(Preached on Sunday, December 20, 2009)
“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. That is what they thought 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 in doing so pushed God off beyond the distant heavens; far too pure to have any dealings with us on earth. Present-day scientific knowledge of the immense cosmos also tends to push God far, far away to the out rim of the universe, or if you prefer a purer scientific view, way back in time before the first big bang. Or possibly even outside the total net of time and space.
For many people God is like a character in the film Cool Hand Luke. The title character, Luke, is a prisoner in an Alabama chain gang. God is symbolized in the character Godfry, the guard boss who wears silvered sunglasses. He is indifferent, remote and detached from the prisoners. He never shows any real emotion whatsoever and we never hear him speak. He communicates only through his underlings – the other guards and the prisoner trustees. When he takes action, 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 to the deeper truth about God: Planet earth is beloved 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 not suggesting that Mary preceded God or that she in any way created God. No, the statement that Mary was Theotokos, God bearer, was an attempt to say more about who Jesus was than who Mary was. They were insisting that the Divine Child started as a human fetus, was really carried in Mary’s womb and later suckled at her breast. God’s true child, Jesus, was fully mothered by Mary, a human being. 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.
None of this was an issue in the beginning of Christianity. For the first 20 to 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, his early followers focused on his teachings, his life, his death and his resurrection. No one gave much thought to his birth. It only became important as the years passed and new believers began to idolize and worship Jesus, not feeling as close to his earthly life because they had never known him personally. This led to an emphasis of his divine qualities over his human qualities – which eventually led to a belief that Jesus’ body only appeared to be real, but he was not truly a human being; so he only seemed to suffer and die on the cross, he didn’t really suffer and die. This belief actually undermined the power of Jesus’ life, teachings, and death so the Church eventually declared it a heresy. That does not mean this view faded away, quite the contrary. In fact, M. Scott Peck suggests in his book The Different Drum that a vast majority of churchgoing North American Christians actually hold a view very close to this ancient heresy. Peck explains that most North 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 that contradiction, they place much more value upon his divinity than on his humanity. Thus they put him completely on God’s level, about 99.5% divine, and leave us on an earthly level, about 99.5% human. The gulf created by this distancing relieves ordinary human beings from responsibility for Christ-like actions. Peck writes: “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, in human flesh and blood.
This is all extremely particular. Of all the ways for God to take on human flesh, 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, and 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 we usually think. And 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. For 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 so widely and so 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 head, 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 quickly. 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.
Where do you find God? Look around you. God’s love is poured into flesh – our flesh. God’s love is given to heal us, to empower us to share healing, to strengthen us to love instead of hate, and to cast out our fear. God’s love is the power to transform everything. God’s love enables us to let go of our failures, our woundedness, our pain, and our fear. We are incarnate reflections of divine love. We can choose with each word of mercy and love we speak, each gesture of compassion, each act of justice, to add stones to the glorious structure of God’s dwelling place on earth – God’s home of love, peace and acceptance for all. Or, we can choose with each act of violence, each gesture of contempt, and each word of hate or anger to tear down the walls of the holy city that would shelter God’s whole universe in equity and joy. We choose. The truth is that some people will only see God through you – through your actions, your words, your life. 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 thus they want to have God in their lives. Yes! God has a mother! And a father! God’s love and presence is being born again this Christmas – in your flesh and mine. Blessed indeed are they who bear the Christ in their lives, for the sake of all who do not yet know the grace, mercy and love of God.