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Luke 1:
39-55
May 10, 2009 THE MOTHER OF CHRISTWith this being Mother's Day and also what our Christian tradition refers to as "The Festival of the Christian Home", this morning I would have us consider what it means to be "The Mother of Christ." Understandably, many automatically think of the Mother of Christ as being synonymous with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and so let's begin there and see what the bible has to say about Mary and thus by implication how she might be a role model for ourselves in our own families and communities. If you were to walk through a neighborhood down in Brooklyn or Queens, New York or virtually any other predominantly Roman Catholic community, chances are you would see statue after statue of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Why Mary plays such a prominent role in Roman Catholic spirituality would make for an interesting study and maybe it would be good if our Protestant tradition paid more attention to her. Some would argue that it would help to restore more of a sense of balance in our theologies between masculinity and femininity. In some theologies, Mary introduces a softer, more nurturing image of God, and if one were brought up to think of God as being an angry, overbearing, unforgiving, judgmental sort of God, then I think we can see how Mary – representing the Divine Feminine -- would make God more accessible. This, of course, assumes that the traditional gender stereotypes hold some truth, and being male, I hate to admit that probably they do. Be that as it may, it's not really or not only Theology that I want to talk about today but rather Anthropology. Rather than see what Mary has to say about the Nature of God, I would rather focus on what she has to say about our human nature. In one of his poems, WH Auden in his long Christmas poem has one of the Wise Men say, "To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow the Star." Mary is one of the "stars" of our Christian faith, and so it would behoove us to learn more about her life and what it means to be human and specifically, what it means to be a "Mother of Christ." Unfortunately, the bible, perhaps because it was written by men, doesn't offer us much information about this woman. There is some apocryphal material outside the canon of the bible that suggests that after the crucifixion Mary may have traveled with John over to what is now Turkey where she made her home on a mountain outside of Ephesus, and indeed, there is a chapel there dedicated to her memory, a chapel by the way, in which both Christians and Muslims come to worship. But all that we can find in the pages of the bible itself are just a few snippets here and there, but they are enough, I submit, to get the measure of this woman. I am intentionally glossing over the notion of Mary's virginity. For some, that's a very important part of their theology, but for me what was really important was the words attributed to Mary in that passage from scripture known as the Magnificat, our scripture lesson for this morning. Before Jesus was born, this young woman who
was probably only about 14 or 15 years of age, recalling the words of her great,
great grandmother, a woman by the name of Hannah, said this: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
My hope and my prayer is that all mothers would exemplify that same sort of strange combination of humility and nobility. Here is a humble woman who saw herself as being of a "low estate", and yet she dreamed that her unborn child would be a blessing for all future generations. "My soul magnifies the Lord." Would that that could be said of us all, men and women! Would that our souls were such that we were each one of us a magnifying lens by which others might come to see that which otherwise might be invisible, namely the love and the grace of God. That might be a spiritual exercise we all could employ. When you evaluate yourself, are you like a telescope turned around backward, a lens that makes God more distant, less visible, less apparent, less real? Or, are you more like Mary, a magnifying lens by which Ultimate Reality becomes more real, a lens by which people can come to see Love with a capital L and Hope with a capital H and Grace with a capital G more clearly? I would hope that we all could say, "My Soul magnifies the Lord." Mary goes on from there to anticipate the kind of blessing that her child would be for the world. Through his influence, the "high and mighty would be put down from their positions of power and authority" and those who had come to think of themselves as being "less than nothing" would be exalted, and the hungry would be filled with good things." That's a pretty amazing dream for a child-mother of only 14 or 15 years of age? Would that all mothers and fathers exemplified that sort of spiritual maturity! It is understandable that all or at least most Mothers and Fathers dream great dreams for their children. Some dream that they'll do very well in school, and they dream that they'll have the financial resources to put their children into the very best of schools. Others dream that their children will excel at sports; others simply hope that their child will grow up to be happy and healthy. All of these are good dreams, to be sure, but blessed are those exceptional parents, those who dream that their children will have a social conscience, that they will be revolutionaries, turning the world upside down and inside out. Blessed are those mothers and fathers who dream that their children will grow up to make a difference in this world, helping the "hungry to be filled with good things." Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was certainly one of these exceptional parents, and as such, it is altogether appropriate that she is venerated as she is. In the Eastern church she is sometimes called, "The Mother of God" and in many of their churches and cathedrals and also in the Anglican church as well, there is a "Lady Chapel", usually just to the side or behind the main altar of the church, a place where one could pray, using Mary as sort of a intermediary between Divinity and Humanity, and my hope is that people come away from those altars with a renewed determination to "magnify the Lord" themselves, to allow themselves to be a magnifying lens by which such Divine things as Love and Grace and Hope and Peace and Justice and Compassion might more clearly be seen, and if we are such a "lens" then regardless of whether we are male or female, whether we have biological children or not, we are what I would call, "The Mother of Christ." Now, for some of us I know, we get hung up on that word, "Christ", primarily because too often we have been taught to think of Christ as being a name exclusively reserved for the person of Jesus who lived 2000 years ago. If Jesus were here I think he would be the very first to acknowledge that that is a perversion of the word "Christ." Too many in the history of the Christian church have thought that Christ was simply Jesus' last name – Jesus Christ -- but to put the mantle of Christ only on the shoulders of Jesus is not only theologically wrong, it is also completely contrary to the life and teachings of Jesus and everything for which he lived and died. Just as St. Paul said those most important words, "Christ is all and is in all", what if we were to think of ourselves as being Christ? And apropos to our discussion today, what if we were to think of our children – not only our biological children but also the children of our congregation and indeed every child as being The Christ? The word "Christ" is taken from the Greek word for "The Anointed", and so the anointed was the one who would make a difference in the world, the one who would allow himself or herself to be the fulcrum between the forces of good and the forces of evil, the one who would tilt the balance toward that which is good, the one who would take on extraordinary responsibility – the anointed. I like very much how the spiritual leaders of the Hopi Indians down in the Northeast corner of Arizona have said, "We are the ones that we've been waiting for." This is in contrast, you will note, to Samuel Beckets, "Waiting for Godot." I am preparing now to take our next group out to the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota and in talking this week to one of our friends out there, I was sad to learn that there has been yet another teen age victim of suicide on that reservation. To my mind there is one and only one answer to this sad and tragic epidemic among the young people out there, and everywhere else as well, and that is to heed the wisdom of the Hopi elders, "we are the ones that we've been waiting for." We need to impress upon our children that they are the "anointed", that Christ was not only in Jesus 2000 years ago, but also Christ is also a beautiful and noble spirit in them as well, and that the world is just waiting for them to arrive, waiting for them to live with a sense of purpose, waiting for them to fill the hungry with good things. If this is what we teach our children – the children of our community – then we are indeed, "The Mother of Christ." This morning we are honored to welcome new members into our family of faith, and I have every reason to believe that as they use the gifts and talents with which they are endowed, they will help us to become a stronger and more faithful and more compassionate congregation. Sometimes, in calling upon prospective new members, some quite understandably don't really know what Church membership is all about. They might already be attending church, and maybe they've been doing so for quite awhile, and so they wonder what the difference is between a member and a non-member. It's a tricky question, because we want to be a place of hospitality for people wherever they may be in their spiritual journeys, and if some find here an open door and a warm community in which they can drop by from time to time, I would be the first that would want to do all that we can to make sure that door always stays open. Also, in days gone by – going all the way back to our Puritan roots – there were those who would draw a rather arbitrary line between the "saved and the unsaved" and sadly there have been some rather unscrupulous purveyors of their own sort of theology, namely the ordained clergy, I am ashamed to say, that have tried to suggest or intimidate by intimating that if you want to be "saved", if you want to live forever in God's love and grace, then, being a member of the church is a little like an insurance policy. That doesn't work for me for two reasons. One, because I believe we are all already "saved" by the love and grace of God, but also because I think there are at least as many of us bona fide church members in need of salvation and redemption as there are in those outside the membership of the church, and if we think of church membership as a community of the righteous, that creates a very unhealthy dynamic with those who are not members, but also it takes us down the road of self-righteousness, a very self-destructive, soul-destructive path. For me, one of the reasons we like to receive new members on Mother's Day is that it helps us to remember what our identity, what our calling is as a church, and a very important part of the work that we do is to follow the example of that 14 year old Mother by the name of Mary and to think of ourselves as being "The Mother of Christ." So for me, church membership is our way of saying out loud, "Yes, I want to do all that we can to help this place be a place that "magnifies the Lord." For all those for whom the telescope is turned upside down, for those who cannot see God's love, for those who do not feel the warmth of God's grace, for those who feel shriveled up inside, bereft of a sense of purpose, I pray that we might be a place where that telescope is turned in the right direction, so that all can see their true spiritual identities. We are the "Mother of Christ", we have the honor and the privilege of being a place that helps our children and our future generations to think of themselves as being "the anointed", the ones that the world has been waiting for, the ones blessed with nothing less than the spirit of God, the ones endowed with a voice of conscience, the ones blessed with that determination to make sure that the "hungry are filled with good things", the ones driven by a passionate desire to make this a better world in which to live. For me, that's what church membership is all about, and I would invite us all to think of ourselves as being, "The Mother of Christ." Amen.
David W. Good Old Lyme, Connecticut
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