Every Sunday Christians gather to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ. We gather on Sunday because this is the day when the disciples found the tomb empty and knew that Christ had risen from the dead. We remember the Last Supper, too, when we share the bread and wine. We do this because Jesus promised that as we share the bread and wine, so we become part of Christ and Christ becomes part of us. And if we are share the life of Christ, if Christ lives in us, then, we believe that we will share his resurrection. The resurrection that we celebrate today is the promise of our own resurrection on the last day.

Sometimes our Sunday worship includes thanksgiving and prayer for other things. Today we have been asked to pray with all the people of New South Wales for rain which is desperately needed in this state. We pray for and with each other and all Christian people of every time and place. Just as we ask our particular friends to pray for us, so we ask the saints to pray for us. In this church we celebrate St Augustine and St Luke every year on the anniversary of their death. We do this because they are the patrons of this community of faith, and they are as much part of it as anyone here. Saints' days are important because it gives us the chance to remember their lives and ministry and to give thanks for what God has done through them.

Today we give thanks for Mary, the Mother of Our Lord. The church remembers her death on August 15th.

In the Roman Catholic Church they call today the feast of the Assumption, because that church has declared that Mary did not die as we do, but was carried by the angels alive into heaven.

If you search the Bible you will actually find very little about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her name, her husband's name, some stories about Jesus' birth, the fact that she was present on the day of Pentecost, but nothing about the rest of her life or her death. All that has grown up over the centuries as the church told and retold her story. For example, the story that Mary's parents were Joachim and Anna did not appear for 800 years after Christ, and it was only 150 years ago that the Pope declared that Mary was born without any trace of sin. And the feast that our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers are celebrating today, the Assumption, was declared an article of faith by the Pope as recently as 1950.

If you talk to a Roman Catholic and ask them about Mary, Mother of our Lord, you will find that 99 percent of what they tell you does not come from the Bible. It is almost all stories that have arisen from the community of the church.

And Christians should ask why this has happened, why Mary is such an important person in our life of faith, why she, of all saints, has been so honoured by the church.

I cannot give you a full explanation - the book (Alone of all her sex, Marina Warner, published by Picador in 1985) I have been reading on the subject is 400 pages long - but the easy answer is that we respect and honour Mary because, as a human being, she chose to love and to listen to God. We respect and honour her because, as a woman and mother, she gave birth to Jesus, the Son of God, and saw him grow to adult maturity and saw him die on the cross. We respect and honour her because, as a disciple, she struggled with her disbelief and doubts, and received the gift of God's Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

For this reason I have chosen the hymns we are singing today. The Magnificat, or the song of Mary, comes from Luke's Gospel. It is a song reflecting Mary's courageous choice to obey God, giving thanks for God's love and kindness through the ages, giving praise for God's justice which scatters the proud, casts down the mighty and empties the rich, lifting up the weak and lowly, giving food to the hungry and helping those who love him; a God faithful in promise, powerful to act, and present in the world in the beginning, now and for ever. It is a song sung by Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel when he was born many years after Hannah had given up the hope of children. It is the song sung by Miriam, the sister of Moses, when Pharaoh and all his horses and chariots were swallowed by the Red Sea. It is a song of God's greatness and it is good for us to join the women of the bible in singing God's praise.

The hymn which follows the sermon is from the 15th Century. I chose it in contrast to the Magnificat. It is a gentle song where Christ is seen as a flower, a rose, bringing beauty, sweetness, light and peace to the world. But even in its gentleness there is power; as Mary's arms enfold God's promise in the second verse we glimpse again her determination to see God's plan of salvation achieved.

I chose Elizabeth Smith's hymn to start with because it gives us a modern perspective of Mary. In the hymn, Mary is a very human person, responding to God with that mixture of faith and uncertainty with which all humans approach God. Mary had the courage to say, "Let it be done for me according to the will of God." Mary's response to God is one of determination and consent. She declared herself to be God's servant and committed herself to God's will, even though she had no idea where it would lead. She would bear a child, certainly, who would be called the Son of the Most High God, but as a human she had no clear vision of the future.

As she listened and watched her son's life unfold, she saw the wisdom of God at work. At times it was hard for her, sometimes she thought he might be mad, when, according to Matthew, she and her other children came to take him home. Sometimes she showed an astonishing faith, as at the wedding at Cana, where the water became wine, when she told the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." She shared the pain of God when Christ was crucified - a mother's suffering when the child they have borne suffers is terrible indeed. The gospels do not record her reaction to the Resurrection, but we do know that she shared the joy of the church as God's Holy Spirit was poured out on it.

Elizabeth Smith, who is a parish priest in Melbourne, sees Mary as a human being who lives and grows through her encounter with God, just as we can live and grow in our lives with God. Christians are those who consent to receive the love of God and become obedient to its force and power. God's love gives us faith and wisdom, endurance and courage in our pain, and an inner peace, power and grace through the Holy Spirit, poured out on all God's people.

As we see this in Mary, Mother of our Lord, we honour her for it and pray that we too may have faith and wisdom, endurance, courage, inner peace, power and grace.