August 16, 2009
Mary, Mother of Jesus
Uniting Contradictions
Pr. Paul Brenner

Perhaps some of you are familiar with the recent British show, "What will we do with Maria?" The purpose of the show was to audition singers for the role of Maria in sound of music. A clever twist to gain an audience with a catchy title. My question to you, this morning, is, "What will you do with Maria-with Mary, the Mother of Jesus?" She sits, somewhat dwarfed, on the other side of the pulpit. What will we do with her?

Let's begin by going back and do some catching up with what has been done with Maria-- Mary, the Mother of Jesus, which may help us grasp how we got to this question today.

As the Christian movement began to replace the existing ancient religions of the Roman world and then gained enough power to suppress them, Christianity was subsumed under the Roman Emperor, whose dictum, One Emperor, One Empire, One Religion, One Church, was the way life was structured and enforced at the point of death or permanent exile.

The Church organized itself along the same lines of the government of the Empire: Patriarchal, power oriented, suppressive of dissonance, and dedicated to order, discipline, control. Jesus was increasingly being presented as the Emperor of the Universe, the Judge of the Living and Dead who gave earthly authority to the human Emperor. The church was dominated and controlled by men and masculine values, and what happened?

All the attributes formerly given to Isis, Aphrodite, and other goddesses began to cluster around Maria, mother of Jesus, as the place of compassion, care, mercy, and tenderness. Interestingly, even the most common image of Mary, the Madonna and Child, comes to us from ancient Egypt long before the Christian era. Isis and her son, Horus, exists in the same form we find in statuary and icons of Mary and Child throughout Europe. Psychologically the divine feminine had to go somewhere, as Carl Jung reminds us, and it went straight to Mary like iron filings to a magnet.

By the time of the 16th Century western European Christianity had many problems, and it was Martin Luther who inadvertently confronted them and became the reluctant reformer, finding that grace and mercy and kindness were the heart of God, not judgment. However, Luther was devoted to Mary whom he regarded as the Theotokos, the Bearer of God. Luther's theology was incarnational, that is, he very much emphasized the humanity of Jesus, and it rings out especially in his many hymns. He even commented about Jesus, that he believed in a hairy God.

Roman Catholicism re-entrenched itself in response to the Reformation, and Mary continued to evolve until the Feast of the Assumption was established in the belief that Mary was bodily taken into heaven where she reigns as Queen of Heaven and the Co-Redemptorist of humanity. While the papal proclamation of the dogma of Mary's Assumption shocked Protestant sensibilities, Carl Jung said that psychologically it corrected the great weakness of the Christian definition of God as masculine. Jung thought that with the idea of the Assumption, finally there was an equal "feminine" element within the Godhead.

In response to the doctrine of the Assumption, Lutherans and Protestants have tended to pull further away from Mary, and so, we have the question before us: What will we do with Mary, the mother of God?

Another critical develop of Mary within the masculine Church was her interpretation as the model of obedience for women, that is, the place of women was to be obedient to the church and to serve it without question, just as Mary had been obedient to God. Today's Gospel text however contradicts this. Mary sings of a revolutionary God who is not about order and control and demands, but about turning things up side down in a world dominated by the abuse and misued of power, wealth, and position. God regards what the world does not: those who are the lowly, those who are without means to support their earthly existence, those who are the despised of the world, those without power or position. Mary, the mother of God, did not meekly bow in obedience to God. Instead she responded with courage to God's involvement in human life through the human being she brings into this upside down world. The vehicle of God's becoming human was woman.

Now, I want to go back and pick up a different thread to this story. When you and I examine ourselves and seek to "know ourselves," you and I understand that we a strange mixture of contradictions: we are both understanding and judgmental, we care deeply and remain utter detached, we flow with love and seethe with resentment and hatred, we do acts of compassion and acts of viciousness and meanness, we heal and we hurt, we help and we harm, we extend support to others and demand attention for ourselves, we serve God and do godless things, we are constructive and self destructive. All our lives we struggle with these and other polarities, and it's one of the reasons we seek forgiveness and healing, and reach for wholeness.

The term, "virgin birth" does not make intellectual, rational sense, but it does make sense in terms of the polarities out of which we live our lives. The idea that God would give birth to a special son through a human mother is another one of those spiritual truths that reaches way back before the Christian era. However, what the Christian interpretation of the "virgin birth" has given us is not a "half god, half man," but Jesus, wholly God, wholly human in whom all polarities, all contradictions, are joined, inter-related, inter-connected, inter-dependent.

Mary, the Theotokos, the Mother of God, occupies a unique role in this development, for it is incomprehensible that God, the Eternal One, the Spirit, The One who is Beyond All Understanding, is born of a human mother, but there it is -- the joining of the contradictions. Our task is not to understand it. Our challenge is to live within the power of this spiritual principle.

To see Jesus is to see God as fully as we can. To see Jesus is know God as welcoming, inviting, forgiving, accepting, opening, smiling, laughing…God who has lived the same life each of us must live in a family, a community, a culture..A life lived in relationship of love with some, and with ridicule and opposition by others...A life with possibilities and limitations…A life which accomplished good and suffered injustice…A life lived in the awareness of the beauty of the world and the cruelty of humans…A life which enhanced the lives of many but was abruptly put to death to preserve the status quo. All that we experience in our struggles and contradictions is within the direct experience of God, because of the One whom Mary bore.

So, we are gathered together on this day we are honoring Mary, the Mother of Jesus, trying to figure out who she is us for who are here. Some in this room are struggling to survive economically, medically, psychologically, spiritually. Some are struggling with complex relationships of family, friends, spouses, lovers. The world is crowding and crashing into all our lives stressing our sense of wholeness, our self esteem, our ability to care for ourselves, our ability to care of those we care most for, our energy to serve those vulnerable people who most need care. No wonder we feel vulnerable, heavy, over whelmed, depressed, oppressed.

It is hard for us to be part of God's revolution when we ourselves are fighting to survive and to hang on as best as we can. It is hard for us to live in the contradictions that press in against us. It is hard to cope with a threatening, dangerous, hostile world that drains our energy and time.

That is why we eat the Bread of Heaven and drink Cup of Salvation this morning. That is why we remind ourselves how important it is to live IN forgiveness and to CLAIM our wholeness. That is why we come together in community to have a place that gives us affirmation. That is why we remind ourselves that a lowly Jewish maiden became God bearer so we can find God in our own lives and the lives of others, in our own struggles and the struggles of others, in our own situation and in the situations of the lives of others. Hear the invitation: come, eat; come, drink; just come. You don't have to become something you are not. You don't have to change. You don't have to do anything, just come!

Amen.