Merry Christmas

Luke tells a powerful Christmas story. A breathtakingly simple yet surprisingly powerful story of a young girl giving birth to her first child, attended only by shepherds and stable animals but heralded by angels above. Here is a story that should not even have been noticed, let alone told again and again across millennium. After all, countless young girls gave birth that night and we remember none of them. Emperors and governors are much better subjects for dramatic narratives; unwed teenage mothers and their vulnerable babes are not. Yet Luke puts this simple little story right smack dab in the middle of the powers and principalities of the age to make a claim: The child born to this young mother will change the course of history, and the fates of leaders and common folk alike hang in the balance of his destiny.

The genius of Luke's story, of course, is that he portrays all this through the simple, sympathetic, and even everyday characters of a young mother and common shepherds. So that we are forced to wonder, if God can work in and through such ordinary characters, perhaps God can also work in and through us. Luke wants, I think, to make sure we realize that it is not just human flesh "in general" that God takes on in Christ; it is our flesh. And it is not simply history "in general" that God enters via this birth, it is our history and our very lives to which God is committed.

Here is the promise of Christmas in a nutshell. God deigns to dwell not with the high and mighty, but with the lowly, the unexpected, those considered "nothing" by this world. And here, amid the weakness and vulnerability of human birth, God makes God's intentions for humanity fully known. God is love, John writes, and here Luke portrays that love, as God takes human form, the infinite becomes finite, and that which is imperishable becomes perishable.

This story of long ago is not only about angels and shepherds, a mother and her newborn. It is also about us, all of us.

On a much lighter note!
I have received a few emails after my last sermon, commenting on my off the cuff comment that it seemed as if Mary was doing all the visiting and appearing.  The men not doing much, sitting around on their duffs watching bowl games.  Well, seems as if some people took to searching the world wide web and found all sorts of Jesus sightings...here is a you tube video that compiles a bunch of news reports about Jesus sightings. The piece is titled "Finally tonight...". It appears that Jesus sightings typically are the news piece right at the end of the news cast. Check it out.

Since we're on You Tube here's a modern look at the Christmas story that I love!

Sunday 12 19 10 Reflection

This last Sunday of Advent I wanted reflect on the feminine maternal dimension in our salvation story before we head of to Christmas and the story focus changes. Here are some of the reflections from my sermon. Please let me know your thoughts and reflections:

It was early in December, the year was 1531. It has been ten long years of suffering for the Aztec people since the Conquistador Cortez invaded Mexico.  Aztec civilization is in its death throes; more ravaged by epidemic disease brought by the Spanish than by their swords. Recent genetic studies on the skeletal remains of native peoples of the times have found that while many hundreds of thousands Aztecs were killed by violence, an even higher number, perhaps as high as 85%, died by disease.

We catch sight of one lone peasant walking along a road, he is going to visit his uncle who is dying from the Spanish plague. His name is Juan Diego, a recent convert to Christianity. Hearing beautiful music, he stops in his tracks and turns to see a young brown native maiden in shimmering robes who speaks to him in his own native Nahuatl tongue. Who are you? He asks. "Call me Little Girl, Young Daughter, Mother of my People", she says.

The young girl tells Juan Diego to go to the palace of the Archbishop of Mexico and to tell him that Mary the Mother of God wishes that a temple be built at Tepayac – the worship site for the indigenous mother GoddessTonantzin. From this church Mary will be able to give all her love to the inhabitants of the land ... to hear their lamentations and remedy their pain and suffering. After two unsuccessful attempts to convince the bishop of the vision, Juan Diego is sent by the maiden to find roses in wintertime in the desert where no roses could be found. Finally when again he is standing before the Bishop and his court, Juan Diego unfolds his shawl and impossibly beautiful roses fall to the ground and there in the cloak is the image of the Indian Maiden.

What do we make of such a story? If you were to ask the minister that I grew up under, at my little Presbyterian church on the West Side of San Antonio – he would, with great emotion, argue that the whole thing was an inside job. The Catholic Church unable to make headway with the pesky natives created a Mary that would speak to the people of the land-a dark skinned native Mary.

Even as a young boy I was a skeptic at heart, so his argument spoke to me, but when I ran with it and suggested that maybe the Jesus appearance to the disciples, after his death, was an inside job also…he gave me a swat on the behind and said, “Do you want me to tell your mother what you said?” The Catholic church at the time, seemed just as skeptical as my minister. Their response to this vision of Mary, ranged from condemnation to silence.

Whether vision or stratagem…history shows that the story spread among the people and around her image the Mexican people were able to reconstruct out of devastation and death a new identity, a new future.

But what is it’s importance for us today? Well…I think the story, however you come to it, continues to have a message for today.

Juan Diego comes to us with a message from the young maiden. Guadalupe is calling to us to build a very particular kind of church? For the church to be evangelized by Juan Diego, to hear the message of Little Girl, Young Daughter, Mother of my People, Juan Diego must help us overcome some significant barriers, which I am not sure we will ever do without the help of God.

First, the church must overcome our problems with God being revealed to us in the person of a woman. Part of this problem for Protestants/Presbyterians has been our rejection of Mary. Historically at the Reformation and after, our forefathers reacted to what they saw as the Catholic deification of Mary, in other words, placing Mary as part of the divine being.

But instead of minimizing her importance, the church completely ignored Mary, and feared any feminine reference to God in the Bible, to the extent that we have lost a part of our story that allows us to see God as revealed in the life of a woman. As we have journeyed through Advent, and heard again the stories:

Mary and the angel, accepting the call of God.

Mary and Elizabeth, two pregnant women finding their way.

Mary and Joseph, struggling with difficult decisions.

Mary and Joseph on their journey, with a baby on the way…

It is hard not to miss the feminine maternal dimension in the salvation that God has brought us. And I am not talking about the submissive, passive icon, the  perfect Mary that is often presented to us in paintings, sculpture and children’s books. Guadalupe beckons to us from the periphery calling us to recognize the divine image that exists in every woman and to overcome the sexism that so marginalizes women in both church and society still today.

In the young pregnant peasant girl we can see that God's salvation is tender like a mothers love, is fierce like a lover’s, and radical like a sister in the struggle.

But Juan Diego’s job is not done, he will also have to help the church respond to a God who is revealed to us as a person of color "La Morenita", the little brown one, the Indian.  Guadalupe challenges the historic racism of church and society and our constant temptation to make one cultural form the supreme expression of reality. 

For as Spain, France and England competed for the acquisition and development of this new American Empire the church debated whether these people of color, whether indigenous to the Americas or shipped in from Africa had souls, could even be called human. Of course they had to come to this conclusion in order to justify to themselves what they were prepared to do to get their land and to exploit their labor.

In 500 years of the history of the Americas, the church has yet to heal itself. God continues to call out to the church through the face of a woman of color, challenging us to find healing for our racism and reconciliation between the races. 

One more challenge to the church…and it comes in the face of her messenger, Juan Diego, the poorest peasant class of landless, exploited labor. She brought a message from the periphery, carried by the most humble peasant to the wealthiest, most powerful in the land, the bishop of Spain's richest empire. Mary calls the church to re-inhabit the periphery, the edges of society among the poor, the displaced, those considered to be non-persons.

You know, if I have any beef with Mary showing up 500 years ago or today, it’s not with the validity, we all have our points at which we just believe, but why does Mary seem to be doing all the work? Yes, Jesus shows up on a tortilla or a tree trunk every now and then…but that’s it! And what about Joseph…can’t they get him off his duff for a few minutes, away from the bowl games, to make a visit now and them. And what about Moses or Isaiah, Abraham and Paul...? No choirs of angles singing in the hill country anymore.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but Mary has shown up again…on the side of an apartment complex in New Braunfels. No message yet, just the faint outline of her robe.

La Morenita continues to call out to the church of the rich, the powerful, to find our true identity with Jesus on the periphery, with her son Jesus on the margins, among the outcast, among the poor. She calls to us to build a church that  truly celebrates diversity. A church that listens to the poor. A church that speaks with a voice of compassion.

Where such a church lives, roses bloom in winter. 

Where such a church lives, the world is pregnant with possibilities.

Reflections on Mary and the Church

Here is a question to my last blog post, that instead of responding to in the previous blog, I would like to respond to here and continue the conversation hopefully into next week:

That makes me wonder. The Catholic church places great emphasis on Mary, even endowing her birth with "supernatural" qualities (eg the Immaculate Conception). We learn that a person born of a virgin birth means they hold great importance. As you have pointed out, women were a marginalized group for a very long time. Why is Mary so special for the Catholic church in particular? Are they more inclusive that Protestant churches that focus on Jesus, a male figure? I know it's not exactly related to the story, but it made me wonder... (Micaela)

Micaela,

Thank you for your question. I’m glad my wonderings have sparked a wonder in you.

I will answer your historical question concerning Protestants and Catholics next week. This week let’s look at your question concerning whether one denomination is more inclusive than another.

Sadly, trying to answer that question is like trying to argue whether McDonalds Super Sized Meal is better for your heart than Jack in the Boxes Up Sized version.

Look at the world we live in. Throughout the world, a quick survey will reveal that the more religiously oriented a nation is, the lower the status of women is in that country.

In Europe one can document a direct correlation between those countries where people still largely honor the Virgin Mary and the entrenched second-class status of women in those nations. In most religious systems women are regarded either as less than complete or as actually flawed human beings.

In the United States, during the struggle in the early part of the 20th century to amend the constitution to enable women to vote, the primary opposition came from the Christian Church, with the suffrage movement being condemned regularly from most Christian pulpits. The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 was brought about by the combination of religious forces together with a right wing Republican administration. And it’s worth noting that the impetus toward equality for women in the Christian West did not seriously begin until secularism's rise signaled the decline of religious power.

In the Islamic Middle-East (no not in Kansas) the impact of Shariah law says that girls can be married at the onset of puberty and that a man may divorce one of his multiple wives by simply saying: "I divorce you," in the presence of two male witnesses. The Taliban in Afghanistan acted out these laws with a terrifying severity producing a "Catch 22" situation for women in that women could not become doctors and no male doctor was allowed to treat Islamic women.

In China, where the principal religions were Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, binding the feet of girls and women developed in response to cultural pressure informed by religious rules. This practice kept women weak, out of power and under male domination.

In India, a land shaped primarily by Hinduism the religious custom for centuries called for the widow to throw herself on her husband's funeral pyre, since the loss of a husband was deemed to be tantamount to a proclamation of the surviving widow's worthlessness.

How did this universal human negativity toward women develop?

Why was it endorsed and thus blessed by almost every human religious system the world over? What is there about women in general and women's bodies in particular that appears to be so threatening to males that they have to employ religion to help in the process of female suppression?

No Micaela, honoring Mary has not made one part of the church more inclusive than another, I wish it were true. I wish there was a church that could honestly honor a feminine face for God and see it within every woman.

This Sunday's sermon will be a reflection on Mary and the feminine face of God.

Sunday 12 5 10 Reflection

This Second Sunday of Advent we looked at the story of Mary going to stay with Elizabeth. 

To make sure that Mary and Elizabeth have room to speak, Luke tells an earlier story where you find out that the priest in the house, Zechariah, is silenced. With Zechariah out of the way; we have the rare opportunity to hear from the women for a change. And what a change they dream of!

"In those days”, Luke writes. “Those days” are the first days of Mary's pregnancy - of the pregnancy of a young girl. of the pregnancy of a young and unmarried girl living in a small village where such a thing would bring untold shame - no, really not untold, because there would be frequently told gossip, that would shame her, her family, and her child for ever. In those days, Mary heads for the far away hills, fleeing the village gossip.

I wonder how Mary must have felt as she made that journey to Judea?

Was she filled with self-doubt, her hopes crushed by her own family? Did she question her own sanity? Maybe the angel was a dream, maybe her mind had played tricks on her.

Maybe she felt angry. How could they treat her this way, how could God let them treat her this way? She felt so alone.

And I’m not so sure seeing cousin Elizabeth was seen as good news to her. Elizabeth was also pregnant, yes, but instead of being shame filled, her shame ended the same way Mary's had begun. Would Elizabeth lecture her as her parents had, but with the added smugness of her righteous pregnancy? Or would her cousin just shake her head and pity her, like Joseph…doubting her story altogether  as if she were a foolish child?

But here is what Mary didn’t yet know, Elizabeth had her own troubles: Here she was expecting her first born later in life, her husband the victim of a stroke, unable to work his turn in the Temple. And now, her aunt was sending their pregnant teenage daughter down to her home so she could handle the shame, not to mention the normal challenges of pregnancy and birth.

Here two women meet at a point of crisis in both of their lives. Here two women meet sharing pregnancies plagued by questions of "How?" and "What now?" Here two women meet a little later when the angels have departed and the long wait has set in and they are on their own to muddle through somehow the meantime between promise and fulfillment.

Young and old, they have both had hard times with their families. I can imagine Elizabeth resenting having to take care of cousin Mary and husband Zechariah at this very time in her life when - at last! at last! - somebody ought to be pampering her.

Who needed this cloud over her joy? I can imagine them resenting each other,

and in their physical and emotional state, sometimes the anger boiling over with harsh words and short tempers.

But no, the moment she sees Mary, the first words out of Elizabeth’s mouth are a blessing, probably the first blessing Mary has heard since telling anybody she was pregnant: "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?"

Can you imagine how Mary felt when she heard those words? All the anger, all the curses, all the confusion, all the shame fell away when she heard those first words: "Blessed are you, Mary!"

And I think here is the lesson for us this day. Never underestimate the power you have to bless people in God's name. Never refuse the opportunity to share God's renewing love with those the world wants to shame and condemn. Never miss the opportunity to offer encouragement to those whose hopes have been beaten down "a little later" by life.

And I think here is the lesson for us this day. Never underestimate the power you have to bless people in God's name. Never refuse the opportunity to share God's renewing love with those the world wants to shame and condemn. Never miss the opportunity to offer encouragement to those whose hopes have been beaten down "a little later" by life.

What we have here is a preview of the church, a model of what we do for one another.

We come here to renew our hope in God when life is beating us up. And in spite of our own struggles and sorrows, we can say to another, "Blessed are you!"  Here we wait, not in fear but with a sense of expectation. God is doing something among us.

New birth is about to come, God's new creation. We can see the first signs of it, feel it stirring within us. God will bring it to pass. It won't be long now.

And when the wait is long, and we get weary, our hopes dim, our dreams die, we are about ready to give up, somebody renews us with a blessing from God. This is when the church becomes the church, the body of Christ, the family of God. Not arrogance, but humility: this is church. We are not going to go through this alone. God has given us each other to reassure, to restore, to bless us as we wait for the day when God's promise will be fulfilled…This is church!

God has made us pregnant with the belief that justice and righteousness will prevail, that mercy and peace will win through, that love will overcome evil…This is church!!

God has given us the vision of a world where people aren't judged by the color of their skin or limited by the class into which they are born, determined by your sex or unwelcomed because of sexual orientation…

   where differences aren't solved by violence

            and children need not fear, or their parents fear for them,

          a world where every child has enough to eat,

             every youth has opportunity for education,

                and every adult can make some

                meaningful contribution to the common good.

God has made us pregnant with the possibilities, and so we hope, and so we trust, and so we love. 

Mary's song to end the story is compared by Robert Redman to "an aria in an opera or a duet in a musical," as it "stops the action of the Gospel in order to celebrate the greatness and covenant faithfulness of God." Yes, "God is great," Mary proclaims, but wonder of wonders and "equally important – and harder to believe for many in our day – God is good" (Feasting on the Word).

In their beautiful and instructive book, The First Christmas, Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan call Mary's elegantly exuberant prayer, an "overture" to Luke's Gospel in which he sounds important themes that will appear again and again. In Luke's Gospel, the emphasis on women, the marginalized, and the Holy Spirit are all evident in the birth narratives, including the one we read this week. Mary, filled with the Holy Spirit, gives voice to those who are lowly, like the shepherds to whom the angels later announce the birth of Jesus.

Reflection on the Christmas Stories

Because this Advent we are following the story leading up to the birth of Jesus, The Wednesday Night Bible Study looked at the two stories used to compile that story. Yes two stories of the first Christmas. Just as Genesis offers two distinct stories of Creation, the Gospels give us two distinct stories of the first Christmas.

The two stories come from Matthew and Luke. Mark and John do not have Jesus birth stories. 

Because we most often hear the story as one compiled story of Christmas with specifics from one story winning out over the other, or just stuffing it all together into one story, we rarely realize the differences in the stories. 

Think of how you would tell the story of Christmas to friends or children, or how it is told during the yearly Christmas pageant or cantata. Now read the two Christmas stories found in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 and see what you have missed, or what parts of the stories haven’t seemed to make it into the mainstream storyline.

Here are some things you might notice:

Matthew tells a much shorter story, without the genealogy of Jesus the story is 31 verses long. Luke’s story is 132 verses long. Since most of us hear the whole Christmas story as a pageant, what would a Matthew only, or Luke only, Christmas pageant look like?

If we started with Matthew, the first scene would be the angel appearing to Joseph. Mary is already pregnant and Joseph is trying to figure out the best way to get out of the planned marriage. Notice that Joseph is the main character, Mary doesn’t speak and we are not told of any revelation that she receives from an angel (nor will we for the whole Matthew story).

There is no story of the birth in Matthew – just these words “He had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.” No swaddling clothes, no stable, no manger, no angels singing to shepherds…all of this is in Luke.

The most familiar parts of the Christmas story come from Luke: the decree that all be registered, the journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, Jesus born in a manger, shepherds in the fields, angles singing.

If we started with Luke much of the pageant (43 verses) would be about Elizabeth, Zechariah and the birth of John the Baptist (there is no mention of this family in Matthew’s story).  and then the birth of Jesus.

Women play a prominent role in Luke’s story. Mary is the central character for much of the Luke story and Joseph is almost invisible, almost the complete opposite of the Matthew story.  Luke also adds another female character, Anna.

Matthew’s story is dark. After the quick reference to the birth we quickly move to the story of the the Magi and Herod, where after they bring gifts but are told not to go back to Herod. Joseph is told in a dream to leave quickly and move to Egypt before moving to Nazareth. Notice here, Matthew 2:19-23, that Joseph is planning on moving back home to Bethlehem, but only decides to move to Nazareth after hearing that Herod’s son is ruling in Bethlehem. So there is not travel story before the birth in Matthew, because the family was already living in Bethlehem.

Where Matthew’s story is dark, Luke’s is like an episode of Glee. Luke’s story contains 3 hymns (the Benedictus, the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis). And that’s not all, the angles sing their own little ditty to the sheperds in the field: “Glory to God in the highest and peace among those whom God favors!”

Lastly, Luke’s story keeps going. We have stories of Jesus circumcision when Jesus was 8 days old, and the only story of Jesus as a youth.

Next mid-week blog we will look more into these two unique stories and how we might understand them.