The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
August 12, 2007

St. Mary the Virgin (transferred)
Isaiah 61:10-11
Galatians 4:4-7
Luke 1:39-55

“During the first days of October a few white, downy snowflakes hung quivering in the air, floated about, fell in great oscillating circles. They seemed headed for nowhere; they followed no common course; but finally they reached the ground and disappeared.” This is O. E. Rolvaag’s description of the early days of winter for those hardy Norwegians who settled the Dakotas in the 1870s. It is also a good description of the winter of our lives today, we who follow no common course and who seem headed for nowhere.

How, in the winter of our lives in our day, do we decide who and what we value, and how we are to live and act? Stanley Hauerwas, a contemporary moral theologian, says (in The Peaceable Kingdom) that decisions about what is good or valuable are always tied to a particular place and time a people live in. Human beings, in other words, make their decisions about values and ethics in the context of their understanding of who they are in history at their particular place and time. And this makes it difficult for us in 21st-century America, because, in our day, we don’t seem to know who we are.

As a people, we are uncertain about how to live because we are uncertain about what we value, uncertain about what is good and what is not, often uncertain even as to whether there is a good that can be discerned, and therefore deeply divided into blues and reds in every area of life because we no longer know or believe a shared story of who we are. So we drift in a world of moral leftovers, a world of moral fragments literally left over from an earlier people who did share a story and who did largely agree on who they were and who, therefore, had a better handle on how to make important decisions about how to live.

But the moral leftovers from earlier days in our history, those guidelines that collect dust on a few bookcases here and there and still adorn some of our public shrines, are not very helpful to us, because we no longer share, to any great degree, the story of those who left them to us.

So, as a people, the moral life for us has simply become a “consumer” life. “I want this.” Or, ”I prefer that.” “I have this toothpaste preference and that ‘lifestyle’ preference,” as if all choices in life are cut of the same cloth and carry equal significance. So we base our decisions, not upon moral benefit, but upon polls and marketing research: get enough people to want this or to prefer that and the entrepreneurs of every sector – economic, political, and religious as well – will pull out all stops to meet the demands of our desires and preferences.

As a people, we no longer know how to choose between that which truly valuable and good and that which is not because, as a people, we are no longer sure that we are participants in that story, God’s story, where the good and the valuable are to be found. We simply choose whatever we desire to choose, creating and serving those lesser gods the Bible calls idols, thinking they will satisfy us.

So we drift like a few white, downy snowflakes in October that hang quivering in the air, floating about and falling in great oscillating circles. We follow no common course and seem headed for nowhere, and finally simply reach the ground and, in time, are buried and disappear.

But as Samuel Johnson reminded us last week, there’s nothing like the prospect of dying to focus the mind. “Depend upon it, sir,” said Johnson to Boswell, ”when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Just so was the mind of Dick wonderfully concentrated. Dick was the young, successful lawyer we met last week, the one who ended up with a heart attack in the emergency room at three o’clock one morning.

“What do the doctors say about the future?” my friend asked him when they visited in Dick’s garden after Dick returned home. “Oh, the doctors say I will be able to resume a normal active life,” Dick replied, ”back to the way I used to live. But I’m not going to do that. I’ve stood before death, and I’ve received life back as a gift. I don’t know yet just how I’ll live out that gift, but I do know that my life will never be the same.”

“It got me to thinking,” said my friend, ”that visit to Dick’s garden. Thinking about how we focus our vision of who we are and where we’re going and what the living of life is all about anyway. It got me to thinking about where we stand to look at life and set the course for our journeys. Because, whether we stop to think about it or not, we all do stand somewhere: we all do have a vision that shapes who we are and how we live.”

That’s why we come to church, isn’t it? We come to church – do we not? – to see where we stand as Christians, so that we can focus our vision of life. And here in church we consider what Jesus and the saints have to offer. We consider, for example, that other man in last week’s sermon, the young man who pushes his way up out of the crowd to Jesus and asks Jesus to make his brother share the family inheritance with him, and we consider how Jesus then tells the parable of the rich fool who focused his vision on building bigger banks to hold all his money in, but who died anyway that very night.

And this morning we consider the way Jesus then follows up with more of the story that would be today’s Gospel reading if we weren’t celebrating the Feast of St. Mary. We consider how Jesus follows up with more wisdom about how it doesn’t do any good to worry about your life, about what you are to wear or eat, because worrying doesn’t add a single hour to the time God gives us anyway. And we consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, how they don’t worry and God clothes and feeds them all right...

...and how God loves us even more than the birds and the lilies, and how God is even pleased to give us his kingdom. And we consider how Jesus suggests to his disciples, and to us, that we might sell our possessions and give to the poor, and so, instead of putting stock in treasure that wears out, we might more wisely provide ourselves with treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, treasure that no thief can steal and no moth destroy.

We consider, too, how Jesus tells us all this because it is truth, because the truth is that our hearts really are found wherever our treasure is. Consider that as a vision of who we are and how we are to live!

If, this morning, amidst all the social and moral drift we experience today, we were wonderfully to concentrate our minds and hearts, if we were to focus them upon what we truly treasure, where would that focus lead us?

Where do we stand today to take the measure of our vision of life at our particular hour in the human journey? What is the treasure that we hope will provide for us at the moment of crisis and judgment in our day? What treasure, at this particular moment, focuses our vision of where we’re headed in life and of how many barns or banks we need? And which God speaks to us the real story of our lives? Which God speaks the truth of our lives rather than simply tickling our latest fancies?

There are, as Jesus and the Preacher in Ecclesiastes reminded us last week, gods that we can count on to fail us in the end: money, power, fame, success, all manner of correctness, whether political or racial or sexual or intellectual or even religious. In the end, all these fail us, Jesus and the Preacher insist.

Well, of course, there is an alternative, an alternative vision, an alternative story, an alternative treasure, which is the story and the vision Mary sings of today:

My soul magnifies the Lord,
    and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
    for he has been mindful of the low estate of his servant.

From now on all generations will call me blessed,
    for the Mighty One has done great things for me –
    holy is his Name.

His mercy extends to those who fear him
    from generation to generation.

He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
    he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts;
    he has brought down rulers from their thrones.

He has lifted up the humble;
    he has filled the hungry with good things;
    but he has sent the rich away empty

He has helped his servant Israel,
    in remembrance of his mercy,
    as he spoke to our fathers,
    to Abraham and to his posterity for ever.


It was winter, too, when Mary sang her song, a time of social and political and moral drift not all that different from our own. Israel had seen no prophet for three hundred years. The conqueror’s legions from the west, then as now, took might to be the measure of right and patrolled the streets of the conquered. Then as now, dill and cumin were tithed with pride, while the weightier matters of justice and mercy required coin for their purchase.

But when Mary sang, Elizabeth said that she was blessed, and that the fruit of her womb was blessed as well. And Mary said that all generations would call her blessed. Why? Why was Mary blessed, rich beyond measure despite the drift of her day?

Mary was blessed because she remembered. Mary was blessed, rich beyond measure, because she knew who she was. She remembered her story. She remembered the One who scatters the proud and brings down the mighty from their thrones, the One whose mercy extends to those who fear him from generation to generation, even to poor handmaidens like her. She knew the story of the God of Israel, she knew where she stood in that story, and she accepted her part in it. In her low estate of that cold, early morning when the angel Gabriel spoke to her, Mary knew that her hope lay only in God, whose promise endures, whose promise is treasure no circumstance can exhaust or destroy.

Mary was blessed because she consented to bear truth to the world, God’s Word for all seasons. She was blessed because she relied upon the treasure that was available to her; she called upon the hope Israel’s story provided and sang about the story of God’s way with the world – about how God’s heart, too, is where God’s treasure is: with the lowly and poor, like Mary, and about how God remembers them and raises them up and blesses them and gives them great purpose, a purpose that is bigger than today’s “I want” and tomorrow’s “I prefer.”

That is why Mary was blessed. She was blessed because she was God’s treasure, and knew it. And she was blessed because of the treasure she possessed, the story and promise of God, a treasure that is not exhausted in the winters of our lives, not even at the threshold of death. Mary knew who she was and whose she was – child of God, God’s daughter, God’s heir, God’s servant – and so she said “Yes” to God’s vision of life, a vision that was where her heart was, because it was her treasure.

We need an audit of our treasure chests today. Perhaps the best records of our personal treasure are our post-it notes, those signs of our time and commitments we hang on our refrigerators at home and on our bulletin boards at church, and our check stubs, those records of what we spend our time and money on, the record of where we find our hearts.

Just what is there? Is it treasure that is portable as well as substantial? Would an audit of your treasure chest reveal a trove that would survive a trip to the emergency room at three o’clock in the morning or to those other crossroads of life where businesses fail or where a husband or wife falls apart, or to those times when dreams fade or a child is missing?

Jesus himself, of course, stood at just such a crisis in life outside Jerusalem when he faced the Cross on his day of judgment. Jesus, too, was blessed, rich beyond measure, even on that cold late-winter day, just as Elizabeth said he would be, because the fruit of Mary’s womb, like Mary herself, also knew who he was and whose he was. And as he was raised on the Cross, the story and promise of God was treasure that did not fail him, but enabled him to live out his life and his death with a difference, a life and a death much bigger than “I want” or “I prefer.”

This past week we celebrated the feast day of still another who stood at the place and moment of crisis where Mary and Jesus stood, another who was blessed in his day by the treasure they left him. St. Laurence, a deacon, was martyred at Rome in the year 258. Roasted alive, tradition says, broiled on a gridiron.

The year before, the emperor Valerian began a persecution aimed primarily at the richer classes of Christians, which included Laurence. Valerian confiscated the properties of the Church. He took for government use all the buildings and grounds – buildings and grounds such as ours here – and told Laurence and his brothers in Christ that they could no longer gather for worship.

The bishop, Sixtus the Second, and seven deacons were arrested. All of them were executed on August 4, all except Laurence, whom the emperor believed could lead him to the treasures of the Church. So showing Laurence the bodies of his bishop and brother Christians, the emperor ordered Laurence to bring him the Church’s treasures.

Well, there’s nothing like the prospect of roasting on a gridiron to focus a man’s vision. So Laurence did what he was told. He gathered together all the poor and the sick for whom, as deacon, he was responsible, and he brought them to the emperor and said, “These are the treasures of the Church.”

Laurence’s vision, too, was the vision of the Magnificat, the vision of Mary’s song that tells a story we can still hear today, if we open our ears and hearts to it – that the treasure of God is us, the needy, the poor, and the poor in spirit, those who know their need for God. It is a vision that sings of a God whose love is so great that he himself comes to share with us the winters of our lives, to raise us up and to bless us, because God’s heart, too, is where God’s treasure is.

Mary’s magnificent story, Jesus’ story, God’s story is treasure that does not drift in circles and disappear, a story that is not exhausted in the moment of crisis and judgment. It is treasure we can call upon in any season – if it is, in fact, our story as well; if, in truth, we see ourselves as part of it as sons and daughters of God.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.