A Mother's Courage
By Tom Reiber
May 11, 2003
Luke 1: 26-38
uck is away at Lauren's college graduation, so I'm here today to share my insights on Motherhood. Fortunately I've gotten some wonderful help from the Illuminators. And my task, actually, is not necessarily to talk simply about motherhood per se, which, believe me, would be a pretty short sermon. But my task as I see it is to try and relate this very special holiday with our Christian tradition, to find that place where the two things intersect.
One challenge we face right away is the male bias of
the Judeao-Christian tradition. We can
all come up with the names of male heroes from the Bible: Moses, David,
Solomon, Samson, Joshua, all the prophets, John the Baptist, Peter, James,
John, Jesus himself, etc. But it's a
lot tougher to come up with the names of the Biblical heroines. We can do it. There's Sarah and Ruth, Mary and Elizabeth, the two Hebrew
midwives from today's story, Shiphrah and Puah. Feminist theologians have gone to great lengths to unearth these
women from the text and to tell their stories. But the simple fact that they've had to work at it underscores the
issue. Or simply take a look at our
stained glass windows: man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man, man,
woman, man. That about sums it up. And the one woman, by the way, is St. Celia
(also known as St. Cecelia). I'm sure
we all know who that is. Actually,
she's the patron saint of music. (I had
to look it up myself.)
Even Mary, who
gets her week or two of limelight during the Advent season, is often treated in
an overly simplistic, one-dimensional way. We pause long enough to note that there's something admirable about the
way she accepts God's call on her life, but we rarely scratch beneath the
surface to really see what makes her tick. Much like with Jesus, it takes a concerted effort to get beyond the
one-dimensional view handed down to from Sunday school to a sense of the real
live person underneath. And while
volumes have been written about the quest for the historical Jesus, much less
has been written about Mary.
So let's allow
ourselves to step outside the box and consider who she might have been based on
what we know. Going on what we're given
in the Gospels we can say: she was probably a poor adolescent girl or teenager;
she was engaged to a working class guy; she ends up giving birth in a barn, on
the road; she faces political persecution and has to emigrate to another
country; after facing all these challenges she witnesses her son's
execution.
This is real-world spirituality. In light of the details of the story, we can
appreciate why Mary's initial opening to God's call on her life might have been
troubling. This is the kind of
spirituality that troubles the mind because it's going to have an impact on the
real world.
Now I said at the
outset that the challenge for today was going to be finding the intersection
between our Biblical texts and the Mother's Day celebration. So let's back up for a moment and take in
the overall thrust of the Gospel. As
far as I can grasp it, the Gospel revelation amounts to a new way of being in
the world. It's a way that runs
contrary to the Pharaohs and the Herods of the world, that undermines the
world's claim that might makes right. Jesus had a new vision. He tried to communicate to us that there is a
Supreme Being out there that loves us all, and that to really come to terms
with that is to lay down our weapons and bow before the sacred depths of the
cosmos.
Now, back to
Mother's Day and Mary. We might ask
ourselves what if anything Mary had to do with this new revelation? Let me put it anther way. Let's say Julie's son Matthew (for visitors,
Julie is our other associate minister her at Christ Church) grew up to have a
very creative, progressive view of the world. Now if you were to be given the task of writing a biography of Matthew,
where do you think you'd look to find some of his formative influences? Okay, so maybe Jeff (Julie's husband) would
have a little something to do with it. But we'd look to Julie, wouldn't we?
But isn't it funny how when it comes to Jesus, we
don't give Mary all that much credit! What if we entertained the possibility that Jesus' ultimate vision
wasn't tangential to Mary's influence, but rather a blossoming of her own,
unique spirituality? Perhaps even the
well-known story of her acceptance of God's call might be seen in a new
light. The first thing we see when the
Angel comes to Mary is that she was “greatly troubled.” At it's most basic level this tells us that
opening up to God is no small task. It's
not like we're carpooling and we're just picking up an extra kid. This is a profound opening to the
life-giving Spirit that birthed the cosmos.
Depth
psychologists who have used the Gospel as a template for spiritual
individuation have seized upon Mary's opening to God, known as the
annunciation, as the first step in the spiritual journey. It involves the humble acceptance and clear
acknowledgment that there is far more to life and reality then we are normally aware. It is an opening to the mysterious depths
and powers of the universe. Depth
psychologists would see this in terms of opening up to our own intra-psychic
depths, and there's certainly something to be said for the profundity of that. But in an ultimate, spiritual sense, we can
take that even further and see it for what it is: an opening to God.
Now it's one thing
to get ourselves to a place where we can begin to see what Mary actually
accomplished. It's of course another
matter entirely to grasp the idea that we, too, can open to God. Jungian analyst Edward Edinger likens the
difference to going to a zoo verses seeing an animal in the wild. Religion takes these encounters with the
numinous powers of life and captures them in myth and story so we can safely
view them. We do the same thing with
the images captured in our stain glass windows. We can safely gaze at them from a distance, without having to
risk hearing what they have to say. What might St. Francis over here have to say to us, for example, if we
were to tell him about the despoliation of the Earth going on today? But we've got him sealed up tight. According to Edinger, that is like looking
at a tiger in the zoo. To actually open
up to these energies ourselves is involves being in the same room as the
tiger. Hence Mary was troubled at the
appearance of the Angel.
Before
Mary says anything, the angel tells her not to be afraid. It's as if the mediating messenger
understands that the revelation is by its very nature overwhelming. Yet he knows, too, that God is to be trusted. Here we see a glimmer of Mary's spiritual
resolve as she takes these words to heart and opens to the possibility.
Then
she asks some practical questions. I
think that's so interesting. An angel
tells her she's going to be the mother of the ruler of the universe, and she's
got to check her appointment book, figure out when she can squeeze that in
around the PTA meeting and the church social. Actually, in all seriousness I think there's something important going
on here. Mary's practical question about
how she's going to give birth when she's a virgin reminds us that a
crucially important dimension of any spiritual experience is the ability to
bring it to fruition in the day-to-day world we inhabit. Too often the things that touch us most
deeply, whether they be dreams or visions or whatever kind of spiritual
experience, tend to stay locked away like fine jewelry, to be taken out some
special day.
But
this isn't the spiritual model Mary was working with. She not only accepted her call, she followed it through to the
end. Her destiny, as announced in the
Gospel narrative, was to give birth to a son who was to usher in a spiritual
kingdom or, to put that in modern language, a new state of consciousness. The powers of the world immediately constellated
against mother and son, in the form of Herod's decree that all Hebrew children
under a certain age where to be put to death. This echoes the same theme we found in the Hebrew Bible reading
describing the time Moses was born. In
a very similar critique of worldly power, the rulers are shown to be so
desperate to protect their power they're willing to kill children in order to
eliminate all threats. Both the Hebrew
midwives and Mary, a vulnerable peasant girl, have to use their wits and call
on their bravery to defy the powers that be and save the children.
Well
this is all well and good, you might be saying, but what might it have to do
with Mother's Day?
Fast
forward the historical clock eighteen centuries to the time of the Civil War,
and you'll find another young woman with a deep spiritual life and the courage
of her convictions. I'm talking about
Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian partial to the transcendentalists, whose “Mother's
Day Proclamation was the impetus for the modern holiday we are celebrating
today. Howe was an intriguing figure,
something of a courageous spiritual warrior, not unlike Mary. For a time she chafed under the
authoritarian rule of her more traditionally minded husband. Though eventually she broke away to study
languages, philosophy, and to speak out on behalf of world peace. She became a pioneer of the woman's
movement, championed the rights of slaves, the write of a woman to vote, wrote
the Battle Hymn of the Republic and called on all women to take power from men
in order to bring about a better world. Listen to the words of her 1870 “Mother's Day Proclamation”:
“Arise
all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears!
Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and
applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been
able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will
be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to
injure theirs.'
From
the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says
‘Disarm, disarm! The Sword of murder is not the balance of justice.' Blood does
not wipe out dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As
men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women
now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them
then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great
human family can live in peace, each learning after her own time, the sacred
impress, not of Caesar, but of God.
In
the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress
of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place
deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.”
And so it turns
out that Mary's role in giving birth to the Prince of Peace is not all that far
removed from the historical roots of our own Mother's Day celebration. Both have to do with a deep spiritual
opening to God and a willingness to stand up to the ways of the world.
Of course we don't
have to take on the world's empires in order to find situations requiring
courage. I'm sure every mother here
today could tell us stories about times in which their children were threatened
by illness or some other danger, when they were forced to draw on their
spiritual resources. Just in the few
years that I've been here I've seen mother's plumbing the depths of their
spiritual resources, mother's like Jean Fellows, whose son is battling Lou
Gehrig's disease. Or Betsy Crosby,
whose daughter Amanda was fatally injured in an apartment fire. Amanda hung on to life for several weeks and
Betsy remained at her side. I saw a
similar courage in Katie Reinhardt, who stood by her daughter, Maria, as she
died of cancer. There's the courage of
Maria herself, who had the unthinkable task of mother two young children as she
lay dying. These are real world events that threaten to overwhelm us. They remind us that life is hard. With Mary as our guide, we can say that the
way to cope is to believe that this whole process, this expanding cosmos and
the evolution of life is heading somewhere. We must believe that life has meaning and that its meaning is rooted in
a Being that loves us. We must, like
Mary, surrender to God.
Ultimately, the
Biblical narrative and the Mother's Day celebration culminate in a new vision
of the world. It is a world in which
all humanity becomes one family. In
that family there are no insiders and outsiders, no hierarchies of importance
or expendable people. Everybody
matters. Everybody counts. Everybody is a child of God, a sister and a
brother. This is the vision that Mary
birthed into the world.
Soon after the war in Iraq started a group of
Christian peacemakers was kicked out by the Iraqi government. A bomb had struck a building and the
peacemakers ran over to see if they could be of assistance. Only in their rush they didn't tell their
government minders they were leaving. Prior to the start of the war you could leave without informing
anyone. But once the war started things
got tense and you couldn't just walk out without informing the
authorities. They were penalized with
deportation.
The next morning three vehicles were tearing down
the highway leading from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan. They were traveling with a sizeable distance between them at 80
miles and hour, hoping that by doing so they'd minimize the chance of all three
being shot or bombed. The last car in
the caravan had a blowout, spun out of control and went into a ditch. Because it was the last one, the first two
cars were unaware of the crash and continued on, leaving the group in the last
car wounded and abandoned in the middle of war zone.
Like a modern day
Good Samaritan, an Iraqi civilian stopped, took all the Americans into his car
and drove them to a hospital. At the hospital the doctor, who by the way spoke
perfect English, treated them all and refused payment, saying, “we're all one
family.”
My message today
is ultimately about courage in the midst of a pretty scary world. Bob Morris of Interweave touches on these
themes in his most recent Interweave Journal. He writes, “There's a lot of fear abroad in the land these days, and
good reason for some of those fears. Whatever the final conclusion of our war in Iraq, we will be living in
uncertainty for a very long time. The
danger is that we will let our worst fears rule us instead of our best
dreams.
“…Nonetheless, the
challenge is still to invest in the dream rather than succumb to the fear; to
live that dream in whatever way we can. Your investment of time, talent and treasure in your best dream of a
better society—through interfaith or interracial dialogue, local environmental
action, serious political involvement, passionate prayer, or raising more
compassionate children—helps create the world. The future is created by the small acts of millions as much as it is by
the big actions of governments. Beginning to live the dreamed-for future now is the surest investment in
making it true” (The Interweave Guide: Spring 2003).
I think Bob is
getting at the same thing Jesus was getting at. That there's a new way of being in the world that is accessible
to us here and now. No matter how much
power the world uses in its effort to stop you, it can't; because God's power
reigns triumphant over the power of the world. We need only muster the courage to dream and to live into those dreams. Mary dared to dream and to live her dream through
to the end. That's the point—or rather,
the invitation.
In the words of
Maya Angelou,
Lift up your faces, you have a
piercing need
For this bright morning dawning
for you.
History, despite its wrenching
pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived
again.
Lift up your eyes
Upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Amen.
© 2003
Tom Reiber.
All rights reserved
