I have noted before that due to the second Rector’s wife being called Mary and her untimely death early in his long ministry here the church is well endowed with Marian windows, statues and mosaics. One aspect of this is that we have not just one Mary shrine but two. Not all that many Episcopal churches have one shrine but we are blessed with two. The Madonna and Child in marble by Richard Westmacott, the celebrated English sculptor in the Holy Family Chapel was sculpted in 1825 and given to the parish we believe in 1875. The shrine in the Transept is in wood and is the work of the famous Gothic Revival architect Ralph Adams Cramm (who was the architect of St Thomas’ Fifth Ave here in Manhattan). It was installed in the 1920s to replace the original baptistery, the font being moved to the Holy Family Chapel from whence it was moved back into the nave of the church last year.

But I want to reflect on the two shrines for they are very different in style and reflect a different theology not only of Mary but of Christmas and its message of Incarnation. And while you may they think that is all very well but hardly relevant in fact it does have consequences for the church and for us today.

Let’s begin with the Ralph Adams Cramm Madonna in the Transept. There she stands slender and tall holding a serious child surrounded by gothic tracery. Mary looks “cool” not quite an ice maiden but northern and somewhat austere, very much in the gothic style. You do not feel particularly warm towards her; she looks rather too ascetic for my liking and perhaps rather pious. Not exactly the person you would want to party with.

By contrast Westmacott’s Madonna, which by the way was his only religious piece in a very large output, exudes a certain womanly warmth and the child is definitely a jolly plump boy. My reaction to the Westmacott is very different from the gothic Madonna in the transept. The Chapel Madonna feels very human in a classical sort of way. After all Westmacott mainly did sculptures on classical themes and in the classical style of ancient Greece and Rome. Thus his Madonna has a warmth and humanity about her. Her face is serene but gentle and loving. And as I said the child in her arms is positively cuddly.

If you like these two representations of the same present us with alternate ways of viewing what happened at Christmas. The gospel for today says in those memorable words “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” In other words God became one of us in the person of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate, or enfleshed One. This shocking fact led to quite a long theological struggle in the early church. For there were no categories for someone to be at one and the same time fully God and fully human. But in the end that is what the early church decided in its understanding of the two natures of Christ. In the Creed we state that Jesus Christ is “very God of very God” and who “came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man.” But for all that agreement we still struggle to come to terms with the humanity of Jesus. One of my better theological teachers used to love to shock his first year students with the provocative question, “what do you think about the sexuality of Jesus?” Now that was a very Sixties thing to do. But as we continue to struggle with issues of human sexuality in the church whether it be about the ordination of women or of gays and lesbians his question was quite valid.

That is where I come back to the artistic representations of the Holy Mother and Child I began with. The Cramm Madonna in the transept has an other worldliness about her. She is not quite someone’s Mum. She does not look like she has every washed a dish or changed a diaper.

Whereas the Westmacott Madonna while very beautiful seems to me more like a real woman, a genuine Mum who has entered into all the messiness of childbirth and child-rearing. You can feel her warmth and compassion. She seems to me to exude that full humanity which Jesus the Son of God assumed in the Incarnation.

I believe that as we come to terms with the fact of Incarnation, that God became one of us and one with us, so God enters into the fullness of our humanity, with all its complexions and ambiguities; with all its potential as well as its messiness. The practical consequences of this are that if God takes on the fullness of our humanity he claims it all for his own. In other words nothing is outside God’s creative and redemptive love. That is why I strongly believe that in becoming incarnate in Jesus God takes all that we are as human beings, that complex physical, psychological, emotional and sexual makeup with all the difference that it brings in individual persons and then uses it all for his glory.