Saint Mary the Virgin

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Here is an excerpt from a sermon preached on this day in 2007 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ :

The assumption is that moment when the promises become real for one member of the mystical body of Christ and so assure us all that the symbolic world indeed is giving way to reality. That reality is the resurrection of the mystical body of Christ and its formation in the world across the boundaries of time and space. It is a reality that we form even this day, but we form in faith and in hope, heirs of the promise that we hold this day in clay vessels as we await the redemption of our bodies.

Mary has passed from the symbolic into the real. That is the first meaning of this day’s feast. We, in the heat of the summer, oppressed by the heat of our lives and the weight of its deep humidity, find renewed hope for the redemption of our own bodies.

We stand this day in hope, even as we look to heaven to behold a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars.

- The Reverend Peter De Franco, Jr