Sermon for The Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary – 17th August 2025
Canon Revd Leonard Doolan – St Pau.’s Athens
Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary
On August 15th the church universal commemorates a feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This celebration is kept by the Orthodox, Catholic and Anglican traditions. It is permitted to move this feast to the nearest Sunday, as we are doing.
On this date the Orthodox speak of the Eternal Sleep of the Mother of God, and generally Blessed Mary is referred to in Orthodoxy as Panaghia – (All holy). The Roman Church celebrates what they now call the Assumption, a dogma that is barely 200 years old as currently understood. For this feast, theologically, the Anglican tradition is more akin to the East than to Rome, and for centuries since the Reformation we have commemorated the Dormition, the ‘falling asleep’ of the BVM.
The other important word for this feast is Theotokos – it means literally God-bearer. It is a title used of Blessed Mary. It is utterly illogical to call her the Mother of God. God is eternal with no beginning and no end. He is before time and outside time. He is as we say in the Creed of Nicea (325AD) – ‘one God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.’ How can it be logical for Blessed Mary to be the Mother of God?
Usually we think of a logical statement as something emanating, emerging out of sense, making sense of sense, if you like. But here, we need to have a warning sign. Our faith is just that, what it says on the tin – not logic but faith. However, the integrity of our faith depends on being logical; to have what Matthew Arnold called ‘sweet reasonableness’.
I would propose that the logic of referring to the Blessed Virgin as ‘God-Bearer’ or Mother of God, is a logic that has to be worked backwards not forwards – and is in fact the natural conclusion of the dogmatic work of the Councils of the Church – Nicea in 325AD, the 2nd Council of Ephesus in 431AD and ultimately in the Council of Chalcedon in 451AD. Chalcedon fully assumes, accepts and endorses the formulas of earlier Nicea, in which crucially Jesus is defined and proclaimed as both human and divine – equally two natures in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
So Blessed Mary is human mother of the incarnate Jesus, the fully human Jesus. The gospels attest to this truth. This same Jesus is also fully divine, so Mary is both mother of Jesus, but at the same time Mother of God, as her human son, Jesus, is fully divine. This is where the logic is to be discovered. It is on account of this that Blessed Mary is worthy of the titles ascribed to her by the Church.
In a way, the titles ascribed to blessed Mary ‘protect’ the dogmatic conclusions of the great Councils, whose conclusions are binding on us as traditional Christians, Anglicans included. For in Article 8 of the 39 articles of Religion, a key text for the Church of England, it says these creeds (Nicean, Athanasian and Apostles) ‘ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy scripture’. Yet, God does not need our protection – however the erroneous ways of his church have been proved in every generation to require correction.
In this Feast of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin, we learn something through her, as the Theotokos, Bearer of our Lord and God, about our own calling to inhabit and participate in the divine life. In this feast today there is a message about the continuity of our everyday earthly lives, into the life that does not come to an end. In our faith we believe that when we die our lives are not ended, but transformed, changed. As we have worshipped God in Christ here on earth, so when we pass from earthly life to heavenly life, we are infused with the company of all faithful believers, living and departed, the angels, saints, and the Blessed Virgin.
As Anglicans we may not necessarily have been exposed to a high profile of Blessed Mary, and if you are nurtured in some parts of the Anglican tradition you might even be forgiven for thinking that the Anglican Church ‘doesn’t do Mary’. Yet this would be an entirely wrong assessment of our own tradition. To neglect Blessed Mary would be a willful rejection of scriptural witness, and very specifically the first two chapters of St. Luke’s gospel where we are informed of ‘Mary’s first introduction into the divine story’ to use a phrase of the great Anglican priest and theologian, Austin Farrer. (Interpretation and Belief, SPCK 1976, p107).
We will do well, also, to mark what part the Blessed Virgin has in the evangelical proclamation of our faith. We recall in Luke Chapter 2 that Mary is ‘overshadowed by the power of God in the Holy Spirit’ and she conceives the Christ-child. Again, after the Resurrection, we read in the Acts of the Apostles (1, 14) that Mary is with the Apostles – that she participates in their life of prayer, and their common gathered activity. I would propose therefore, it is not at all unlikely that Mary was present with the Apostles on the Day of Pentecost, when for a second time in her life, she is overshadowed by the Holy Spirit of God. This, I would suggest, places her not just in the scriptural and dogmatic life of the church, but also in the pneumatological life of the Church – the church born of this Holy Spirit experience. So the Blessed Mary is honoured in the tradition of the great historic churches.
The gifted Anglican hymn writer and Bishop Thomas Ken (1637-1711), wrote a beautiful hymn which begins “Her Virgin eyes saw God incarnate born”. Bishop Ken was no supporter of Roman Catholicism, not by any means, yet he penned this beautiful hymn about Blessed Mary. The final stanza runs as follows,
Heaven with transcendent joys her entrance graced,
Next to his throne her Son his Mother placed;
And here below, now she’s of heaven possest,
All generations are to call her blest.
As Anglicans we may not grant Mary the high profile in the way the Orthodox and Roman Catholics do, but we fool ourselves if we think her imprint is not present in the life of our church; if we think that her place in the Body of Christ is not unique, and therefore worthy of honour; if we think that she is simply incidental to the work of salvation that God is doing in Christ. Again, Austin Farrer, offers us a worthy reflection on this.
‘If she is loved, it is because she is; she has her place in the Body of Christ and it is a place no other creature can share. Christ is worshipped for what he uniquely is in each of his sainted members; the relation of Mary to Jesus is an endless subject of fruitful contemplation, and her will is a handle to take hold of the will of God. Her glory is that she is the virgin mother of God; what more can be added to it?’ (Interpretation and Belief, p123).
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