We are here this morning to celebrate the patronal festival of this church: to give thanks for the opportunity to worship here together, to give thanks for the building itself and the many who have entered these doors over the centuries.  The church to which we belong is in many ways our second home, and our surrogate family.  Here we are ushered through the major transitions of life: birth and baptism, marriage, and death are all celebrated and given meaning through the rituals enacted and the words spoken in this place.  This is where our own families, and the family of the church, are recognised and honoured.  Just as the mantelpiece of a family home will have trinkets and mementos, pictures and cards that remind us of those we love, so here we have pictures and memorials in glass and stone that tell us of the wider family to which we belong.  Some may be saints, and all are sinners, but together we inspire each other to live the Christian life.

This acknowledgement of our need of each other, and of our deep belonging together is brought out in the wonderful reading from the letter to the Romans that we heard just now: ‘For those whom God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family.’  Now don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about predestination this morning; but it is a wonderful thing to hear St Paul describing Jesus as ‘the firstborn within a large family’.  That means that not only is Jesus our elder brother, but that Mary and Joseph are our parents too.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, the mother of God, is our own mother also.  In bearing Jesus, in saying Yes to the message of the angel, she has born us, brought us into this family of faith, taken her part in the incredible gift of life in her son.

So today we are celebrating the birthday of our mother.  And as we give thanks for Mary, and for all who have mothered and nurtured us in our life of faith, let us look further at how Mary leads us in the way of faith, and in what way Mary can teach us how to pray.

The first scene that leaps from the pages of the Gospels concerning Mary is of course the annunciation, the meeting of Mary with the Angel Gabriel, who says to her: ‘Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.’  In depictions of the annunciation, Mary is often shown kneeling at a small table saying her prayers, reading from a prayer-book open before her.  Early church traditions say that Mary spent much time in the temple at Jerusalem as a young girl.  Perhaps she was like the prophet Anna whom she later meets in the temple when she brings her newborn son to be presented to God.  Mary was certainly a devout young woman, and it may well be that Jesus himself learned the first steps of prayer directly from his mother.  It is while praying that Mary is visited by an angel and told of the future birth of her son.  At first her response is confusion: Luke says that ‘she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.’ In this response Mary is already teaching us about prayer.  Prayer begins with an openness, a receptiveness to God, often at those times when we have specifically sat down with a prayer-book in hand and set ourselves to pray.  Mary begins with an expectation that God is going to speak with her, whether or not in the time-honoured words of the prayers she no doubt knows by heart.  But she is perplexed by the words of the angel, she cannot understand what they mean.  That, surely, is an encouragement to us also.  If Mary didn’t understand what God was saying to her through the angel, then we too are fully justified when we cannot make sense of what God may be saying to us.  But Mary ponders the words of the angel.  She doesn’t understand them, but she doesn’t dismiss them either.  She mulls them over in her mind; and that is a lot of what prayer is about.  Prayer often begins with a word of scripture, or some prayer of the church, which we simply mull over in our minds, which we weigh in our hearts.  We don’t need to understand the words at the start, or even at the finish, but we take them and savour them, maybe memorise the words, and as the collect says, ‘inwardly digest them’.  A number of times in Luke’s Gospel, Mary is depicted as hearing something she doesn’t understand, like the words of the shepherds at the birth of Jesus, and pondering these things in her heart.  She doesn’t try to explain them, but she mulls them over, she explores their meaning in the presence of God.

This questioning of God comes out even more strongly in a later story concerning Mary and the brothers and sisters of Jesus.  The whole family is gathered outside the door of a house where Jesus is teaching his disciples.  They have come because they have heard that Jesus is out of his mind and they want to restrain him.  But Jesus says, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’  And looking at those sat around him he said: ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ (Mark 3:19-35).  It is an interesting story because it shows that even Mary did not fully understand Jesus.  She was worried about him, perhaps thinking that he had let his healing and teaching ministry go to his head.  ‘Who does that son of mine think he is?’ she might have said to his brothers.  But Mary is still the one who has said, and who continues to say, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.’  Mary herself hears the word of God and does it, and so qualifies on this ground alone to be the brother, sister and mother of Jesus.  But in the process, Mary shows us that it is alright to doubt Jesus, to be mystified by him, to knock on the door and say, ‘What’s going on? Are you out of your mind?’   Prayer is not simply the blind acceptance of whatever happens to us in life.  Prayer can also be a debate with God, a struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel in the Old Testament, a struggle which leaves us limping from the scene.  Mary is not always meek and mild: she brings her complaints directly to Jesus himself.

Mary is nothing if not persistent.  But it is this persistence and courage that carries her through the final dark days of the life and death of Jesus.  Mary is one of the few people to stick it out to the bitter end, to stand at the foot of the cross and share the pain of Jesus as he takes his last gasps of breath.  Mary does not hide from the pain, but confronts it, and experiences it not alone but in the company of the other women with her and with the beloved disciple.  Together they offer up their pain, and the life of her son Jesus, to the God who promised through the prophet Simeon that a sword would pierce her own soul too.  And Jesus, in his turn, entrusts Mary and the beloved disciple to each other, to care for each other as mother and son when he is gone.  And so Jesus in this act entrusts Mary to us also, and us to her, to bear together something of the pain of the world, and to pray for its release.  Mary shows us that prayer does not hide from pain, nor try to explain it away.  In prayer we bear the pain, as we share it with each other and with Christ on the cross.  In our prayers we stand with Mary at the foot of the cross, we open ourselves to the suffering of those around us, and we pray for God’s kingdom of healing and plenty to be visible here on earth.

But that is not the end.  We do not stay at the foot of the cross forever, for we need to journey with Mary back to the heart of Jerusalem to await God’s greatest gift to the church.  The Acts of the Apostles says that Mary was with the disciples and the brothers of Jesus as they continued to meet for prayer in the upper room in Jerusalem where they were staying.  She would have been there in that group when the Spirit descended like the rush of a violent wind and in tongues of fire.  The Holy Spirit would have filled Mary also, reuniting her with her lost and mourned for son.

At Pentecost the Spirit came in a dramatic way, with wind and fire, enabling the disciples to speak in other languages.  But the Spirit doesn’t always come in such a dramatic way.  On the first Easter Day, as recorded in John’s Gospel, when the disciples were gathered in that upper room, Jesus appeared suddenly among them.  First he greeted them, saying ‘Shalom’, Peace be with you.  Then he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’  The Holy Spirit comes as gently as the breath, bringing forgiveness and the grace of finally letting go.  When we pray we can allow God’s Spirit to enter us simply by breathing, by consciously allowing the breath to enter and leave the body.  This is how Jesus taught the disciples to receive the Holy Spirit on that first day of the week.  And St Paul tells us more about this Spirit, this breath of God, in his letter to the Romans.  He says: ‘the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words’ (Rom.8:26).  God’s Spirit sighs, exhales, within us.  God breathes through us, and that sigh is all we need to say.  Everything else we let go.  Thoughts arise and fall away, but the breath remains a constant ebb and flow, like waves at the sea-shore.  God breathes his peace into to us and washes away our fear.

And it is the Spirit, the Breath, that reveals we are brothers and sisters of Jesus, children of Mary, and ultimately children of God: ‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God, (by the breath of God within us,) are children of God’ says Paul (Rom.8:14); ‘when we cry ‘Abba, Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (v.16).  When our breath and the breath of God mingle, then we can know that God is within us, that God is closer to us than the air in our lungs, closer than the blood in our veins.  And that, in the end, is the purpose of prayer.

So Mary has taken us on a long journey.  She gives us birth as Christians by allowing the life of God to become incarnate within her.  She shows us how to ponder the words of God and of angels.  She encourages us to question Jesus, even to argue with him, to share with him all our doubts and fears.  She gives us the strength to stay with Jesus even to the end, to the depths of our suffering and the suffering of those we love.  And by her presence in that desolate praying community in the upper room in Jerusalem, she shows us how Jesus can breathe into us his Holy Spirit, bringing us forgiveness and newness of life.  And when we receive that Spirit we can finally know for ourselves, in our own experience, that God is here, now, in this church and in all places, breathing his love into our hearts, setting us free.