Preacher: Fr Morris | Well, as we celebrate today the birthday of Our Lady we might ask ourselves where’s her birthday cake? Where are the presents? Why has no one taken any photographs yet? Or videos of people dancing, if this is meant to be a birthday party?

The reality of our Lady’s life, living two thousand years ago in Nazareth would have been one of simplicity, never to have travelled more than a few miles away. This was, of course, until she had to flee for her own life, becoming a refugee and having to go to Egypt pretty soon after giving birth: those tender moments of discovering the personality of her new born child spent as a fugitive. We can assume Anne and Joachim, her parents, would have given Mary presents as they loved her very much. Ditto Joseph, her husband, but the tradition of the Church is that he died before Jesus’s death and she needed to be cared for no longer by her Son, but by St John who stands at the foot of the Cross next to her, gazing at their Saviour.

We are reminded of the poverty of the Holy Family whenever we celebrate the Queen of Heaven. Today is no exception, with the prophecy of Micah reminding us of the insignificance of the birth place of Our Lord, Bethlehem, even more so, not in a royal house or hall, but in stable dark and dim, as the hymn puts it. Mary teaches us that even in our poverty we have ourselves to give and Mary offers her entire self and ensures she is as united as possible to the life-giving grace of God.

Mary gives us gifts. The reason some Christians don’t really love Mary is because they don’t really believe that the Resurrection of Jesus has an effect on peoples’ lives today. They end up denying that Mary can do things because she is dead: ‘she can’t pray for you because she’d dead;’ ‘she can’t love you because she’s dead.’ This is nonsense. Paul reminds the Thessalonians that we are not to grieve as others do who have no hope (I Thessalonians 4:13). Death cannot separate us from the love of God, Paul instructs the Romans (Romans 8:38-39) and so prayer, the union of the will to God, continues beyond the grave.

Yes, Mary gives us gifts. We are members of the Body of Christ through our baptism, the Body she bore in her womb and therefore she is our Mother. What mother would not give her children gifts? She gives us the gift of praying for us. She offers to us the gift of her Son, given for the life of the world. She gives us the gift of herself in which she shows us what faithful obedience looks like as she proclaims the greatness of the Lord. All gift-giving that we do, be it at Christmas or for birthdays, is to share in the generosity of God, who gives to us.

As Jesus prepares to return to Heaven following His resurrection, He promises to send the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the gift. The Holy Spirit overshadowed the Blessed Virgin that she might conceive and bear a Son. On Pentecost Sunday, Mary is found in the Upper Room in Jerusalem with the eleven Apostles and with other women. There they are “constantly devoting themselves to prayer” together (Acts 2) and the Holy Spirit comes to them. And today, my friends, the Holy Spirit comes down on the offerings of Bread and Wine that they too might become for us the Body and Blood of the Lord. And we who receive them are transformed by what we offer here.

Like any good mother, Mary wants us to have at our disposal all the best tools possible to live life abundantly, supreme among them the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. We see these listed in Isaiah 11 and are the gifts the Bishop will pour down on those to be confirmed here at the end of November. And if you’re interested in being confirmed, remember those classes start next Sunday at 2pm and there are more details in a letter at the back of Church about that. To discern the Holy Spirit at work in us will be to see evidence of these gifts in our lives. They are possessed in abundance solely by the Lord Jesus, who generously shares them with us to the end that we might further grow in holiness.

I’m going to say something briefly about each gift in turn. Wisdom has a clear sense of what God wants and steers that course. Understanding perceives God at work. Counsel is when we allow ourselves to be directed by God. Fortitude means we do this even when it’s dangerous or self evidently disadvantageous to us. Knowledge helps us to make good decisions. Piety is getting our responsibilities correct to others: loving God above all and revering Him appropriately; adoring the Saints but not worshipping them; being dutiful to our neighbour and those to whom we have obligations. Fear of God is not a fear of punishment from a judgemental God; this fear is again a reverence and affection as we might have as for a parent. Whee you see these gifts in you, you know it is God’s Spirit at work.

These gifts of the Holy Spirit are different to the fruits of the Holy Spirit. The gifts are seen as something permanent in our nature which we each hold to a different extent; none of us have them in their totality. They are gifts that God chooses to give to us or not. Through life we are increasingly to cooperate with what God wants us to do and not expect life to be determined by our own priorities. Through this we will bear fruit, the fruits of the Spirit. These are based on the list in Galatians 5 and termed by the tradition of the Church as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control and chastity. These become signs of the dispositions we possess by gift.

Notice in our Collect at the start of Mass that today’s celebration of the birthday of the Mother of God is to bring about peace for us, one of these fruits of the Holy Spirit. We sing too in the Gloria on Sundays outside Lent: “on earth peace to everyone of good will,” echoing the angels who announced the Saviour’s birth. The peace proclaimed is not simply an absence of war or meaning we’re not arguing with other people. Peace is a state where we have got the relationship with God right and where we have worked out our own identity. There’s a welcome realisation in society now of the importance of people’s identity and how that connects with their wellbeing. Society has got a lot more to learn about how identity affects the way an individual connects with society: just because people share particular aspects to their identity does not mean they will interact with society in the same way. But getting this equilibrium about who we are correct will help us to know peace.

So, we celebrate our heavenly Mother’s birthday and we do this because we are children, through baptism made members of the Body of Christ, which she bore in her womb. We are reassured then of our proximity to Jesus if His Mother is our Mother. This will give us  gifts, including the gift of peace, a peace the world cannot give. Amen.