Sermons

Sermon Preached by Mother Robyn Arnold

Preached by Mother Robyn Arnold on Feast of the Annunciation (Thursday, March 25, 2010)

How is it that we find ourselves here?... at the beginning again? In the grand scheme we are still moving forward. From here we can see the storm clouds gathering over Jerusalem and hear the noise of the crowd waiting to welcome the King who “comes in the name of the Lord”…. All the while the shadow of the cross looms large.

Of course time in this context has a shape rather than a direction so perhaps it is not surprising that in this moment we are here…. in the room where it begins… the Incarnation.

Maryam, a very young Jewish girl in a nondescript town in Palestine in the first century looks up from her woman’s work and sees…. an angel on a mission from God.

But wait, we have been here before… we have seen this … she looks up from her book… not some unimportant woman’s task…. She has been meditating on the scriptures, sitting there in her chaste (rather sterile) beauty in her red gown and blue robe… there among the lilies…..

No,…. Not that Mary…. That one comes along almost two hundred years later when the writer of the Protoevangelium of James, fueled with passion for the Virgin Mary, but having a distaste for women in general creates an alternate history for this woman - this woman who walks very quietly through the Gospels and no doubt keeps much of what she thinks and knows in her heart. Because he cannot fathom her interior self the author creates an exterior for her…. An image with the appearance but not the substance of a woman… an image that supports a theology of the Incarnation that is still unsure of exactly how human Jesus was… and by association how human his mother was.

The human Mary would have been a woman much like the other women of her tribe, busy in her woman’s way. The men might sit in the doorways and discuss theology or strap on their armor and wage war, but the women would have been about other things…. Baking bread to feed the hungry, carrying water, weaving cloth for swaddling…. or wedding garments …. or shrouds. Mary would have known the ways of birth…and death. Women were always the ones there at the beginning…. and the end…. in the thin places at the edges of life where heaven and earth draw near.

Our young mother-to-be was not surprised to find herself in the presence of God’s messenger; rather she was perplexed by his address… “Greetings favored one, the Lord is with you…” The angel mistakes her curiosity for fear and reassures her…. “Do not be afraid Mary”. As Gabriel goes on to describe God’s master plan, Mary, no stranger to either biology or the laws and customs

of her community asks the obvious question…. “How can this be?” The angel’s answer, while vague to us suffices for Mary and she makes her decision…. “Here am I the servant of the Lord…. Let it be.”

And so it begins…. The Incarnation. The new thing God had in mind from the creation of the universe. … the Incarnation…. God becoming human… not JUST human but a particular human, the man Jesus. The Virgin Mother is blessed because it was of her humanity that Jesus was formed. Don’t ask me as a scientist to reconcile my belief in the Virgin Birth but at the same time don’t expect me to deny the full humanity of Jesus… or his mother.

The Incarnation with its scandal of particularity was (is) a difficult concept to grasp. Throughout Christian history the fathers of the Church, devout men of faith, tried to understand how God in God’s perfection, could (or would) become human… could or would become this weak frail creature full of corruption and decay. In the cosmology of the day heaven and God were so far removed from earth and humanity that to join the two in the person of Christ was almost beyond comprehension.

This struggle to understand the Incarnation is reflected in the various heresies that arose…. Nestorius’ denial that a divine being could be born of a woman… or exist as an infant. He reconciled his conflict by suggesting that Christ actually had two natures, human and divine…. Natures that could merge but remained distinct… Cyril of Alexandria countered him by insisting that Christ has one nature… the Incarnate one.

Eutyches offered up the monophysite heresy insisting that the person of Christ had two natures before incarnation but only one afterward… that his humanity was absorbed by his divinity as water is absorbed in a cup of wine.

I suspect that it was the taint of monophysitism that provided the impetus for a theological anthropology of Mary that repackaged the Jewish mother into a female quite unlike any woman with an experience alien to all women. Blame it on the monophysites and the misogynists, of whom there were many. From the Apostle Paul in 60 AD insisting that we be subject to our men… to Tertullian in the late 2nd, early 3rd century convinced that women were the “gateway to Hell” … and on and on… up through the 13th century and Thomas Aquinas, who consistent with Aristotelian understanding, wrote that we were merely “defective and misbegotten”.

During the medieval period both devotion to the Blessed Virgin and Church-sanctioned misogyny were rampant. It is quite ironic that many of the most beautiful images of the Blessed Virgin were produced by artists in this period… images that show Mary holding a book (symbol of wisdom) with a lily (a symbol of purity)

at a time when it was widely considered a waste to educate girls and women had no autonomy over their own bodies which were used as currency in real-estate deals the Church blessed as marriages.

The Church used the image of the sinless, ever-virgin mother of God to bind women in a social structure that allowed them no power and no voice. Throwing us up on the pedestal with her or crushing us beneath it ... either was equally effective. With countless people repeating the words of Magnificat wherein God casts down the mighty and lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry and remembers his promise of mercy… how can it be that so few listened and acted on those words?... words that called for justice and equality.

The Virgin Mother that Mother Church gave us seemed far removed from those words herself. They gave us a model woman who spoke of mercy but valued only virtue, who obeyed but did not choose, who felt no pain at her son’s birth or any desire for her husband… a woman very unlike her first century counterpart in Nazareth.

This medieval lady was not the wise Mary who taught her son to value all people as God’s own. This was not the courageous Mary who risked stoning to be part of God’s great plan for the world. This was not the strong Mary who bore the pains of labor to bring God into the world, or who walked the way of the Cross and watched her first-born son die. This was not the loving Mary who cradled her man-child at the beginning and end of his life… and who cradles the poor and the broken children of this world.

Incarnation…. brothers and sisters, the Good News is the Incarnation…. It is always about the Incarnation… and the Incarnation is a messy business.

In the Incarnation theology becomes tangled up in biology and by necessity our cosmology is restructured. Alejandro Garcia-Rivera, a visionary professor from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, writes in The Garden of God that

“a theological cosmology gives an account of the relation of heaven and earth and their role in our redemption. This is essentially the reconciliation of heaven and earth.”

In the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ through the active participation of the Blessed Virgin Mary God has brought heaven and earth together and redeemed all of creation.

Quoting again from the Garden of God….

”The need of flesh for God’s help finds answer in the Word become flesh. Frailty finds God’s favor not God’s condemnation. Our understanding of flesh as frail must find answer in the Incarnation… God finding favor in the frail…. The frailty of the flesh is the strength of God.”

This relationship comes to its fruition in the Cross, Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord …

and it all begins with the Annunciation.

Maryam of Nazareth -- Daughter of Eve, woman of the House of David, and “Favored of God”…

In a pivotal moment that will reshape the cosmos a young girl with flashing eyes and warm brown skin feels the stirring of God within her womb.

Let it be with me according to your word.

Let it be with me according to the way of women.

Here am I, the servant of the Lord.

Let it be with me.