“The woman you gave to be with me; she gave me the fruit of the tree and I ate.”
In most parishes of whatever tradition there always seems to be someone who takes delight in being of a different tradition. Essentially it seems to boil down to a similar condition to that of a rebellious teenager who rebels against the status quo. In nearly every Anglo-Catholic parish that I have known there have been people who claim to be evangelical and who attempt, with hardly any success, to bring people round to their way of thinking. In a strange sort of way they seem to thrive on being the odd one out.
There is a true story, told to me recently, of such a lady in a parish in the north of England. An evangelical lady, so she claimed, in a very spikey parish. As a card-carrying evangelical she attended, as a matter of duty, the Parish Bible Study Group, in order that proper biblical teaching could be defended against error. On one occasion the Group was discussing the matter of sin, and, in particular the matter of sin after baptism or conversion. In rather earnest tones she declared before the assembled group, “I can honestly say that since I gave my life to the Lord Jesus I have never done anything to offend him.” Apparently, from that moment on she was known in the parish as “The Immaculate Exception!”
If we are going to consider Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, that is her being free from sin, and as the present Archbishop of Canterbury described Our Lady this year in Lourdes, “the Lord's spotless Mother,” then we need to consider the matter of sin – not a popular matter to discuss, but I am not sure the Book of Common Prayer puts it correctly when it speaks of us being “miserable sinners”! The consequences of sin may lead to misery, but not too many sinners seem to be miserable while sinning.
Our first reading this evening shows us the consequences of the fall of mankind, when sin had been introduced and mankind was now barred from the Tree of Life. One of the immediate effects was the introduction of blame. Man blames the woman for getting him into this trouble, and even blames God for giving him the woman, and in turn the woman blames the serpent.
Of course, the culture of blame is fostered to a great degree today. We see crimes committed, and someone else as well as the perpetrator has to carry the blame, as it seems that they should have prevented it from happening. Whereas I am sure that there are human failings in social service departments and police forces and the other emergency services, I wouldn’t want their job and I suspect that most people wouldn’t either, and yet we expect the unrealistic of them. There is a tendency today for people to be encouraged to think that we live in an age where bad things shouldn’t happen and that they should always be preventable; where many falsely believe that those in authority have the power to prevent awful things happening, where many falsely believe that every illness should be curable and if it can’t doctors and nurses are to be blamed; and of course God still gets the blame for almost every war, illness or disaster that has happened even though many want, at the same time, to profess their disbelief in him.
Human nature is flawed – mankind has fallen from a state of grace. There are those who mistakenly believe that mankind is not flawed, who believe that people’s faults are the fault of what society has done to them. I recall a school teacher once saying to me that there were no bad children – it was only what society had done to them. I thought she was rather naive. David Kossoff once wrote about children who look like children but, although they were under the age of ten, scared him. He called them “child grown-ups. He went on to write:
“Child grown-ups have their grown-up qualities in purer form. Un-adult-erated in the truest sense! Pure malevolence, pure cynicism, pure wickedness.”
The problem is that so often these child grown-ups often never really grow up into maturity. They have been taught that they are really innocent and so they continue to protest that they are innocent and that the problems they cause are really someone else’s fault, notably their parents and even God’s – after all he did create them! And don’t whatever you do expect an understanding response if you mention “personal responsibility” or the word “Confession” to such people. One such lady in a south coast parish came into church one Sunday in Lent and demanded to know of the priest why there were no flowers in church. On being told that Lent was a more sombre time in the Church’s Calendar and that it was a time for prayer, reflection and the examination of one’s conscience leading to confession if needed, she protested, “Confess, I’ve got nothing to confess.” Her parish priest was not the sort of priest to take the Derek Nimmo’s Vicar approach. Imagine her shock when he said, “Well, I tell you what we’ll do, my dear. We’ll mount you on a wall, put a candle either side of you and bow down and worship you.”
Sin is a big problem. What can be done about it? The present Government seems to behave in a way that is completely contrary to what the Apostles teach us about Christ’s mission of redemption. It seems to think that passing laws will solve all of society’s ills. All that does is identify the criminals and to make matters worse this Government has actually declared good those things that are bad and declared bad those things that are good. They have not learnt that the Law cannot save mankind. Mankind has to be saved by being changed from within, and to achieve this there needs to be a Saviour and a process of sanctification.
Sin, and our refusal to accept that we are sinners, along with our refusal to accept responsibility for our sins is not a state of affairs that God wished to allow to continue. Sinful man could not live in God’s presence, for no sinful man or woman can look on God and live. Remember the story of Moses who asked if he could see God’s face? God said that he would let him see his glory, but that he could not see his face and live – yes, even Moses was a sinful man. So God puts Moses in the cleft of a rock and places his hand in front of Moses face and then passes by him so that he can see his back after he has passed and the glory that surrounds him. God protects Moses from the consequences of sin.
So God’s plan was that at the right time he would intervene personally. The Law was given to show that mankind cannot save himself and that he needed a Saviour, and this is where Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception is so important and an essential part of the Church’s Doctrine. I have shown that sin and God cannot share the same space – the way to paradise was barred after the fall; God expels man and woman from the garden for their ultimate protection and subsequent salvation. How then could God become man in Mary’s womb if she were sinful? Moses was told, “No man can see me and live” and that was because, as St Paul teaches us “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” If Our Lady was a sinner how could she have carried God in her womb? The answer is: she couldn’t – she would not have been a worthy vessel. So God as part of his plan had predetermined that she would be sinless from the moment of her conception. Just as God, in his loving providence protects Moses from the consequences of sin, so he lovingly shields Our Lady from the effect of his presence by creating her free from sin.
Now, someone, who claims to be a protest-ant, once said to me “But that makes Mary less than human.” Unfortunately, this betrays an even more fundamental error: about the nature of what it means to be human. The Church understands that the Lord Jesus is both fully human and fully divine and yet he is without sin. He is fully human and not a sinner. In the first account of creation in Genesis after each of the various acts of creation that God brings into being we read “and God saw that it was good” and after creating mankind we read, “...and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” Before the fall man and woman were without sin and they were therefore full of grace, created in the image of God. After the fall mankind is tainted with sin, and sin means that we are no longer full of grace. If the man and the woman had remained in the garden they would have died as they could no longer look on God and live – perhaps they instinctively knew this and that is why they hid out of shame when they heard him calling, rather like the little boy who goes to hide from his parents when he has done wrong.
Our Lady, by God’s grace, was spared this taint in order that she could be full of grace and as such a worthy vessel to bear God incarnate in her womb. To be human is to be called to become full of grace. Jesus, our Saviour, comes to redeem us, comes to set us free from our sins, bears the burden of them for us, destroys that which separates us from God in his own body on the Cross. We now have access to paradise once more through the saving action of Christ mediated to us through his continued saving action in the Sacraments he has given to his Church, and our faith in him. We are not yet perfect and full of grace, but putting our faith and trust in Christ we are being renewed daily in his image, that is: sanctified through the grace and power of the Holy Spirit. We are being filled with grace once more in order that we may share eternity with God in the garden, and where when he calls “Where are you?” we will no longer feel the need to resort to blame, or to hide from him in shame.
In most parishes of whatever tradition there always seems to be someone who takes delight in being of a different tradition. Essentially it seems to boil down to a similar condition to that of a rebellious teenager who rebels against the status quo. In nearly every Anglo-Catholic parish that I have known there have been people who claim to be evangelical and who attempt, with hardly any success, to bring people round to their way of thinking. In a strange sort of way they seem to thrive on being the odd one out.
There is a true story, told to me recently, of such a lady in a parish in the north of England. An evangelical lady, so she claimed, in a very spikey parish. As a card-carrying evangelical she attended, as a matter of duty, the Parish Bible Study Group, in order that proper biblical teaching could be defended against error. On one occasion the Group was discussing the matter of sin, and, in particular the matter of sin after baptism or conversion. In rather earnest tones she declared before the assembled group, “I can honestly say that since I gave my life to the Lord Jesus I have never done anything to offend him.” Apparently, from that moment on she was known in the parish as “The Immaculate Exception!”
If we are going to consider Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, that is her being free from sin, and as the present Archbishop of Canterbury described Our Lady this year in Lourdes, “the Lord's spotless Mother,” then we need to consider the matter of sin – not a popular matter to discuss, but I am not sure the Book of Common Prayer puts it correctly when it speaks of us being “miserable sinners”! The consequences of sin may lead to misery, but not too many sinners seem to be miserable while sinning.
Our first reading this evening shows us the consequences of the fall of mankind, when sin had been introduced and mankind was now barred from the Tree of Life. One of the immediate effects was the introduction of blame. Man blames the woman for getting him into this trouble, and even blames God for giving him the woman, and in turn the woman blames the serpent.
Of course, the culture of blame is fostered to a great degree today. We see crimes committed, and someone else as well as the perpetrator has to carry the blame, as it seems that they should have prevented it from happening. Whereas I am sure that there are human failings in social service departments and police forces and the other emergency services, I wouldn’t want their job and I suspect that most people wouldn’t either, and yet we expect the unrealistic of them. There is a tendency today for people to be encouraged to think that we live in an age where bad things shouldn’t happen and that they should always be preventable; where many falsely believe that those in authority have the power to prevent awful things happening, where many falsely believe that every illness should be curable and if it can’t doctors and nurses are to be blamed; and of course God still gets the blame for almost every war, illness or disaster that has happened even though many want, at the same time, to profess their disbelief in him.
Human nature is flawed – mankind has fallen from a state of grace. There are those who mistakenly believe that mankind is not flawed, who believe that people’s faults are the fault of what society has done to them. I recall a school teacher once saying to me that there were no bad children – it was only what society had done to them. I thought she was rather naive. David Kossoff once wrote about children who look like children but, although they were under the age of ten, scared him. He called them “child grown-ups. He went on to write:
“Child grown-ups have their grown-up qualities in purer form. Un-adult-erated in the truest sense! Pure malevolence, pure cynicism, pure wickedness.”
The problem is that so often these child grown-ups often never really grow up into maturity. They have been taught that they are really innocent and so they continue to protest that they are innocent and that the problems they cause are really someone else’s fault, notably their parents and even God’s – after all he did create them! And don’t whatever you do expect an understanding response if you mention “personal responsibility” or the word “Confession” to such people. One such lady in a south coast parish came into church one Sunday in Lent and demanded to know of the priest why there were no flowers in church. On being told that Lent was a more sombre time in the Church’s Calendar and that it was a time for prayer, reflection and the examination of one’s conscience leading to confession if needed, she protested, “Confess, I’ve got nothing to confess.” Her parish priest was not the sort of priest to take the Derek Nimmo’s Vicar approach. Imagine her shock when he said, “Well, I tell you what we’ll do, my dear. We’ll mount you on a wall, put a candle either side of you and bow down and worship you.”
Sin is a big problem. What can be done about it? The present Government seems to behave in a way that is completely contrary to what the Apostles teach us about Christ’s mission of redemption. It seems to think that passing laws will solve all of society’s ills. All that does is identify the criminals and to make matters worse this Government has actually declared good those things that are bad and declared bad those things that are good. They have not learnt that the Law cannot save mankind. Mankind has to be saved by being changed from within, and to achieve this there needs to be a Saviour and a process of sanctification.
Sin, and our refusal to accept that we are sinners, along with our refusal to accept responsibility for our sins is not a state of affairs that God wished to allow to continue. Sinful man could not live in God’s presence, for no sinful man or woman can look on God and live. Remember the story of Moses who asked if he could see God’s face? God said that he would let him see his glory, but that he could not see his face and live – yes, even Moses was a sinful man. So God puts Moses in the cleft of a rock and places his hand in front of Moses face and then passes by him so that he can see his back after he has passed and the glory that surrounds him. God protects Moses from the consequences of sin.
So God’s plan was that at the right time he would intervene personally. The Law was given to show that mankind cannot save himself and that he needed a Saviour, and this is where Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception is so important and an essential part of the Church’s Doctrine. I have shown that sin and God cannot share the same space – the way to paradise was barred after the fall; God expels man and woman from the garden for their ultimate protection and subsequent salvation. How then could God become man in Mary’s womb if she were sinful? Moses was told, “No man can see me and live” and that was because, as St Paul teaches us “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” If Our Lady was a sinner how could she have carried God in her womb? The answer is: she couldn’t – she would not have been a worthy vessel. So God as part of his plan had predetermined that she would be sinless from the moment of her conception. Just as God, in his loving providence protects Moses from the consequences of sin, so he lovingly shields Our Lady from the effect of his presence by creating her free from sin.
Now, someone, who claims to be a protest-ant, once said to me “But that makes Mary less than human.” Unfortunately, this betrays an even more fundamental error: about the nature of what it means to be human. The Church understands that the Lord Jesus is both fully human and fully divine and yet he is without sin. He is fully human and not a sinner. In the first account of creation in Genesis after each of the various acts of creation that God brings into being we read “and God saw that it was good” and after creating mankind we read, “...and God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” Before the fall man and woman were without sin and they were therefore full of grace, created in the image of God. After the fall mankind is tainted with sin, and sin means that we are no longer full of grace. If the man and the woman had remained in the garden they would have died as they could no longer look on God and live – perhaps they instinctively knew this and that is why they hid out of shame when they heard him calling, rather like the little boy who goes to hide from his parents when he has done wrong.
Our Lady, by God’s grace, was spared this taint in order that she could be full of grace and as such a worthy vessel to bear God incarnate in her womb. To be human is to be called to become full of grace. Jesus, our Saviour, comes to redeem us, comes to set us free from our sins, bears the burden of them for us, destroys that which separates us from God in his own body on the Cross. We now have access to paradise once more through the saving action of Christ mediated to us through his continued saving action in the Sacraments he has given to his Church, and our faith in him. We are not yet perfect and full of grace, but putting our faith and trust in Christ we are being renewed daily in his image, that is: sanctified through the grace and power of the Holy Spirit. We are being filled with grace once more in order that we may share eternity with God in the garden, and where when he calls “Where are you?” we will no longer feel the need to resort to blame, or to hide from him in shame.
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