Why couldn’t Joseph and Mary get a hotel room in Bethlehem?
Hotels are always busy around Christmas
If Mary gave birth to Jesus and Jesus is the lamb of God…
Then (sings) Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. Mary had a little lamb and Jesus was his name O!
Advent is the season leading up to Christmas. For Christians, it is a season of waiting, anticipation and preparing for the birth of Jesus the savior. On the 2nd Sunday in advent, Catholic churches celebrated Mary. That was last Sunday. The past Friday was the feast of the Lady of Guadalupe, that Vicki told us about earlier.
Since we UU’s are not tied to a liturgical calendar, I thought that it would be okay for us to put a spotlight on the blessed virgin today. Perhaps you question my reasons for doing so. Your questioning is welcomed here today and always. Questioning religious authority is part of our religious liberal tradition.
The word liberal means generous and not strict. We agree to be generous with each other when it comes to our free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We cherish our right to determine life’s mean for ourselves, to grow and shift according to our conscience and our relationship with G*d or our sense of the Holy however we express or experience sacredness. We agree to encourage each other along these lines, and together we insist on the freedom to explore widely and deeply to develop our spirituality and faith. We value free and disciplined study of scriptures, sacred stories, doctrines, belief systems, traditions and practices especially in relation to our UU religious tradition.
Our tradition encourages us to examination ourselves for prejudice that might keep us from discovering for ourselves what meaning religious and spiritual concepts can have for us. We UUs have a reputation for questioning and critical thinking. We value literary criticism and historical scholarship with a particular emphasis on questioning anything that we believe has been used for oppression or domination. We notice that some beliefs lead to suffering while other beliefs are empowering.
Different viewpoints make for rich discussions. Some of us hold Mary as sacred. Others have not much interest in Mary. Some of us bring a hefty portion of skepticism or cynicism with us today. We are all welcomed to participate in this service where we put a spotlight on Mary, mother of Jesus.
I imagine we might be interested in Mary’s relationship to the patriarchy and how feminists view her. Does doctrine and devotion to Mary keep women subjugated? Or is it a force for liberation and salvation? We can examine how social forces affect us collectively and individually. We cherish the power and responsibility each of us has to choose which symbols we allow to guide and direct us.
I wish to share some personal history and be transparent about how I am coming to this subject.
The first time I attended a UU service, Dr Virginia Molenkott, Professor of Literature at William Paterson University was the guest speaker. She spoke of her participation in the creation of the first language inclusive lectionary. A lectionary is a book that presents selected bible passages to be used on determined dates by all congregations in a given denomination. The National Council of the Churches of Christ appointed Molenkott and eleven others and gave them the task of creating a language inclusive lectionary in order to “to express the truth about God and about God’s inclusive love for all persons.”
That UU service was my first experience of liberal religion outside of my Jewish faith. It reminded me of something my rabbi had said. He said “we don’t worship the Torah (Jewish bible). That would be biblio-idolatry. We worship the G*d that is written about in our Torah.” This topic also reminds me of something my mother said to me. One day we were talking about religion and politics, while riding in her car. Knowing me I was probably questing authority. She said “the bible was written by MEN, Phillip.” I was stunned. Mom was a devout Catholic, pointing out the human authorship of the bible.
IMO this is the core of religious liberalism, an acknowledgment that our sources are imperfect and incomplete. To the religious liberal, bibles are repositories of cultural treasure, inherited understandings and ways of living. And through this vehicle of literature our attention is drawn to the Sacred, to an experience of connection, a transcendence of ego, transcendence of limited individual views.
In my Jewish upbringing, the name of G*d could not be spoken because to name is to create an object, and God was not to be considered an object but the ultimate subject, the source which created us, and the Ultimate Reality beyond our perceptions. In our UU religious tradition we study religious language. We recognize that words are at best symbols and approximations of realties greater than words can capture.
Excited and inspired by Dr Malenkot’s talk, I decide that from then on, I would use female pronouns for God. It wasn’t that I had concluded that G*d is a woman, if I may use the imperfect word god. My intention was to counterbalance the skewed representation of divinity as male. To transcend the language of God the Father, I wanted to reclaim the ability to imagine God as Mother, and maybe sister and brother too.
In my first semester of seminary there was a sculpture on loan to the Pacific School of religion. “Christa” is a statue of a crucified woman created by Edwina Sandys, daughter of Winston Churchill.
Like that first language inclusive lectionary, “Christa” has been met with outrage by those who see it an affront to their faith. People object to representation of divinity as female because it contradicts the language, story and doctrine that they hold as absolute truth. Literalists often call art “evil” when it doesn’t match their idea of religious truth. They claim that it diverts people away from their complete and perfect revelation of God’s truth.
Who was Mary? Did she and does she possess divinity? According to the bible, the archangel Gabriel approached Mary to inform her that she had found favor with God. The word had been conceived, and was eager for this world to experience his mercy. God chose Mary to give birth to Jesus who would be the Jewish people’s promised messiah.
In the ancient world it was considered the ultimate curse for a women to be barren. The ultimate blessing was to give birth to a male that could be a provider. What could be a greater honor than to give birth to the man who bring salvation to humanity? According to church doctrine, Jesus was born to save the world from sin, defeat death and create a path to eternal life.
In this century in many parts of the world, women have experienced life as meaningful and fulfilling in other ways besides motherhood. Many have criticized the patriarchy and claim it’s depictions of divinity and prescriptions for salvation have asserted male supremacy, enshrined male privilege and power.
Mary has been held up as the ideal for women, the pinnacle of purity and virtue. According to the church, she was created by immaculate conception. The taint of original sin was not upon her. Also, Jesus conception was miraculous because it involved no sexual activity. To the church, the body and sex were sinful. Bible study, thought and intellect were seen as men’s territory. Women have been associated with blood, body, and nature. Father God has been seen as existing above and removed from nature. Man was given dominion over Earth.
Although the patriarchy used Mary for its purposes, I think it’s also true that the historic rise the veneration of Mary created some societal value for women. Similar to the way doctrine, theology and Christology, (ideas about Jesus) evolved over time, so did Mary’s importance. Mary became very important when powerful men -church leaders sought to establish the doctrine of Jesus as fully human and fully God.
One view I have heard many times in the past forty years is that Christianity consists solely of ideas stolen from Jewish, Zorastrian and Pagan cultures. In this view, the church coopted the beliefs and practices of the common folk to get them to become Christians. It was part of a process of domination, assimilation and erasure of identities of the conquered.
The church couldn’t get the country folk to give up their goddesses, stories and rituals that expressed women’s role in creation, fertility and the interconnected beauty of life. So Christianity offered them Mary. I credit Pagans for finding ways to survive, and avoid being erased by the regimes that had already conquered and coopted the movement of followers of Jesus.
The current popularity of the Virgen of Guadalupe is a great example! The story of the Lady of Guadalupe can be traced back to Spain. Appearances of the Virgin Mary were common in the period before and during the Spanish conquest in the Americas. Even the detail of Mary appearing at Guadalupe can be trace back to Spain. The Spanish brought this story no doubt along with their intention to conquer the indigenous Americans.
Today 12 million people make pilgrimage to Mexico City to celebrate the Blessed Mother of Guadulupe. She is a source of national pride, pride for Indigenous and working class people, for women, and the culture that is a weave of ancient and modern. In 1531, Mary appeared to Juan Diego, an Atzec peasant and asked him to build a church on that site. This future site of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe had long been the site of temple of adoration to the goddess Tonantzin. It was a sacred place to the Anahuac empire, a federation of tribes. The people believed that on the top of the hill, the mother of the gods appeared. The greatly venerated Goddess Tonantzin, it is said, appeared to them in the form of a young girl.
In Mexico today the Lady of Guadulupe is also known as Tonantzin.
The veneration of Mary through the ages marks the continuance of the incarnation of the divine feminine in so many ways. We can compare her to Kwan Yin, goddess of compassion.
Here is a sample of Church Fathers talking about the blessed virgin:
St Alphonsus Ligore: There is no sinner in the world however much at enmity with God, who cannot recover God’s grace by recourse to Mary, and asking her assistance!
St. John Damascene called Mary “the city of refuge for all who fly to her.” St. Bonaventure says: “Poor abandoned sinners, do not despair, raise your eyes to Mary, and be comforted, trusting in the clemency of this good Mother, for she will rescue you from the shipwreck you have suffered and will conduct you to the haven of salvation. “
“Let us,” says St. Bernard, “ask grace, and ask it through Mary.” The grace that we have lost she has found, When the Archangel Gabriel announced to Mary that God had chosen her to be the Mother of the Word, he said to her: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God (Luke i. 30). Cardinal Hugo answers, that she did not find grace for herself, because she always possessed it, but she found it for us who had miserably lost it.”
Paul McCartney dreamed of his mother, woke and wrote “when I find myself in times of trouble Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom: let it be.”
Who is this Mary? Is she Theotokos, the mother of G*d? Is she Kwan Yin? Tonantzin? I recently saw an extraordinary video captured by a door cam. A wolf sees the great avalanche of snow coming down the mountain. She grabs her pup in her mouth, darts with lighting speed up onto the porch to the house’s front door. She covers up and protects her pup as the snow washes like a wave over them. This is the nature of divine mother love. Put down your beliefs, let go of history, remember the truth of this love. Call Mother Mary and she will come to you.
Blessed be!
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