The YES of Mary
The Year of Mary - Sharing My Story
The Year of Mary - A Sermon from Circle Service
This past Wednesday was the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, celebrating the bodily taking up of Mary into heaven at the end of her life on earth. Here at St. Mary’s we celebrate this as the Feast of Mary.
The preparation for this sermon began last fall when my friend Erica and I decided we wanted to work together for a year on women’s spiritual events focusing on Mary. This resulted in the Advent half-day retreat Waiting with Mary, and six months of preparing for and leading the June women’s weekend retreat, Walking with Mary.
We high-fived on the street outside my house and gleefully declared last year “The Year of Mary.” We spent an enormous amount of time studying, meditating, and writing about Mary. It was a rich and rewarding project. However, the journey raised many more questions than answers, and the questions continue to disturb me.
Getting deeper into Mary is upsetting because her story has been almost completely silenced and co-opted by the institution of the Church. She has been used as a model of submission, piety, and purity, when in fact she was probably a woman of great courage, intelligence, and power, as evidenced in the person Jesus was.
Getting deeper into Mary is upsetting because the silencing and sanitizing of her story looks too much like the silencing of my own story, and the tremendous pressure I have felt all my life to be a good girl, to be a model of submission, piety, and purity.
Increasingly I am realizing that although I cannot resurrect the entirety of Mary’s story, I can do what is in my power to do, and that is to honestly share my story as a woman of faith, and encourage all of you to do the same. To share the real stories, even if they upset the status quo.
The story I am going to share with you today starts with this Circle. This is where the ancient Blessed Mother broke through in a living way for me, in the life-giving safety of this Circle.
Circle Service was started eighteen years ago this summer by a group of brave women who passionately wanted several things: inclusive language (language about the Divine that did not alienate anyone), shared power (symbolized by our arrangement as equals in this circle), and to create a place where people could honestly wrestle with their beliefs and experience of the Divine.
This Circle movement, I will call it—it’s bigger than just a weekly service—is labeled “alternative,” but it is also firmly rooted in real tradition. It is deeply Christian, and it is authentically Episcopalian. In the Circle Movement there is room for the full range of doubt and confusion and disagreement. There is room for all the good stuff too, the stuff we can agree on, but the “alternative” status is specifically for making room for the hard stuff.
I am a feminist, meaning, I believe in and work towards wholeness for each human person. “In Christ there is no male or female,” as St. Paul says. In my body, my deepest heart, my spirituality is earth-based. My ancestors are my teachers, and they work through creation. When I ask a sincere question of a tree, for example, I am given an answer.
I am a Christian because I love Jesus. I know that Jesus is one with the Divine, and that the Divine speaks directly to me through him. I believe that we as a community, the people of God, are empowered to transform these creatures here, the bread and wine on this table, into the spiritual food we need to become the living body of Christ in the world.
I was raised Catholic, so I was steeped in Mary. I am named after her. I grew up in the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary. My family always sat on the Mary side of the church, the left side, which had an alcove with a statue of Mary. From the time I was tiny, and the mass was still in Latin, and up until only a few years ago, I studied that same statue and wondered: Who are you really?
Through a long period, around when I was the age of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, I waited for Mary to speak to me special. Bernadette was 14 when Mary appeared to her. About the age Mary was, when the angel visited her, by the way. I would sit in front of the statue, and long for her to speak. She did not speak.
Who was Mary? Mary was certainly a historical person, because Jesus existed, and he had a mother. The story of Jesus in the gospel of Luke begins with Mary, when the angel tells her she’s pregnant with him. The Magnificat that we read together today for the Gospel was what she says when she meets her cousin Elizabeth, who was John the Baptist’s mother.
In the Bible, Mary is given only 191 words. It takes the average person about one minute to speak 120 words, so Mary speaks for only about a minute and a half total.
The most words she speaks at one time are in the Magnificat, a hymn that reveals very little about her as a person except that, like a good girl, she is grateful to the Almighty. Mary is a handmaiden of the Lord, a servant. It’s a beautiful, powerful hymn, and it tells us a lot about God, but it tells us almost nothing about Mary as a human woman.
Mary speaks 191 words in the Bible. During our 6-month preparation for the women’s retreat, my leadership team and I did Lectio Divina, an ancient Benedictine practice of meditating on sacred texts. Over the months, we deeply pondered every single word Mary said, and shared what was rising in each of us in response.
I have to tell you, as the months went by, I became more and more disturbed. Who is this very important woman? The mother of the man who has changed the course of history? I became more and more convinced that the words attributed to her were not her words, but the words the forming church wanted her to have.
The deeper story of Mary is ancient, deeply ancient, much older than Christianity. The deeper story of Mary is written on my heart, and yours, and deep in the unfolding story of what it means to be human.
Dr. Clarissa Estes is an indigenous Jungian psychologist and storyteller who went on an interesting quest related to Mary. She traveled the world and asked indigenous people on every continent about the Blessed Mother, Our Lady, Mary, and she found a version of Mary everywhere and adapted to every single circumstance. Judy did some research for the women’s retreat on Mary and found that there are dozens and dozens of names for Mary the world over, all of them seen as perfectly legitimate names for Mary. This is what Estes found as well, on her quest.
For example, if for the local people, some road was the most important thing, the road was where people dried and sorted the harvest and met one another for trysts, the road was the central symbolic identity of the place, then Mary became something like, Our Lady of the Road. In many places, Mary is known as Queen of Heaven, which was also a name used for the ancient African goddess Isis, whose flower, by the way, was the rose.
And so, my brothers and sisters: Maybe today I’ve found a new name for Mary: Our Lady of the Circle. Maybe this is how she speaks to me today. As our opening chant says,
Long before the name of a God was spoken
Long before a cross was nailed from a tree
Long before She laid her arm of colors ‘cross the sky
there was a love,
this ancient love was born.
The story of Mary is an ancient story of love. The story of Mary is written on my heart, and yours. And it matters very much that it is NOT written in our holy texts, or in our liturgical prayers. The silence is wrong, and distorts our understanding of ourselves as whole human beings.
I will close by reading part of the dedication in an important book by Episcopal priest Lindsay Hardin Freeman, Bible Women: All Their Words and Why They Matter, published in partnership with Episcopal Church Women.
Dedicated to all women and girls
who have spoken, screamed, or cried
whose words were not remembered or understood
and to those who could not speak
who were silenced, beaten back
their cries known to You alone.
Restore them, Lord—Our Lady of the Circle,
renew them, make them whole,
on earth, as it is in heaven.
Amen.
Mary: Jesus' Mother, Our Mother
Pentecost!
Happy Pentecost! Pentecost is one of the three most important festivals in the church year: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Christmas celebrates the incarnation of God in this world in the person of Jesus Christ. Easter celebrates his resurrection from the dead. And Pentecost celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples, empowering them to go out into the world and be the Church. We tend to think about the first two as being about Jesus and this one being about the Spirit. Though, the reality is that the Holy Spirit is moving through all three of them.
For instance, at Christmas, while we are all focused on the the cute baby in the manager, it is the Holy Spirit working to make it all possible. At the annunciation, when Mary objected to the impossibility of this pregnancy, the Angel Gabriel said that it was the Holy Spirit that was going to make the incarnation possible. The Holy Spirit makes Christmas happen. With God, all things are possible, because the Holy Spirit makes things possible.
At Easter, we are rightly focused on Christ being raised from the dead, but it was the Holy Spirit bringing Christ up from the dead. We heard in our first lesson today that powerful vision from Ezekiel of resurrection, a lesson we normally hear at the Easter Vigil, the first service of Easter, the first service of the Resurrection, but it is also rightly read today because it is a reading about the Spirit. In this vision that Ezekiel experienced, it says that the bones were raised, but they had no life, until the breath came into them. In Hebrew, the word breath is ruach, which is also the word for Spirit. It was the Spirit that brought about the resurrection. The Spirit is the Breath of God working in the world, bringing life where there was no life. As true for the vision of Ezekiel as it was for Jesus’ at the first Easter: It is the Holy Spirit bringing about resurrection.
And then, of course, today, we all know that today is all about the Spirit, as the Holy Spirit comes down like a rushing wind, and lights on the disciples like fire, empowering them as we heard about in the reading from Acts. And this amazing thing happens: Everyone begins to understand the message, despite all of their linguistic and cultural differences. The Holy Spirit is working to make sure people understand each other across their differences. The Holy Spirit doesn’t erase their differences, the Holy Spirit builds bridges across their differences so that the Good News can be heard and understood. The Holy Spirit brings this vision, not of unity through erasing difference, but of a unity across those differences. Each person staying the way that God made him or her, but the Holy Spirit working to bring understanding across the divide.
That same Spirit that brought Jesus into the world, that same Spirit that brought Jesus up from the dead, is the same Spirit now pouring out onto the disciples, sending them out into the world to bring the Good News of God’s love to a broken world. So, all three of these festivals are linked to the Holy Spirit; they are all festivals of the Spirit. But they are all also Festivals of the Body of Christ. For while we celebrate God being born in a body at Christmas, and we celebrate that body being raised on the third day at Easter, on Pentecost, the disciples are sent out in to the world to be the Body of Christ. Christ’s body born at Christmas, raised at Easter, is now sent into the world through us. All of which is made possible... by the Holy Spirit.
A few weeks ago, we had a baptism here at St. Mary’s. And as we blessed the water, we said those words that we always say: “We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water…” And we retell the story of salvation through the lens of water, talking about the Spirit moving over the waters at the beginning of creation. And we talk about the children of Israel moving through waters out of their slavery and again moving through waters into the Promised Land. And we talk about Jesus’ own baptism in the River Jordan. We offer our gratitude to God for the baptismal waters, in which we are buried with Christ in his death, by which we share in his resurrection, and through which we are reborn by the Holy Spirit. Reborn by the Holy Spirit. Pentecost teaches us that the same Spirit that came down upon Jesus at his baptism and declares Jesus as God’s beloved Son, comes upon us and declares us to be God’s beloved children as well.
Reborn. Given new birth. New life. In the Spirit. The German theologian, Jürgen Moltmann compares this new spiritual birth with our original physical birth. He says of when a child is born: “Life begins, the senses awaken. The child opens its eyes and sees the light. It begins to breath, and feels the air. It cries, and hears the sounds. It lies beside its mother and feels the warmth of her skin.” The same is true when we are reborn by the power of the Spirit. He says, “Our senses are born again too. The enlightened eyes ... wake to the awareness of God. The beating heart experiences God’s love. The experience of God’s Spirit is like breathing the air: ‘God is continually breathing ... upon the soul, and the soul is breathing unto God.” God’s Spirit is life’s vibrating, vitalizing field of energy: we are in God and God is in us.”
The experience of a newborn reminds us though, that this initial awakening is not the end. The senses continue to grow. We continue to grow in life AND in faith. Even as sense of sight awakens at birth, it takes months to develop, as the child learns to distinguish shapes and colors and get depth perception and see far distances. The awakening of our spiritual senses are the same, they develop and grow over time as we grow in our faith. As we train our spiritual eyes to be aware of God’s presence with us, as we train our spiritual hearts to know God’s loving heart, as we train our spiritual lungs to breath in God’s spirit, that ruach, that Breath of God that brings life to this world, even in places of utter death like a Valley of Dry Bones.
As we celebrate today the coming of the Holy Spirit at that first Pentecost after Christ’s resurrection, we also celebrate the Spirit coming into lives every day, awakening our spiritual senses to feel and to know God’s loving presence with us, and empowering us to go into the world, bringing the Good News of God’s love found in Jesus Christ, helping bring up resurrection, new life, to all of dry bones we come upon, transforming the world by helping get our heartbeat to align with God’s. Amen.
