YES! GOD HAS A MOTHER!

(Preached on Sunday, December 21, 2003)

And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?                                                                                 -Luke 1:43

 

Where do you find God? 

Once upon a time God was thought to be found on mountain tops.  We find that in ancient Israel (Sinai); in early Greece (Olympus); in Japan (Mt. Fuji); in South America (the Andes); and in India (the Himalayas). 

Greek philosophers rejected such primitive concepts but pushed God off beyond the distant heavens; far too pure to have any dealings with us on earth. 

Present-day knowledge of the immense cosmos also tends to push God far away to the outer rim, or if you prefer, way back in time before the first big bang.

Or outside the total net of time and space.

 

For many people God is like a character in Cool Hand Luke.  Luke is a prisoner in an Alabama chain gang. God is symbolized in Godfry, the boss who wears silvered sunglasses.  He is indifferent, remote, and detached from the prisoners, never really showing any emotion whatsoever.  He communicates through his underlings.

When he speaks, someone suffers. 

He arbitrarily sets limits and punishes at a whim.

They feel that God somehow doesn’t understand their lives.

 

But this fourth Sunday of Advent brings us back to the deeper truth about God: Planet earth is loved by the Creator.

God is present with and through human beings.

The Holy One is uniquely present in the Child of Mary; Mary is the mother of God.  

Yes!  God has a mother!

 

When the early Christians made that statement they were not giving divine status to Mary. 

They were definitely not saying that Mary preceded God or that she created God.

The statement that Mary was Theotokos, God bearer, was intended to say more about who Jesus was than who Mary was.

They were insisting that the Divine Child started as a human fetus, really carried in Mary’s womb and later suckled at her breast.

God’s true child, Jesus, was fully mothered by Mary.

This is how God comes to us — in the flesh — in a neighbor, in a friend, in a small child, in a baby.

God loves us so much that God will find a way.

The word becomes flesh again, and again, and again...

 

An argument among early Christians over Jesus’ human and divine qualities led to a heresy called docetism.

Docetism held that Jesus’ body only appeared to be real, and therefore he only seemed to suffer and die on the cross.

Even though this point of view eventually lost the debate and was declared a heresy, it did not totally fade away. 

M. Scott Peck suggests in his book The Different Drum that a vast majority of churchgoing American Christians are also heretics, because they practice what he calls “pseudodocetism.” 

Peck explains that most American Christians have enough education through catechism or confirmation to recognize that there is a contradiction in the claim that Jesus is both human and divine. 

To compensate for the contradiction, they place much more value upon his divinity than his humanity, putting him on God’s level, 99.5% divine, and leaving us on an earthly level, 99.5% human. 

The gulf created by this distancing relieves ordinary human beings from responsibility for Christ-like actions. 

In Peck’s words: “It is through the large scale ignoring of Jesus’ very real humanity that we are allowed to worship him in name without the obligation of following in his footsteps.  Pseudodocetism lets us off the hook.”

 

But Luke’s gospel, more than any of the others, reminds us of the very human face of Jesus. 

Luke wants us to remember that the main truth about the Incarnation is not simply that “God is with us,” but that God came to us as Jesus.

Of all the ways for God to enflesh, God came as a Jewish peasant from Nazareth who was murdered by the authorities, not because of the peculiarity of his birth, but for the revolutionary quality of his life.

Jesus was violently tortured to death, not because he was a baby conceived out of wedlock, but because of what he said and what he did once he grew up. 

His life and teachings provoked a crisis in our settled intellectual and political arrangements. 

He unmasked the relationship between our cherished notions of what can and can’t be and our governmental sanctions about who is and who is not in charge.

 

Here at Christmas, and especially here on the fourth Sunday of Advent, the story is all very specific, all very earthy, all very gynecological.

It is all a way of saying that God is not some distant, removed deity who only occasionally, as in some sentimental season like Christmas, intervenes in the world.

God doesn’t come to the world “from the outside”.

The world, in its workings, inside and out, is God’s.

God does not despise the earth.

God and people are much closer than you think. 

And perhaps nothing conveys that truth as powerfully as the phrase “Mother of God.”

 

First and foremost it underlines the incomparable love of God; the unique humility of God; the saving beauty of God.

Secondly, it declares hope for humanity.

If the Divine can become “incarnate in Mary’s son,” then the human and divine are not poles apart. 

Human flesh is not a lost cause.

God has become “bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.”

 

We remember and celebrate Mary’s story not because it is unique but precisely because it is our story. 

The love of God still seeks ordinary mortals and labors to be born into a world to widely and often absent of love. 

God chooses us, no less than Mary, to bear that love.

Grace comes to us in the flesh. 

Forgiveness, mercy, pardon, love, and healing are administered through living beings; in a voice, in an embrace, in a kiss, in a touch, in the flesh.

Someone forgives you and gives you another chance when you don’t deserve it; someone picks you up when you fall; someone touches you where you hurt, and you are healed.  “Mommy, kiss it and make it better,” we say, “the best medicine in the world.”

The word becomes flesh again and again and again....

 

We can rejoice because God is in our lives — right now!

We can see God in the love of one person for another.

A chaplain tells about seeing a young man with a bald heard, eyes to the ground, outside a cancer hospital. 

He thought the man was going in for a cancer treatment.  Later, he saw the man in the hallway.

This time his head was up and he was walking fast. 

When he came back to the desk, the chaplain was surprised to see the man again. 

This time he had a big smile on his face and his steps were light.

He was not alone, either. 

High on his shoulder was his son, four years old, wearing a Winnie the Pooh bathrobe. 

And then the chaplain saw that it was the child who had cancer, who had lost his hair.

This father had shaved his head out of love for his son.

 

A minister who helped build a Habitat for Humanity house said, “Christ was not an abstract at this site where 20 homes were being built.  I am sure that I have seen Jesus, though I am not sure just where.  Did I see him in Celso and Esthella, who, like Mary and Joseph, had a hard time finding a place to stay?  Or in the people who came from Belfast, and Switzerland, and other states, to help build for people they hadn’t met yet?  Or in the people staffing the first aid stations?  Did I see him in those who gave their days to serve food and keep the drink barrel filled?  Did I see him on the list of major donors or in the supply trailer finding nails or caulking?  I think the answer is yes!”

 

The truth is that some will only see God through you.

They will know who God is, know whether or not they want to be a follower of God, because they see and recognize God in your life and they want to have God int heir lives also.

The Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart wrote this truth: “What good is it to be if their eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself?  And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace and I am not also full of grace?”

 

God still comes to our flesh and blood, just as God came to Mary, asking us to bear the promised Savior. 

So when the angel Gabriel says, “Do not be afraid, Mary,” we also are being comforts: “Do not be afraid, Lucy, Helen, Meredith, George, Richard, Jeremy, Vanessa, Frank, Bryan and Barbara.  Do not be afraid for you have found favor with God!”

What her cousin Elizabeth exclaims — that the one who bears this child is blessed, indeed — is no less true of each and every one of us; for that is what we are, called to bear Christ, for the sake of all who do not yet know the grace and mercy of God.

 

We are incarnate reflections of divine love.