feisty mary

 

SERMON PREACHED at

St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU

FEAST OF MARY THE VIRGIN

(15^th August) 2021

 

Readings:

 

Isaiah 7: 101-5          

Psalm 132:6-10, 13-14

Galatians 4:4-7

Luke 1:46-55

 

In the famous words of the Nuns of Nonnberg Abbey. “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” Protestants – and incidentally that is something I believe we’re not – have done their best to ignore her for five hundred years. Catholics, of the Roman variety, something else we are not, elevated her to the celestial realms and made her the Queen of Heaven, an elevation that is fraught with problems. The Orthodox, idf we are to be honest, probably had the best solution, honouring her as Theotokos, the Mother of God, which is a title guaranteed to send a shiver up the spine of many a Protestant, but is probably the most profound of her titles. For if Jesus is fully divine as well as fully human (and that’s something we’ll never get our heads around), then there is a very real sense in which Theotokos (Θεοτόκος)is correct. The problem is that the τόκος part of Θεοτόκος) is untranslatable. God-bearer will do.

How do you solve a problem like Maria? It’s a bit of an issue, really. Luke, who gives us the closest glimpses into the heart of Mary of Nazareth, paints with a few broad brushstrokes, a portrait of a remarkable woman. He places her into the context of a remarkable whanauatanga, linking her in righteousness, in integrity, in compassion and strength of character with her cousin Elizabeth. These are not women to trivialize. Elizabeth bore stoically what was in her culture – not theoretically ours – the shame of childlessness, barrenness as it is often indelicately called. Mary has no such problem – though technically she has the problem of a pregnancy that occurred somewhat before society would consider the appropriate time.

We lose sight of Elizabeth, but we find Mary singing a song that taunts corruption, that flings a gauntlet at the feet of exploiters, that dares injustice to dismantle its protections and privileges. One can only think of the women in Afghanistan in terror at this moment as the Taliban strip them of rights and dignity: Mary, unlike the Eurocentric world currently wringing its hands, dared to challenge the oppressor. Mary, like the early champions of Me Too, dared to challenge a nudge, nudge, wink wink world of male supremacy.

Women, strong woman like Florence Nightingale, Rosa Parks, Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia, Rachel Carson, Mary Daly, some of whose names may be familiar, dared to challenge corrupt orthodoxy. Mary was not the first: she too stood in a line of remarkable, brave women: her namesake Miriam, Esther, Vashti, Rahab. It is little wonder that her biological son was a fairly stroppy sort of a fellow.

The elevation of Mary through history was a complex story. As Christianity steadily moved from its subversive roots and became a religion of authoritarianism and usually male privilege, Jesus became less and less accessible, more and more the remote and distant God-figure that dominated the often Hebrew scriptures and other related traditions. He became unapproachable, but he became, too, unapproachably masculist – and I use the word carefully. An authoritarian bloke, demanding submission, was hardly approachable to the women who were surrounded by unapproachable authoritarian masculist blokes.

Slowly prayers were redirected to a more compassionate figure, a mediatrix who would intercede before her now remote son, a female who would understand the heartaches of motherhood and femalehood. Mary became Queen of Heaven – and was elevated further and further, ironically, until lesser saints became intercessors to grant the vulnerable access even to her as she granted access to the Son who granted access to the Father. It was a mess. Humans mess religion pretty quickly. But eventually God in triune, and as it happens genderless compassion shatters corruptions, religious and political and both. Proud empires and protectorates pass away.

Feisty Mary saw that, and warned the mighty that their comeuppance was on its way. We ignore Mary at peril.

She was no Maggie Thatcher, either. The power of Mary came not from her political muscle but, ironically from her powerlessness, her holiness, her submission not to a male but to love itself. She loved her God, and soon recognized too the God in her Son. She agonized at his precocity, storing up in her heart her puzzlement at the dangerous directions the life of Jesus was heading in. Her heart ached, beyond words later, as she watched him dying, knowing the grief that only a parent who has done likewise can ever understand. And we know, though not with the knowledge of mere rationality, that this was not the end of the story, and she and another Mary, and other frightened, broken women would soon be astounded at the experience of his resurrection. Later theologians would argue that Mary herself was assumed into heaven because flesh that had borne the Life of God could not itself taste death and corruption. Who knows, maybe they are right?

But I want simply to leave us with this holy, woman, feisty, courageous, strong. I want to leave us with a woman who bore God, who bore hope. I want to leave us with the challenging question: how can we bring the hope that Mary bore to young women? How can we but think not only of the women who face the Taliban or women predeceasing their babies as Covid rages rampant amongst the uninoculated, but women too who face domestic violence, or women who face sexual exploitation, or simply women whose lives cry out for meaning and who, like Olivia Podmore whose life become so empty that only the vortex of suicide awaits them?  

Jesus of course was more than just an example, he was God with us. He is God with us. But he was also a chip off the old girl’s block, and as he grew in stature he took with him the courage and the humility the strength and the compassion that made Mary blessed amongst women. Through his Spirit he can empower us to be like his mother, to be bearers of hope and justice. May we. women and men, be bearers of Mary’s mana to the world around us.

The Lord be with you.

bread and bereavement

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, NORTH OAMARU 

and St ALBAN'S, KUROW

ORDINARY SUNDAY 19 (8^th August) 2021

Readings:

 

2 Samuel 18:5-9, 15, 31-33 

Psalm 130

Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2

John 6:35, 41-51

 

“Oh Absalom, my son, my son Absalom.”

I know of few more spine tingling moments in the entire witness of scripture, or indeed in the entire body of literature. The complexities of the death of Absalom are many, his betrayals both perpetrated and received, (dying by the sword as he had come to live), his brutal execution, so undignified a death; only some of these have we glimpsed in this bowdlerised liturgical reading of the Old Testament Scripture. Yet the cry of his father rings out across thirty centuries, and still sends shivers down my spine.

I want to tread carefully here. There will be some of you who have experienced far more grief than I have in my relatively comfortable life. There are every day on our news feeds the sanitised tales of those across the globe who are experiencing immeasurable grief as entire communities are torn apart most obviously by COVID. Communities are torn apart every day, too, in the hidden atrocities of civil war in Myanmar, oppression in West Papua, decades old hatreds in Israel and Palestine. A bereavement is a bereavement wherever and however it is; and the loss of a child, as some of you will know with nerves only too raw, is the greatest loss of all. We can only think in horror of the families of five young people who lost their lives in Timaru last night. “Would I had died instead of you, Oh Absalom.” 

So I speak not to trivialize nor to answer the great cries of time, the “why” that reverberates through bereaved human lives. Yet somewhere, as in the too many times I have stood with grieving families, I must try to wrestle with mysteries of loss, the emptiness of a universe without one who has been loved. Today we speak theoretically perhaps, but too often the theory is reality.

At the same time I am confronted with the words of one who we call Lord, one who himself weeps at the death of those he loves, and who was himself be cut down in life’s prime, a fact we must never lose sight of no matter how well we know the resurrection story. He speaks of “I am” – the timeless un-name of God (a phrase I will unpack another time), and he speaks of bread, and he, if we weave these bread of life sayings into the entire narrative of his teachings, challenges us both to consume and to be bread for others. To be the staple of life for those who God brings across our paths, for we are called over and again to be Christ to those around us.

We cannot be that with empty words. I try to ensure words are not empty, my words are not empty, though God knows I fall short, as we all do. But to be bread of life, to be Christ bearers in the midst of grief, in the midst of a sometimes bewildering and empty universe, is to seek to dig deep into the integrity and authenticity of our faith. The bread that Jesus speaks of is the very stuff of life. “All I need is the air that I breathe,” sang the Hollies, “and to love you.” But the bread is the “love” part of that equation: we are to be bearers of love and light and hope that brings those rare dimensions into the lives of those who are groaning under whatever burdens weigh them down. Let’s not think this is melodrama: we live in a nation with ridiculously, demonically high rates of suicide. Furthermore, if we are to be honest we must acknowledge that we the Church have failed – occasionally but even that is too often – to break cycles of despair. In some lives we have even perpetrated darkness, as Royal Commissions and equivalent around the world have told us. Not us individually, we hope and pray, but we the Christian community. No wonder Jesus said something about millstones.

But I think Jesus, and John who conveys his here-complex words gives us clues about the way to be hope-bearers, life-bringers in his name. There are deep hints here about the demand to encounter Jesus again and again, and not superficially but with ever-deepening awareness, in the bread-made-body of Communion, of Eucharist, of Mass. He chooses his words carefully when he hints of this, using a harsh verb that we might translate as “munch” or “chew,” except they sound more silly than sombre. We are called to consume with intent the Spirit-enriched life force that Jesus offers us in the communion that is his gift to us. For that to be life-force of Jesus rather than flimsy wafer or crumb it must be pregnant with our desire, made possible by the Spirit; for the communion to be communion with him with his life, with his resurrection life it must be saturate with the presence of God. “Be known to us in broken bread, but do not then depart.”

We are called then so to immerse ourselves in lives of justice and, similarly, lives of compassion in the communities into which God has called us, placed us, that we can withstand and be there, wordlessly yet bearing hope, as those around us or even those we love cry with David, “Oh Absalom my son.” For only when we ourselves are immersed in Christ hope and Christ love can we bring that love and hope to the despairing, near and far.

May God help us to have that integrity, for it is to that which God calls us.

 

The Lord be with you.


I apologize for the typos that marred the earlier posting of this reflection - tiredness and rushedness nearly had the last word!
M