Mater Dei, mater mea.

A Sermon for the Annunciation

March 30, 2025 at Holy Communion

Jesus said, “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:50). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

Yesterday I was in Halifax giving a retreat day for a parish I had served in as a student. One of the prayers we were using in our sessions was the “Hail Mary”: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” and so on. I got chatting about it with one of the Wardens, and he told me about his childhood in Montreal. He remembers that at 7:00 AM there would be a voice that came on and said, “Let us pray” and then led the city in Our Father and Hail Mary. It was “very Catholic,” he said.

He told me that in those days Montreal was not so much divided by language like it is now, but by religion: Irish Catholics were definitely on the same team as French Catholics, and not on the same team as English, Scottish, German, and Irish Protestants. There wasn’t exactly acrimony—but there was separateness. The proof for this man I was chatting with was that, decades later, he met a man the exact same age who can grown up two streets down from him in Montreal. They had never met, because this other kid went to the Catholic school and played in the Catholic hockey league and shopped at the Catholic corner store and of course went to the Catholic church, but my friend was Protestant.

Today is all about Mary, the Mother of Jesus. This week, on March 25, it was the Annunciation, the annual celebration of the angel’s visit to Mary announcing that she would be the mother of the Messiah. Because during my three years here it has never fallen on a Sunday, we have never celebrated it, and I thought it’s time that we did.

So the reason I tell that story about Catholics and Protestants in Montreal is that, when it’s all about Mary, people think that you’re getting into “Catholic stuff.” And I want to dispel that. We are very grateful that Catholic-Protestant tensions have cooled off in Canadian society over the last several decades. Let’s not make the church a place where those tensions persist. Mary is the Mother of the our common God and Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, so let’s learn from her whatever we can—not as Protestants or Catholics, but just as Christians.

I’ve been telling the Christian education group that a Christian is someone who shares the life of Jesus. Christian self-understanding is what St Paul says in Galatians 2:20: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” By faith (our part, which God inspires in us) and sacramental grace (God’s part, with which we cooperate), Jesus’ death becomes our death to sin and self, and Jesus’ resurrection becomes our resurrection to righteousness, joy, and service.

So here’s the point: Jesus’ mother is also our mother. The rhyming Latin phrase “Mater Dei, Mater mea,” which means “the Mother of God [is] my Mother,” captures this succinctly. Mary is the Mother of God. She doesn’t give birth to or somehow generate the divine nature, as if she were the source of divinity, but she does give birth to the divine person of our God and Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It’s simple math: Jesus is God, Mary is Jesus’ mother, Mary is the mother of God. That’s the first part of Mater Dei, Mater mea, but the second part is where the lesson gets applied to us. Christians have God as their Father because they have been welcomed into Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. Christians have also been welcomed into Jesus’ identity as the Son of Mary.

If you are a Christian, you have a Mother in heaven, and not only a Father. Just as God’s fatherhood can be comfort (in different ways) to both people who had positive and negative experiences of their fathers on earth, so Mary’s motherhood can be a comfort to both people who had negative and positive experiences of their mothers. God is our Father without competing with our dads. Mary is our mother without competing with our moms.

Christians have always believed, those who have departed this life in faith are not dead and gone, but continue to live with Christ and pray for those of us who are still on our way. So you have a Mother in heaven who prays for you. As the Mother of Christ, she has a greater intimacy with the Godhead than any of us can imagine. Like her Son, she desires only what God desires. And all of that divine goodwill, poured out into Mary when she received Christ into her own body, is now directed towards us, her other children.

But I want to conclude with a different point. There’s a Gospel scene in Matthew 12 where Jesus mother and relatives are looking for him, and Jesus, instead of going out to meet them, looks around at his disciples and says, Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (v 49–50). If we get the logic of Mary being the Mother of all Christians because she is the Mother of Jesus, but then we stop there, we actually haven’t gone far enough into the depths of the mystery of what it means to live with God in Christ.

If I am in Christ and you are in Christ, then you and are one. If Christ’s Father is my Father, and Christ’s Father is your father, and we are brothers and sisters. If I am in Christ, then my mother is Christ’s Mother and Christ’s Mother is my mother. And you can press this kind of reasoning a long way. But the point is that, as our will is united to the divine will, that divine will is expressed as the care we give to one another in all our family relations. God’s will is that we be brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers to one another.

The mystery of union with God is the secret principle behind some of Saint Paul’s advice to the church, which is so mundane that we rarely give it much thought: in the church, we treat older gentlemen as fathers, older ladies as mothers, our peers as brothers and sisters, our juniors as beloved children (1 Timothy 5:1–2). The grace poured out into Mary is the same grace poured out into every Christian whom the divine will inspires to treat another Christian with motherly care.