Mary, the Mother of Jesus

A sermon preached at Niles Discovery Church, Fremont, California,
on Sunday, June 2, 2019, by the Rev. Jeffrey Spencer.
Scriptures:  Mark 3:19b-35 and John 19:25b-27
Copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey S. Spencer

            Months ago, when Pastor Brenda and I were planning this Easter season sermon series on women from scripture, I suggested that we needed in include Mary, the mother of Jesus, perhaps even concluding the series with her.  The book we used as inspiration for this series focuses on women from the Hebrew Scriptures, so it didn’t include Mary.  I don’t know what it was that made me think we should include Mary.  Whatever it was, I’m grateful.

I’m grateful for a poetic reason.  Mary has been seen as the new Eve, and we started the series with Eve.  The name “Mary” is a version of the name “Miriam,” the name of Moses’ sister and the second person in our series.  Focusing on Mary, Luke’s narrative of the birth of Jesus mirrors the story of Hannah and the birth of Samuel.  Like Esther’s brave “Yes,” Mary’s “Yes” to God changed the world.  The only woman in the series that isn’t clearly paralleled in Mary is Deborah.  And now that I’ve brought up Deborah, there’s a poetic closure to the series by including Mary.

I’m also grateful that we’re including Mary because my relationship with the mother of Jesus has been, well, distant.  It’s like I unpack her from storage like a figurine in a nativity set each Advent and then pack her away as soon as Christmas is over.  I’ve been doing some reflecting on this relationship and I’ve come to realize that it’s rooted in some New England Protestant anti-Catholicism I haven’t realized I’ve been carrying all these years.

I always knew Mary was a big deal for Catholics.  As Richard Rohr points out in his book The Universal Christ, Mary’s been given special names by the church over the centuries:  Queen of Heaven, Notre Dame, Our Mother of Sorrows, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, And “Our Lady of just about every village and shrine in Europe.”^[1]

And somewhere along the line I got the notion that Catholics pray to Mary which seemed sacrilegious – after all, Mary isn’t God.  That notion was corrected.  Catholics pray through Mary.  But praying through Mary seemed pointless – why go through middle management when you can talk directly to the CEO?  We can unpack that prejudice in another sermon.  And then there are all those statues and paintings – at some point, isn’t that idolatry?  Another prejudice to unpack at another time.  You can see why, given these prejudices, by mid-January, I pack Mary away for another year.

Rohr points out that it is precisely because Mary wasn’t/isn’t God that she is important.  “In the many images of Mary, humans see our own feminine soul,” he writes.  “We needed to see ourselves in her, and say with her, ‘God has looked upon me in my lowliness.  From now on, all generations will call me blessed’ (Luke 1:48).”^[2]

Rachel Held Evans (left) and Nadia Bolz-Weber at Grace Cathedral

I started to get a better Protestant sense of the importance of Mary at a two-day conference in San Francisco I attended in early April.  The headliners for the conference were Nadia Bolz-Weber and Rachel Held Evans.  During the conference, Evans said something that evoked an image very different from those I tend to have of Mary.

Mary “has been loved for centuries for being ‘good,’ the docile picture of purity and virginity.  As a matter of fact, some church doctrines have been written to say that unlike other women, Mary was born without sin.  Which, of course, implies that God could never choose to make God’s home in the womb of an actual woman, since we know that actual women are sinful, fleshy temptresses,” to quote Bolz-Weber.^[3]  This packaging of a sinless, pure, meek and mild Mary – who actually was an unwed, teenaged, peasant, Palestinian Jew – made painters depict Mary like this.

Unfortunately, this does the exact opposite of what Rohr says is important about Mary.  These images make Mary less and less like us.  At least in my opinion.

In contrast, the image Evans evoked was of a mom holding her crying baby, completely focused on comforting him, while baby spit-up dries in her hair and on her shoulder.  In a blog post she wrote three years ago when her first child was a newborn, Evans reflected:  “I’ve been thinking:  … In Jesus, God was once a baby – a baby who nestled in a woman’s womb, a baby whose life depended on a woman for nourishment, a baby who fell asleep on a woman’s chest, a baby whose first word could very well have been, ‘mama.’

“Think about that.  God kicking through a woman’s pregnant belly, God nursing from a woman’s breasts, God furrowing his brow and concentrating with all his might to form the word ‘mama,’ God releasing a cute baby belly laugh, God wailing late into the night.

“The miracle of the incarnation … [is] that God became human – with all of a human’s weaknesses, dependencies, and interconnectedness.  If anything, the incarnation reminds us just how much we belong to one another and need one another, how our shared humanity means no one is more important by virtue of gender or status.

“Sure, when God became flesh, God became a man.  But that man was once a baby who needed his mama.  And that baby grew into a man who surrounded himself with women who were his students, his ministry partners, and his friends.  And when that man was crucified and buried and abandoned by men, it was the women who came with the spices, the women who got the first glimpse of resurrection.”^[4]

At the conference, Evans echoed these ideas.  She pointed out that long before Jesus could say, in fact, in order for Jesus to be able to eventually say at the Last Supper, “This is my body, for you,” he needed Mary to say, “This is my body, for you.”  God needed a woman to feed God before God could feed us.

“Tradition holds that Mary suffered seven sorrows:  her flight to Egypt to escape the infanticide, Simeon’s prophecy that her heart would be pierced, those panicked days in Jerusalem when she thought she had lost Jesus in the crowd, walking with Jesus to Calvary, watching her son’s execution, holding his body in her arms, and placing him into the cold tomb.”^[5]

Rachel Held Evans points out that there would have been many other sorrows “for Mary along the way:  when her son left home to travel and teach, when he nearly killed himself fasting for forty days in the wilderness, when whatever happened to Joseph happened to Joseph, when Jesus responded to the announcement of his mother’s presence by saying to his disciples ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?  Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.’ He was making a point, she must have known, but still, it had to pierce her heart a little.

Modern Day Madonna and Child, by Jessica Russo Scherr

“And as every mother knows, Mary also experienced the quotidian sorrows of motherhood:  the first bruised knee, the unkind words of other children, the frightening illnesses, the surprised eyes of a little boy the first time he witnesses injustice, cruelty, or the suffering of another, the gifts she wished she could give him, the memories she wished she could preserve forever, the disappointments she wished with all her heart she could stop.

“Sometimes I imagine Mary breathlessly recounting Simeon’s strange prophecy to her friends while they nursed together under the shade of a tree, only to hear the mothers in the group laugh and say, ‘What kind of prophecy is that?  You are a mother!  Of course your heart will be pierced.  It will be pierced every day.’

“Fittingly, Mary watched her son’s crucifixion in the company of other mothers.  The Gospel writers describe them as being both ‘at a distance’ and close by.  At one point, Jesus looks at his mother and says, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ …

“In this moment, when Mary’s eyes locked with the eyes of the boy she once nursed, once tickled, once watched fall asleep, I imagine that Jesus understood the suffering of mothers, perhaps the most powerful suffering of all.

“Mary was not the first, nor the last, mother to hold the broken body of her child in her arms.  She was not the first, nor the last, to weep in the company of mothers as they stumbled their way to an open grave.

“It happens every day – when famine claims another little life, when the sudden arrival of blood represents the end of a pregnancy, when cancer strikes yet again, when the phone rings and the news is bad.

“It is a pain that pierces the heart.”^[6]

I’m grateful we included Mary in this sermon series because including Mary has forced me to examine some of my hidden prejudices, and including Mary has invited me to consider how I look at images of Mary.  And I have found that I want the gritty images of Mary.  Give me the images of the mom with drying baby spit-up in her hair.  Give me the images of the mom desperately trying to protect her son – when he was a child and when he was an adult.  Give me the images of the mom who is heartbroken at the death of her child.  Give me the images of a Mary who is one of us, and who reminds me that you and I find favor with God, too.

Amen.

Questions for Quiet Reflection:

In what ways – emotionally, spiritual, physically – does your story connect with Mary’s story?

How might a deeper relationship with Mary deepen your relationship with God?

_______________

[1] Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ (New York: Convergent Books, 2019), 122-123.

[2] Ibid, 124.

[3] Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God In All the Wrong People (New York: Convergent Books, 2015), 67.

[4] Rachel Held Evans, “God Needs Women,” Rachel Held Evans, https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/god-women-incarnation (posted 6 July 2016; accessed 30 May 2019).

[5] Rachel Held Evans, “Women of the Passion, Part 2: Mary’s Heart is Pierced (Again),” Rachel Held Evans, https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/women-of-the-passion-mary-pierced-heart (posted 6 April 2012; accessed 30 may 2019).

[6] Ibid.

Esther

A sermon preached at Niles Discovery Church, Fremont, California,
on Sunday, May 26, 2019, by the Rev. Jeffrey Spencer.
Scriptures:  Esther 4:9-17and Matthew 7:15-20
Copyright © 2019 by Jeffrey S. Spencer

From time to time, writing a sermon seems like a waste of time.  This is especially true when someone has already written what I want to say.  In her book Inspired, Rachel Held Evans wrote a wonderful reflection on the story of Esther.^[1]  Almost all of today’s sermon is from that reflection.

 

A teenage boy wearing a black cape and felt hat strolls across the stage.  Behind him, a cavalcade of middle school princesses, pirates, and superheroes bows.

“Make way for Lord Haman!” cries the caller, a boy of eleven or twelve wearing a Mad Hatter costume.

At Haman’s name, the audience erupts into a deafening roar, drowning the villain’s words in boos, catcalls, and thunderous stomps.…

Onstage, only Mordecai stands erect, declaring with muffled defiance through his costume beard, “I only bow to God!” The audience cheers.

“What kind of man is this?” asks Haman of a nearby Princess Elsa.

“A Jew,” she replies.

Everyone in the audience knows what’s next.…

It’s a strange way to mark a thwarted genocide, but every year, this is how Jews across the world celebrate Purim, a holiday recounting the tale of Haman, Mordecai, King Xerxes, and Queen Esther – one of the best resistance stories in Scripture.

As Lauren Winner wrote, “Purim is like Halloween and Mardi Gras and bunch of other stuff all mixed up together.  It’s a holiday in which there’s revelry and inversion and people all dress up.  They wear masks.  When you go to the synagogue to hear the book of Esther read, you are instructed by the rabbis to shout and scream whenever you hear the name Haman so that his name gets drowned out.  You’re also instructed to get really drunk on Purim, so drunk, the rabbis say, that you can no longer tell the difference between Haman’s name and the king’s name.”

Indeed, the biblical story, which tells how Mordecai and Esther helped saved their people from a pogrom by the Persian Empire, lends itself to such an interpretation.  Many of the characters, particularly those of the Persian court, are so hapless and exaggerated, you can’t help but laugh.  Nearly every major plot point unfolds at some banquet, and the text includes all sorts of dramatic twists and turns.  It’s a story fit for the stage.

Yet the text itself includes some disturbing details.  As a kid, I always imagined Queen Esther to be something of a beauty pageant contestant.  Having received the PG version of the tale in church, I figured that in addition to the “twelve months of beautification” Esther underwent before meeting King Xerxes, she must have performed some kind of talent and answered questions from a glass bowl before winning the heart of a love-struck royal.  I never learned in Sunday school that Esther, whose Jewish name was Hadassah, was forced, along with perhaps thousands of virgin girls from Susa, into King Xerxes’s harem.  Or that the king had banished his first wife, Queen Vashti, for refusing to publicly flaunt her body before his drunken friends.  Or that under the care of the royal eunuchs, Esther and the women of the king’s harem each took a turn in the king’s bed to see who would please him best. Or that the women received just one night with the king, after which they were transferred to the eunuchs in charge of the concubines, with the instruction not to return to the king’s chamber unless summoned by name, under the penalty of death.

They left those details out of the flannelgraphs.…

The Greek historian Herodotus, author of History of the Persian Wars, wrote just twenty-five years after the reign of Xerxes and provided some insight into his might and cruelty, including the fact that five hundred young boys were gathered each year from the kingdom and castrated to serve as eunuchs in the Persian court.  It’s important to remember that the bodies of these eunuchs, and the bodies of the women like Esther who were forced into the royal harem, were the property of the empire. This was the forced concubinage of women who, in a patriarchal culture in an occupied territory, had no authority over their own marriages or bodies.

The story begins with a banquet.  At the height of his glory and wealth, King Xerxes throws a lavish, multiday celebration for all the nobles of his court.  He hosts feasts day and night in the palace garden, where fine linens hang from marble pillars and merrymakers lounge on couches made of gold.  The king tells his servants to give each man as much wine as he wants to drink, so as the days wear on, the party grows wilder.

On the seventh day, when Xerxes is “in high spirits from wine,” he commands his eunuchs to bring Queen Vashti to the garden.  He wants to display his wife’s body before all the drunken men of the court, for she is “lovely to look at” (Esther 1:10-11).

Well, when the attendants deliver the king’s command, Vashti refuses to obey. The woman simply won’t come out.

Her defiance infuriates the king, who consults his closest advisers on how to respond to his wife’s disobedience.  A confidant named Memukan takes advantage and turns this little domestic dispute into a full-blown national crisis.…

[Letting a woman say “No” to the king, he argues, will cause the collapse of the social structure.  If someone at the bottom of the power pyramid can get away with saying “No” to the person at the top of the pyramid, then anyone anywhere in the pyramid will think they can get away with saying “No” to those above them.

So, Vashti is banished and a decree is sent forth,] delivered to every province and in every language of the empire, [that] proclaims that “all the women will respect their husbands, from the least to the greatest” and that “every man should be ruler of his own household” (vv. 20, 22).

The overreaction is downright comical.

Audiences at Purim plays roar with laughter at these pathetic, insecure men, so threatened by one woman’s autonomy that they issue kingdom-wide edicts declaring men the rulers of their homes.

But behind the joke is a warning.  Xerxes and his court have a habit of making major, national decisions based on personal offense and whims.  [This is a warning for us, too.]  Beneath the pomp and wealth is a dangerous fragility with which our heroes, and the Jewish people, must contend.

After banishing Vashti, the king gets lonely.  Once his “fury had subsided” (2:1), he is persuaded by his attendants to search the land for its most beautiful virgins with the goal of finding a new, more obedient queen.  Among the women forced into the harem is Esther, a beautiful Jewish orphan under the care of her cousin, Mordecai.  While preparing for her encounter with the king, Esther wins the favor of everyone she meets, including the royal eunuchs, who, like Esther, had themselves been taken and used by the king.  The cunning eunuchs pull more strings in the palace than anyone realizes, and they prove important allies as the story unfolds.

With the help of the eunuchs, Esther is chosen queen, though she is forbidden from speaking with the king without a summons.  No one in the palace knows she is a Jew.  Meanwhile, Mordecai, too, is commended when he uncovers an assassination plot by two of King Xerxes’s courtiers.  The cousins seem poised to live a relatively privileged lifestyle among the occupying empire, until Haman – Boooooooo! – is appointed viceroy.

When Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman as he passes, Haman’s fury turns to disdain for all Jews.  The villain convinces a disinterested, persuadable King Xerxes to exterminate every Jew in the empire, then sends dispatches throughout the land with the order to “destroy, kill, and annihilate all the Jews – young and old, women and children – on a single day” (3:13).  Haman chooses the day by casting lots, the fate of an entire race left to a game of chance.… While the Jews fast and pray in fear, King Xerxes and Haman celebrate over drinks.  The text says, “The city of Susa was bewildered” (v. 15).

Terrified for his people, Mordecai implores Esther to intercede with the king, urging that perhaps she has “come to royal position for such a time as this” (4:14). After three days of fasting, Esther works up the courage to approach the throne without a summons.  To her relief, the king extends his scepter to indicate her life will be spared.  Esther invites both the king and Haman to a series of banquets, setting just the right stage to reveal her true identity.

Meanwhile, Haman plots to have Mordecai hanged, but a bout with insomnia leads King Xerxes to a bunch of old court records that remind him that Mordecai has yet to be honored for saving his life.  (King Xerxes, you will find, is a rather forgetful fellow.)  In a deliciously ironic scene, King Xerxes asks Haman how a man faithful to the king ought to be honored.  Assuming Xerxes is referring to Haman himself, he tells the king to throw a grand parade for the man, dress him in the king’s royal robes and give him a royal horse, and declare throughout the city that this is how a man who loves his king will be praised.  Imagine Haman’s horror when King Xerxes tells him to do these things for Mordecai!

Mordecai gets his parade, Haman goes home to cry to his wife, and Esther plans her big reveal.

At Esther’s second banquet, she tells the king that her people have been targeted for genocide and begs him for mercy.  The king is horrified.  “Who on earth would plan such a thing?” he essentially demands, his previous conversation with Haman about eliminating an entire people group apparently slipping his mind.

Esther points to the villain.  “An adversary and enemy!  This vile Haman!”

Haman, seeing he’s been bested, falls onto Esther’s couch in agony to beg for pardon.  Xerxes interprets this as the man making a pass at his wife, and Haman’s fate is sealed. The villain is hanged on the very gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.  Esther secures permission for the Jews to take revenge on their enemies, on the very day those enemies had planned to eliminate them.  The story ends in a Tarantino-style bloodbath [which I could have done without].

Many people notice that the book of Esther is the only one in Scripture that fails to mention God, and indeed its religious themes are covert.  However, God’s presence is discernible, not simply in the providential unfolding of the Jewish people’s deliverance, but as a contrast to the impotent, aimless reign of the bumbling King Xerxes and his Persian court.  Though intent on flaunting the “vast wealth of his kingdom and the splendor of his majesty” (1:4), Xerxes turns out to be little more than a pathetic puppet, coaxed and coddled by advisers, eunuchs, and villains, and ultimately controlled by a Jewish orphan and her cousin.  Haman’s rage against the Jews is petty and childish.  Major empire-wide decisions get made, not after prayer and fasting, but over drinks at banquets or by casting lots.  The story of Esther pulls back the veil on the empire to reveal that behind the golden chairs and packed harems and patriarchal edicts are a bunch of insecure, weak men whose attempts to puff themselves up only make them look silly.  It is an empty, foolish power.  The emperor has no clothes.

This would all be terribly frightening were it not for the quiet, and at times hidden, hand of God, working all things together for good.  I suspect this is why the Jews dress up in costume, feast, celebrate, and laugh in response to a story about their near destruction as a people.  They laugh because, like a thrown-together middle school Purim play, the power of the empire is just a big show.  In the end, the God of Israel – of Abraham, Moses, and Esther – gets the last word, using the weak to humble the powerful.

The^[2]story of Esther as a story of resistance. It is a story of civil disobedience. It is a story of feminism.  And I am grateful that there is a story like this one – of resistance, civil disobedience, and feminism – in the bible.

Vashti’s “No” to being objectified could have led to her execution.  Esther’s “Yes” to standing up for her people could have led to her execution.  Nevertheless, they persisted.  And their story calls us to persist.

And while I hear the challenge to persist, to risk, to speak truth to power and to stand on the side of justice, I also find comfort in this story.  I find comfort because it reminds me “that a misogynistic king running a dangerously dysfunctional superpower is nothing new and nothing God can’t handle.”  Amen.

_______________

Questions for Contemplation:

How might you be called to act in such a time as this?

How might we as a church be called to act in such a time as this?

How can you be of support to those who are persisting?

_______________

[1]Rachel Held Evans, Inspired(Nashville: Nelson Books, 2018), 130-137.

[2]The conclusion of the sermon (these next three paragraphs) is mine, though it is influenced by RHE (and I quote her in the final sentence).