s film Being John Malkovich was a box office hit in 1999. One of his lesser known films is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The characters played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet fall in love but their relationship becomes so dysfunctional that they opt for a new brainwashing treatment. Wired up to helmets with electrodes, every memory of each other is erased. The film ends tantalisingly.

They meet each other again, as strangers now, and go on a date. We’re left wondering whether they will start a new relationship. Will it be a disaster again? Or will the brainwashing mean that they behave differently.

One of the characters says, ‘Everything that happens to us in life shapes who we are.’ So if I get laughed at for saying what I think, I’ll become less honest. If I am rejected in love, I won’t risk giving myself to anyone again. We build up defences. Defences that make us less free to be ourselves, less open.

It’s bad form for a preacher to talk about himself but I hope you will see why I am making this an exception. When I was younger, I was a socialist. I assumed that future generations would learn from our mistakes. In the words of New Labour’s theme tune, ‘Things can only get better.’ But it’s not true.

Each generation seems destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can inherit certain limitations from our parents. Only six years ago I discovered that my father had bi-polar disorder (manic depression.). So did his three siblings. I had a breakdown and found out that I had inherited it. It’s in the genes.

Humans are born less than free. Jung talked of the ‘collective unconscious’ and I wonder whether we inherit memory and inclinations from our ancestors. My parents were strong atheists but I had an attraction to churchgoing in my teens and was baptised against their wishes. (Nowadays they’d probably rule that out as some sort of abuse by the church.) Some time ago, I did some research on my family tree and I was surprised to discover certain things about my maternal grandfather, who died before I was born. He was well over six foot. Neither of my parents was but I am. He had a house full of books. So do I but for my mum, a book was a Woman’s Own magazine.  Most interestingly, he was a churchwarden of St. Katherine’s Southbourne. I visited it. Strong whiff of incense, votive candles, statues, big six and tabernacle. Just the sort of church that I had ‘discovered’ in my home town. Do I have any choices?

The sort of theology I did at Leeds University can best be described as ‘liberal protestant’ Miracles probably don’t happen. They’re symbolic. But across the city, in the red light district, the church I attended and where Forward in Faith’s Geoffrey Kirk was then curate, had Benediction every Sunday and I wondered what to make of the phrase towards the end: Blessed be her holy and immaculate conception. It’s a bit Roman Catholic isn’t it? We’re Anglicans. A wise old priest told me to view doctrine like a family photo album. Some of the people you’ve never met or you don’t like. But don’t throw away your heritage. One day, someone you haven’t met, didn’t like or understand will become very significant to you. And so it is with the Immaculate Conception.

Each generation seems destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. We inherit limitations from our parents. Defences make us less free to be ourselves, less open. Do I have any choices? We’re Anglicans

We’re Anglicans. In 1571, Bishop John Jewel’s Homily on Repentance, endorsed by the 39 Articles, spoke of ‘the Blessed Virgin…..and …her undefiled substance.

Cranmer’s Preface for Christmas Day: that without spot of sin [the Latin version, idque, “for that reason.” indicates that it is speaking of Mary]

Anglican Bishop of Chester, John Pearson calls our Lady “immaculate: Exposition Of The Creed

Seventeenth Century Bishop Jeremy Taylor spoke of Mary going to the temple for purification ‘though she was sinless.’

Twentieth Century American Episcopalian theologian, Dr. Francis J. Hall: it was fitting that the Blessed Virgin should be sanctified for her unique function of hearing the Eternal Word; and the salutation of Gabriel implied that such sanctification had already taken place – before the Holy Spirit caused her to conceive…… the Blessed Virgin’s sanctification was ….an effect, anticipatively realized, of Christ’s redemptive work.”

Do I have any choices? A typical protestant response to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary had no choice. If God had preserved her from original sin, she could not sin, so she could not say no to the angel Gabriel. Well that depends on your definition of sin. We’ve heard a lot this year about the Blessed John Henry Newman. He can help us here. He wrote a Letter to Pusey. – 170 pages (How would be have coped with text messages?) He said that the Immaculate Conception is a stumbling block to non-Catholics because they do not know what we mean by original sin. “Our doctrine of original sin is not the same as the Protestant. We with the Fathers think of it as something negative, Protestants as something positive.”  (By ‘negative’ he meant an absence of something.)

“They hold that “it is a disease, a radical change of nature, an active poison internally corrupting the soul, infecting its primary elements, and disorganizing it; and they fancy we ascribe a different nature from ours to the Blessed Virgin, different from that of her parents, and from that of fallen Adam.

“We hold nothing of the kind.

“We consider that in Adam she died as others; that she was included, together with the whole race, in Adam’s sentence … but we deny that she had original sin; for by original sin we mean something negative, the deprivation of that supernatural unmerited grace which Adam and Eve had on their first formation.” (Difficulties of Anglicans, ii., 48, 49)

Adam’s sin reduces his children. Newman was being very modern. It was later that theologians would use negative terms for sin: the lack a right relatedness, ‘separation’, ‘estrangement’, alienation from God, from other people and within the individual self

The protestant image of sin can be sub-Christian, Manichaean: sin as somehow a substance or something existing in its own right. I hope you might go home this evening thinking, ‘I never knew what sin was until I encountered Derek Jay.’  For Newman, sin makes us less, not more, fully human; less, not more, fully ourselves as God intends us to be. We know that we are less ourselves, when we feel ill because we have eaten and drunk too much and slept too little. We know that we are less, not more, ourselves, when we have been hurtful towards others. When the Church talks of ‘deadly’ sins, it is because they deaden us, they make us less alive, and therefore less fully human. Sin wounds our humanity. So to be sinless makes Mary not less, but more human: human from the very first moment of existence, more able, not less, to make choices.

Each generation seems destined to repeat the mistakes of the past? Well, our faith is about the future. When we remember, at the Eucharist, we do so ‘until the Lord comes.’ We remember the past in the light of the future: a past in which God has been working to secure the future. Karl Barth wrote: God, ‘in the beginning of all his works and ways…conceived humanity as his covenant partner. He purposed to bring the human race not only into existence but into loving communion with himself.’ Church Dogmatics

 So one step in unpacking the idea of an Immaculate Conception is to go back to the original conception in the mind and purpose of God. No individual exists in a vacuum, but always in a stream of history and in a culture. The individual becomes unique by interacting with this context. For Mary, this background was Israel. We call Israel the ‘chosen people’, because it had been elected by God to a peculiar destiny within the broader history of humanity. The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission was adamant that we should not view Mary through some distorted, medieval lens but in the whole context of God’s plan for God’s people. So texts originally written about one individual or circumstance can be applied to God’s people as a whole and, thus, to Mary:

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you’ Jer. 1:5

God….had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace Galatians 1:15

From our epistle: God chose us in Him (Christ) before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless. Ephesians 1:4

Jesus Christ is Mary’s Saviour just as much as he is ours. In no way is Mary exempted from the need to be redeemed. As Pope Pius IX taught when defining the dogma, she is redeemed in anticipation of the saving work Christ accomplished for us on the cross. His work is timeless, cosmic. The saving power of his merits can reach backwards as well as forwards, as we see in the eternal sacrifice of the altar.

My film’s title, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, echoes the title of the hymn, Eternal Ruler of the ceaseless round which talks of ‘the power that makes Thy children free’ As we rejoice with Mary on the feast of her conception, we thank God for His love and mercy which embraces us right from the moment of our own conception.

What do you have that you did not receive? Everything is gift, everything good in us is God’s grace. All of us, children of God, are also favoured ones and heirs of God’s grace.

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