First Parish Unitarian UniversalistMother Mary
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
December 23, 2007
A Presbyterian minister (James M. Buchanan) writes that several years ago, during Advent, he received a note from the sixth grade church school class which said, “Dear Mr. Buchanan: We have some questions about Christmas. 1) Did the star actually stand still? 2) Were the shepherds and wise men real? 3) How was Jesus born if his parents didn’t have sexual intercourse?”
They ended their note with, “Please meet us next Sunday and tell us the answers.” (“Hail, Mary” in Christian Century, December 14, 2007, p.3)
He says his first response was to “think that when I was in sixth grade the phrase ‘sexual intercourse’ had not yet been uttered in my hearing. It certainly wasn’t part of a question I addressed to the minister.”
He also says that the next week the kids seemed to “get it” when he told them that “the virgin birth was more about Mary’s son and who he was, than about Mary’s sexual behavior.”
Well, I for one, am glad that our children don’t have to ask that question. I’m glad that they know about who Jesus was and what he taught. I’m glad that they don’t need to ask “did it happen?” and instead can ponder “what does it mean?”
Like that minister, I and any of you who grew up in the Protestant tradition may not have heard much about Mary the Mother of Jesus, except for when she made her annual appearance at Christmas, in the Christmas pageant. How many of you ever played a shepherd? Raise your hands! An angel? Joseph? Mary?
In his comedic novel about Christmas in a small Midwest town called Harmony, Philip Gulley (a Quaker minister whose laugh-out-loud novels were recommended to me by Dick White) describes a Christmas pageant in which a boy plays Joseph in a traveling Nativity scene on the back of a hay wagon. He wore for his costume, as instructed, his father’s plaid bathrobe. But, Mary, played by the stunning State Sausage Queen, had not been told what to wear. She wore her gauzy, slinky dressing gown! Through the center of town, as Mary the Mother of Jesus!
When the hay wagon downshifted opposite the Five and Dime, to give (as the organizer of the nativity scene had planned, and I quote) “nonbelievers sufficient time to be convicted of their sin,” the boy recalls,”the men along the sidewalk began to whistle, while I, her faithful husband, gazed adoringly at my [scantily-clad] betrothed, thanking the Lord for using me to bring Truth to the unwashed masses.”
We haven’t had a pageant here at First Parish for quite some time. I’m sure that, when we did, our Mary was decently garbed!
But, recently I was thinking maybe we need to have a pageant, after one of our RE teachers told me a few weeks ago that the children in her class didn’t even know what a manger was! Hopefully, they were all here to participate in Patsy’s Time for All Ages this morning.
For a long time in the Protestant tradition, including both Unitarian and Universalism, Mary has not been a key figure. Not much was known about her because the Bible didn’t say much about her. The Bible verses I read for our Reading this morning were all there is.
As the Protestant author of the 1996 book Mary Through the Centuries says, “You could copy on an eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet everything there is about Mary in the New Testament. Now, with Jesus, you can know more about any player in the NBA than about Jesus. But at least with Jesus there’s the material in the four Gospels. With Mary—well, to get from such skimpy evidence to what she has become is an astonishing example of how an idea can develop out of small beginnings.” (in “Mystery of Mary,” Life magazine, December 1996).
That quote was the first paragraph in a December 1996 Life magazine article I clipped. I marked a file folder with “Mary” and put it between “Marriage” and “Masks” in my future-sermon file drawer. Over the years since, other articles were slipped in. But that one from Life brought Mary alive for me as a symbol and as a person like no other when, this December, for the first time, I pulled out that folder to prepare to preach about her.
The article is compelling for the same reason that Mary is compelling, the mystery of her. Because the Bible says so little about her, much has been left up to human imagination, and to the church’s speculations about her, some of which became doctrine.
The visual arts, music, and the daily piety of billions of Christians, Catholics especially, have filled in the Biblical blanks with incredible beauty, and devotion. She and her newborn are depicted as being of every possible ethnicity, and with all the tenderness any of us would hope to have been shown by our own mothers.
Yet, as the Mother of Jesus—or, depending on your Christology, as the Mother of God—she is both far more powerful a symbol than just a mother and, at the same time, as accessible to the believer as one’s own mother.
Indeed, on the front cover of Life that month was a creamy white marble statue of Mary, almost apparition-like, with the words “Two thousand years after the Nativity, the mother of Jesus is more beloved, powerful, and controversial than ever” and then the cover story title: “The Mystery of Mary.”
The long article weaves the author’s [Robert Sullivan] sensitive personal memories of growing up Catholic with the reflections of scholars like the Yale professor Jarsoslav Pelican, whose opening quote I just read; Karen Armstrong who I’ve quoted to you more than once, the former Catholic nun who wrote The History of God and several books on Islam; and—and this you may find as shocking as I did—the article ends with, it gives the last word to… a Unitarian Universalist!!
And what does the Reverend Forrest Church of All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City have to say about Mary?
“I envy Catholicism its Mary. Protestantism has nothing that can replace the part that she could or might play in their churches. She lends the idea of God a feminine face and makes the idea more available, less exclusionary. I would like to think that she could be a bridge between [Christian] religions. Not right now, perhaps. Those hymns to her in Protestant hymn books—I wonder how many times they get sung. But someday, if we could get back to a human Mary who is like us, who represents our mothers, I think we can come together through Mary. Think about it.” An entirely human Mary. [pp.59-60].
How UU of him. We Unitarian Universalists who believe Jesus was a man, not God, would be the ones to suggest Mary was equally as human, wouldn’t we?
Forrest Church admits his idea of Mary as the ecumenical bridge is a dream. It’s hard to imagine that the Pope could ever walk across that bridge. God-fearing Roman Catholicism needs for Mary to be at least close to divine. As the great 12 th century theologian Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “If you fear the Father, go to the Son, if you fear the Son, go to the Mother.”
Or as Father Andrew Greeley, the Catholic priest and sociologist, jokes (as told in the article), “Once upon a time, the Lord went walking through the streets of heaven, and he saw a lot of people who had no business being in heaven at all. So, the Lord goes to the Gates of Heaven, where St. Peter sits at his laptop. He says, ‘Simon Peter, you’ve let me down! There are people with no business being here, and you let them in!’ ‘Boss, it’s not my fault.’ ‘Well,’ says the Lord, ‘Who let them in?’ ‘I don’t want to tell ye, because ye’ll be angry.’ Says Peter. ‘Ye better tell me, I’m the boss!’ ‘Well,’ says Peter, ‘all right, but ye won’t like it. I tell them folks they can’t get in, and don’t they go around to the back door, and your mother lets them in?!’”
Mary as intermediary is right there in the Hail Mary, too. How many of you who were raised Catholic can recite it still? Please join me if you wish.
Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
The first lines of this familiar prayer, the first taught to most Catholic children, are Biblical, from the Gospel of Luke. Perhaps you remember them from the Reading today. The first part is from the Angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary just before telling her the good news. "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women" (Luke 1:28). The second line is from when the newly-pregnant Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth, who was at that time also “with child,” the child who would be John the Baptist. Elizabeth greeted Mary, "Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb" (Luke 1:42)
But, a full millennium after the Nativity had passed before there is any record of these lines as a prayer formula in devotional life. By mid-thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas had inserted Mary’s name, to say “Hail, Mary, full of grace…” But it wasn’t until the Council of Trent in the 16 th century, in response to the Protestant Reformation, that the Roman Church added the last line, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
Clearly, if one aspect of the Protestant Reformation was a protest against the vast separation in the Roman tradition between the people and their authoritarian male God, between people and Pope or priest, then this addition to the Hail Mary must have been intended by the Roman Church to open up a more direct line of communication to God, a female one, though a safely sexless one, as a virgin.
Her virginity brings to mind an interfaith conversation here in Canton. I’ve mentioned it before. One December, the Canton Clergy met for a holiday luncheon at Nick’s Restaurant. We were talking about the Virgin Birth and one of the rabbis told us, shaking his head incredulously, that possibly it is all just based on a poor translation. Because, he said, the word translated as “virgin” from the Hebrew actually just means “a young woman.”
Nevermind, though, the story is what it is.
We who have gender-free images of the divine, if we have them at all, like Spirit of Life and of Love, or Creative Force in the Universe, may not need a feminine divinity to balance the masculine God, or a conduit for our prayers to that God.
But, I still think that Mary has a kind of appeal, even so.
Life can be rough. We make poor choices. People around us make poor choices that have consequences for us. Tough things happen to us through no choice or fault of our own. We have an accident or a serious illness. We face disappointment or disillusionment. In life, a person needs some comfort, and some strength.
That’s what Mother Mary is good for. She is strong, and she provides solace. She can confront, but she is comforting. She nurtures, but like any good mother, she needles us to do the right thing, too. She’s a symbol for what we’re going to need to find within ourselves, with the support of those who love us (hopefully), to live this life when it is rough.
We go to her or she comes to us, speaking words of wisdom. When we’re broken-hearted, she says, let it be. And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light that shines on us, and we wake up to the sound of music, she whispers words of wisdom to us.
Let it be.
Amen.
The closing hymn was “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” and the Postlude was the Beatles “Let it Be” (Mother Mary come to me, Come to me!).