“Mary’s Song”
I owe the inspiration of this sermon to Cardinal Suenens of the Roman Catholic Church, the Women of Kansas, and Margarett Atwood. An unlikely trinity but God works in strange and wondrous ways divine miracles to perform.
Let me start with Cardinal Suenens. He was a Dutch cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. After Vatican II he was in the US on a lecture tour that I somehow happened to attend. I don’t think that I had ever listened to a lecture from a Cardinal and so I went to see what he had to say. He said that he felt sorry for us Protestants. I had never heard someone say that before. I took it personally. He said that he felt sorry for Protestants because we do not have a feminine principle in the godhead. We have the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but those are all masculine. Protestants cannot pray to Mary, the Mother of God, the way that Catholics do. Mary is not part of the trinity. So, we do not pray to her. Cardinal Suenens encouraged us to work on our theology. So, like a good Protestant, I have been doing that ever since.
Then, yesterday, Saturday, I attended a meeting of Women for Kansas. The topic for discussion was women’s health. I learned a lot of things. I learned, for example, that the pregnancy-birth related death rate for women of color in Kansas is three times higher than it is for White women. Medical negligence, lack of access to health care, especially, but not only, in rural areas, and the inadequate training of healthcare professionals is a huge problem. Many of these problems could be prevented if we expanded Kancare. More than eighty percent of the people in Kansas want to see Kancare expanded. But, a handful of people in the state legislature are preventing this. Why? Apparently just because they can. It’s pure power politics. Senate bill 42 and HR 2108 are the proposed legislation to deal with this issue. We need ground level advocacy to change this situation.
As I was listening to this discussion and taking it all in, it struck me that Mary would have been one of the women at risk. She was a member of a religious minority. She rode a donkey when she was pregnant. She gave birth to her child in a barn, with animals around her, not a hospital delivery room or birthing center. Yet, with all this going against her, she identified herself as a “handmaiden of the Lord.”
I never thought much about this until Margaret Atwood’s book, A Handmaiden’s Tale, became popular. I never asked myself what a handmaiden does. In Atwood’s story, the handmaiden is the leader of the resistance in a dysfunctional empire. The handmaiden is the one who facilitates the resistance.
Seen in this new light the story of Mary took on a whole new meaning for me. So, I began looking up birthing stories in the Bible. Here’s what I found. In Deuteronomy, chapter 32:6, we read “Is not he [God] your father who created you, who made you.” That’s pretty clear, but in 32:18 Moses says to the people, “you forgot the God who gave you birth.” A birthing God is a woman, and that’s pretty clear too.
In Isaiah 66:13, the Lord says, “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you.” God is a comforting mother. Then in Luke chapter 15 we find three parables: the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep are two of the parables. God is the waiting father and the good shepherd. We know those stories. But stuck in between them is the parable of the woman finding the lost coin. If the father in the Prodigal Son and the shepherd in the Lost Sheep represent God, so also does the woman who sweeps the place clean looking for the lost coin. Cardinal Suenens was right, Protestant patriarchy did not get the message. We need to include a feminine principle in the godhead.
Lastly, let me turn to Mary’s song, found in Luke 1;46-56. We have to divide this song into two parts. One part of Mary’s song is a radical critique of a dysfunctional society: “God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. What do the proud imagine but a world created in their image. God “put down the mighty from their thrones,” The proud not only imagine a world created in their image, they have the military might to impose their will on others. To complete the critique, Mary said, “the rich God has sent away.” Mary, the handmaiden of the Lord, is exposing the dystopia and calling out the people who create it and sustain it. That’s one part of Mary’s song.
The other part of Mary’s song lifts up an alternative way of being: “the hungry are filled with good things. . . the lowly are exalted. Mary, this handmaiden of the Lord, is the one who will make this happen. When Elizabeth, her cousin, learns that Mary is pregnant, the baby in her womb “leaps for joy.” and Elizabeth proclaims of Mary, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”
Mary is the one who brings the good news of great joy into the world. The birth of Jesus is a virgin birth. Some of us believe in the virgin birth, some do not. People who hold one belief or the other are not likely to be persuaded to change their view. But think of the virgin birth theologically instead of biologically. Mary is the handmaiden of the Lord. And you never know who the next Mary will be until she shows up.